Demand Planning answers one question for every product, week by week: how much do we need to make or buy, and when? It reads what customers have ordered, what a forecast expects, and what you already hold, and turns the shortfall into production and purchasing work.
This article is the setup path. It covers what you need to hold, what has to exist before anything will plan properly, the two setup screens, and how to run the first week. Once you are set up, the day-to-day work happens on one screen — see Running your weekly planning cycle.
Where to find it: the Demand Planning section of the main menu for the day-to-day screens, and Setup → Demand Planning for the two configuration screens.
Module requirements and availability
Demand Planning is a module your account holds, not a switch you turn on. There used to be a Use Orders and Demand Planning toggle in Account Settings; it has been removed. If you are looking for it, this section is what replaced it.
What the module needs
| Module | Also requires |
|---|---|
| Demand Planning | Manufacturing and Orders |
| Manufacturing | Inventory |
| Orders | Inventory |
Both are genuinely needed, because demand planning is two halves with different appetites. The production half hangs off batches, production lines and recipes, which is Manufacturing. The procurement half hangs off purchase orders and suppliers, which is Orders. With only one of them, half the module would be permanently inert.
On a current price plan the Orders capability is derived from what you hold: buying Orders is what switches it on, and it cannot be set by hand. Accounts on an older arrangement keep whatever was set for them, but that value is no longer editable on the Account Settings screen.
Who can see it
- The whole DEMAND PLANNING menu section, and the Setup → Demand Planning group, require the module.
- They also require the demand planning permission, granted through roles. A user without it does not see the section at all — not a greyed-out version of it.
- If the Orders capability is off for the account, the demand planning screens redirect to the main dashboard rather than showing an error. A screen that bounces you to the dashboard is almost always this.
- Requests the app makes are gated on the module as well as the permission, so a link pasted from somewhere else will not get round it.
- Everything is scoped to your current site. Plans, policies, alerts and cycles belong to one site; records made on another will not appear. Check the site selector before concluding a list is empty.
- A site is not a security boundary. The site selector decides which site’s figures you are looking at and working on, and it keeps another site’s out of your way. It is a working scope, not a wall: a user who can open a demand planning screen and change site can read that site’s figures. The real boundary is the account — nothing belonging to another account is reachable at all. Do not use sites to keep figures from a colleague; use roles. Every demand planning article says this, because it is the assumption that costs most when it is wrong.
Other demand planning articles carry a one-line availability note and point back here.
What appears
Eleven screens in the DEMAND PLANNING section, in menu order, and two configuration screens under Setup → Demand Planning.
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Planning Cycle | Where you run the week: the five steps, what to do next, what is holding later steps up, and the site's health figures. Start here. |
| Stock Alerts | Where stock has moved outside the rules on its stock policy. |
| Forecasts | Forecast runs and their per-product results. |
| Forecast Accuracy | How close past forecasts came to what actually happened. |
| Demand Plans | The plan itself — demand, stock and net requirement per product per period. |
| Production Planning | Turning the requirement for made products into works orders you can make batches from. |
| Production Calendar | The same works orders seen as a calendar. |
| Procurement Plans | What to buy and by when, and where draft purchase orders are created from. |
| Supply Tree | What each purchase is for, and what each order depends on — the same chain read in either direction. Every plan line has a Trace button that opens it here. |
| Supplier Forecasts | Expected demand shared with a supplier so they can prepare. |
| AI Recommendations | Suggestions raised by the one analysis each planning cycle runs. |
| Setup → Demand Planning | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Forecast Settings | Account-wide: which parts of planning you use, when the forecast runs by itself, and the starting values a new stock policy takes. |
| Stock Policies | Per product: safety stock, reorder point and how it is worked out, lead time, order sizes, shelf life and waste limits. |
The two setup screens sit under Setup with the other modules' configuration, not in the Demand Planning section — they are things you set once, not screens you work in weekly. Menu section headings can be collapsed, and each remembers whether you left it open.
Setting up, in order
The order matters, because each step is the input to the next.
- Products. Every product you want planned needs a unit of measure — its stock unit. Every product you make needs a current recipe: the recipe is what tells procurement which materials a batch consumes. Set Make Time (Days) on anything that takes more than a day to make, so works orders start early enough.
- Unit conversions. Where a recipe, a sales order or a supplier uses a different unit from the product's stock unit, the product needs a conversion between them. A quantity QTRACA cannot convert is left out and named, never counted as zero — so a missing conversion under-plans quietly unless you fix it.
- Suppliers. Add each bought material to its supplier, with Unit Cost, Lead Time (Days) and Minimum Order Qty, the unit you order in, and the Preferred supplier tick where a material has more than one. See Preparing products and suppliers for planning.
- Sales history. Forecasting is a projection from history, so there must be some. A product with no history is skipped by the forecast — it is not forecast as zero. It can still be planned: confirmed orders and sales contracts state their demand outright, so a brand-new product under contract gets a demand plan line without ever having been forecast.
