Demand planning

The pain

Planning happens in a spreadsheet that was current the morning it was exported. Coverage gets guessed from a stock report that ignores what is already allocated, at-risk lines surface when a customer calls about them, and the same buyer keeps re-deriving a purchase quantity a rule could have produced. The result runs in both directions at once: expedites on the items that ran out, and cash tied up in the items that never did.

How it works

• Read the real position: live stock snapshots, open sales orders, and open purchase orders come from your ERP, so coverage reflects what is committed, not just what is on the shelf.
• Plan by item tier: stocked items plan against open-order and seasonal-forecast shortfall, capped at max-stock headroom; non-stocked items cover the open customer order and round to case, pallet, or full truck against the supplier's threshold; special-order items plan from the customer order and flag a required date the manufacturing lead time cannot meet.
• Surface the risk: order lines that will miss their date, coverage gaps, and delivery-date feasibility are raised to the buyer who owns that supplier.
• Propose, approve, apply: the agent proposes a replenishment with its arithmetic visible, a buyer approves or rejects it, and only approved recommendations are applied. Nothing purchases itself.
• Tune without a deploy: thresholds, rounding rules, and ownership routing live in decision tables your team edits.

What you get

• Coverage and at-risk order lines a planner can trust, refreshed from the ERP rather than from last week's export.
• Replenishment recommendations that arrive with their reasoning, so approving one takes a moment instead of a rebuild.
• Buys rounded to the units your suppliers actually ship, with full-versus-partial-truck decisions made explicitly.
• Inventory visibility, lot and expiry views, and forward-looking analytics beside the planning queue.
• A governed path from proposal to purchase, with every decision attributable.