Order Planning

Order Planning combines material requirements planning, distribution requirements planning and capacity requirements planning. The entire product structure consisting of supplying relationships and bill of material relationships, is exploded.

The net requirements of each plan item in the product structure are balanced by creating planned orders. The net requirements are based on the netting of firm supply, inventory and demand, which is an integral part of the order planning. Examples of demand types are: forecast, sales orders, and sales quotations, sales schedules.

You can use Order Planning to plan items that have the manufactured, purchased, product and generic type. The planned orders for manufactured, product and purchased items in the actual scenario are confirmed and transferred as actual orders to the shop floor, purchase department and the warehouse. The planned orders for generic items cannot be transferred; they only serve to explode the material requirements on the lower levels in the generic bill of materials.

  • Purchase schedules

    Purchased items can be ordered by purchase schedule rather than (planned) purchase orders. Purchase schedules support high-volume, repetitive purchase supply based on contracts. When an item is ordered through purchase schedules, based on changed or new demand, the order planning will directly change purchase schedule lines or create new lines, taking into account the supplier's delivery patterns.

  • Resources

    The planned production orders result in the capacity use of resources. For each resource, the detailed capacity utilization, based on the order planning in the resource order plan, can be viewed and compared with the available capacity. All other sources of capacity use, critical requirements, JSC orders, service order, and PCS activities are shown.

  • Item order plan

    You can create an item master plan for plan items that is fully controlled by order planning. However, master planning is not required to control a plan. For order-planned items, you can use item master plan-related functions, such as forecasting, inventory planning, and capable-to-promise.

    In addition to the demand forecast in the item master plan, you can use special demand, which is another type of forecast can be used. Consumption of special demand by actual sales demand is supported. To define special demand an item master plan is mandatory.

    The item order plan constrains all demand and supply data of a plan item, and provides a complete time-phased overview for the planner. The item order plan also contains available to promise figures. Therefore it is not mandatory if you want to use capable to promise techniques.

    Lead times, fixed delivery dates, and lot sizing rules are checked for an accurate calculation. In the order horizon of the plan item, these figures serve as input to calculate ATP and CTP to support order promising. The components and capacities to be checked for CTP are part of the bill of material and routing. Materials and capacities can be indicated in the entire product structure of the item that must be checked for capable to promise.