M3 Inventory Planning Workbench

Infor M3 Inventory Planning Workbench improves your planning decisions by indentifying the essential highlights and exceptions in your material plan.

It is a tool for viewing, simulating, and editing inventory, demand, and supply across multiple variable time buckets. It provides support for monitoring material and product inventory planning in manufacturing and distribution companies. The functionality provides support for these roles and processes.

  • Production planners: Provides a master planning tool that focuses on the availability and inventory levels of selected items.
  • Customer service: Indicates items that are available for sale and push marketing as opposed to items with low inventory levels that may experience shortages
  • Buyers: Forecasts a time-phased inventory projection across different items that are grouped per supplier

Highlights and exceptions are defined in the application by a flexible color-coding feature that enables you to identify the most critical planning issues and items that require immediate action. These key indicators and measures can help you in your decision-making process:

  • Dynamic coverage time per time bucket and coverage time in relationship to shelf life
  • Safety stock and maximum inventory violations
  • Forecast fulfillment %
  • Expected future negative shelf life issues and positive inventory reclassification
  • Forecast versus order stock comparison

Infor M3 Inventory Planning Workbench is different from a single-item level material planning viewer or any advanced stand-alone planning tools. The integration provides an online workbench that supports cross-assortment inventory planning that is available in a single view. It enables you to assess and adjust your plan across multiple items in a single screen. The grid, which contains a list of items, is similar to a spreadsheet where a user can directly edit values and where the plan is immediately analyzed based on these adjustments. The inventory projection can also be viewed in a graphical format that visualizes demand, supplies, and future planned on-hand balance.

Users can commit any changes made to the plan back to M3. This feature enables you to do the following:

  • Adjust forecasted demand
  • Adjust quantities and firm or release manufacturing order proposals or purchase order proposals into orders
  • Adjust quantities in released manufacturing orders