Two stages
Planning has two distinct stages:- MRP, explode and net. The engine explodes demand through bills of material, nets it against on-hand plus open jobs and purchase orders, and writes period-bucketed demand forecasts (plus the demand and supply actuals it read). It then sizes each shortage with the item’s and writes a for it, and one for every open order whose date or quantity no longer fits.
- Planning views, show and apply. The production and purchasing planning pages project running stock week by week, show the actions on each row, and let you apply them.
When it runs
MRP recalculates on its own every 3 hours. To run it once a day instead, go to Settings → Planning → MRP Schedule, choose Once a day, and pick the hour; the hour is on your company’s time zone. You can also run it yourself at any moment with Recalculate on the planning pages, whichever schedule is set; hover the button to see which schedule is active.What feeds it
Reorder policy
Each item, per location, carries a reordering policy that decides how a suggestion is sized: Manual Reorder (suggests nothing), Demand-Based Reorder (the default), Fixed Reorder Quantity, or Maximum Quantity. Each is tuned by reorder point, order quantity, accumulation period, and min/max/multiple rounding. See Reordering for the parameters in full.From suggestion to order
An item’s determines where its shortage appears. Make items produce suggested on the production planning page; Buy items produce suggested POs on the purchasing page. Choosing Order creates a saved job or purchase order with status “Planned”, pending release into its normal lifecycle. Purchase orders are grouped one per supplier per week, so each week’s order is sent on its own and the later weeks stay open to planning changes.Reading the grid
Each row is an item at the location. Stock Availability draws the projected stock for every planning week as one strip; the CSV export keeps a column per week. 1st Negative On Hand is the first week the projection goes below zero. Latest Order Date is the date you must order by to receive in time (the required date less the lead time); it turns red once it has passed. Open a row to see the order drawer.Planning actions
Every MRP run leaves a worklist on the planning pages. Each row’s Actions column shows one chip per open action type, an ASAP flag when a suggestion is already late, and a muted count of the actions you dismissed. Expand the row to see each action with its target order, quantity, date and assignee; hover the action type for MRP’s reason.
Apply is offered only while the target can still change from planning: a PO at “Draft” or “Planned”, a job at “Draft” or “Planned”. A PO that has been sent or is in approval, a job on the floor, or a PO line whose date the supplier has promised shows Review instead, and you make the change on the order itself. Select several rows and choose Apply Suggested Changes to apply every open action on them at once. Apply writes the suggestion as it is at that moment: if an MRP run refreshed the action after the page loaded, the refreshed quantity or date is what lands. A job that had no deadline gets a Soft Deadline with its new date. Cancelling a PO line deletes it, so it needs the purchasing delete permission.
An applied action is finished: the next run re-evaluates the changed order and writes a fresh action only if something still does not fit.