- Forecast Settings. Decide which parts of planning you use, and when the forecast should run by itself. See Forecast Settings.
- Stock Policies. Add a policy for each product you want planned. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides safety stock, reorder points, order sizes and how much history the forecast uses. See Stock Policies.
- Run your first cycle from the Planning Cycle screen.
Do steps 1 to 3 properly before anything else. Almost every “the plan is empty” or “the plan is buying the wrong amount” question comes back to a product with no recipe, no unit conversion, no supplier terms, or no stock policy.
The master data it reads
| From | Used for |
|---|---|
| Sales orders | Firm demand. Only confirmed orders count. |
| Sales contracts | Scheduled deliveries and committed call-off volume. |
| Dispatch history | The past demand the forecast is built from, and the average daily demand behind a calculated safety stock or reorder point. |
| Product recipes | Working out which materials a planned batch consumes, level by level where a component is itself something you make. |
| Product settings | The stock unit, the unit conversions, shelf life, and Make Time (Days) for sequencing works orders. |
| Inventory | Stock on hand, and disposals for the waste figures. |
| Purchase orders | What is already on order, so procurement does not buy it twice. |
| Supplier products | Who to buy each material from, at what price, with what lead time, minimum order, order unit and pack size. |
| Stock policies | Forecast method and history, safety stock, reorder point, order multiple and limits, batch size, shelf life, waste and review periods. |
Work Calendar, under Setup, is not a planning input. Nothing in demand planning reads it.
Your first cycle
Open Planning Cycle. Before anything exists it offers a single button, Run forecast, which opens a cycle for the week and queues its forecast. From there you work left to right, one button at a time:
- Run forecast — what you expect to sell.
- Generate demand plan, then Activate plan — demand per product and period. Activating is what production is planned from.
- Generate production plan, then Approve plan — what to make and when.
- Work out what to buy, then Approve plan — what to buy and by when.
- Generate supplier forecasts, then Review supplier forecasts — and approve each one.
Nothing downstream happens on its own. Each of those steps is an explicit button, and each produces a draft that somebody has to activate or approve. If a step fails, the screen quotes the reason — see When a Generate step fails.
A first cycle usually finds the gaps in your setup. That is the point. Read the Blocking later steps list in the sidebar: it names products with no supplier, materials whose units cannot be converted, and parts of planning you have switched off.
How the pieces connect
| Stage | Created by | Produces |
|---|---|---|
| Forecast run | You, or the schedule | A forecast quantity per product per period, and recalculated safety stock and reorder points |
| Demand plan | You, from a completed forecast run | Net requirement per product per period |
| Production plan | You, from an active demand plan | Works orders, including sub-assemblies, dated by Make Time |
| Procurement plan | You, from an approved production plan | Material requirements with suppliers, costs and order-by dates |
| Supplier forecasts | You, from an approved procurement plan | One forecast per supplier, in that supplier's order unit |
| Purchase orders | You, from an approved procurement plan | One draft purchase order per supplier |
Nothing in that table happens as a side effect of a status change. Approving a production plan approves a production plan; it does not create a procurement plan. Executing a procurement plan does not create supplier forecasts. An empty Procurement Plans list therefore means nobody pressed Work out what to buy — not that something is broken.
Things to know
- Forecasts and stock alerts run overnight, at 2am and 3am in your account's time zone. The forecast only actually runs on the day set in Forecast Settings; the alert sweep runs every day. You can still run a forecast yourself at any time.
- A plan is a snapshot, not a live view. It reflects orders, stock and forecasts as they stood when it was generated. Generate again to bring it up to date — the new one arrives as a draft beside the one in force.
- Materials are exploded all the way down. A finished good explodes into its recipe’s ingredients, and where an ingredient is itself something you make, that item’s own recipe is exploded too, up to ten levels deep.
- A made component with no recipe is never bought. Finished goods and work-in-progress items are made here, so one with no active recipe can be neither made nor bought: the plan says so — “CUSTARD is made here but has no active recipe, so it can be neither made nor bought” — and leaves it out rather than raising a purchase order for something you have no supplier for and no intention of ordering. Publish a recipe; or, if it really is something you buy in, set it up as a stock item with a supplier.
- One open cycle per site. You cannot plan two weeks side by side, and scenario or “what if” cycles do not exist.
- Switching part of planning off really switches it off. Unticking Plan production or Plan procurement in Forecast Settings stops those plans being made at all, by hand as well as on the schedule, and the Planning Cycle shows a blocker saying so.
- A made product with no recipe is planned with a warning. It cannot be exploded into materials, so its works order line carries WARNING: No active recipe found for this product. Something you buy in and sell as it is should be a stock item with a supplier, not a recipe-less made product.
- Supplier terms only exist for bought types. Raw materials and packaging can be added to a supplier; finished goods and work in progress cannot — they are made, not purchased.