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A procurement plan is the buying side of production. It takes an approved production plan, works down the recipes into the materials those works orders will consume, nets that against what you already hold and what is already on order, and lists what is still short — with a date by which each item has to be ordered.

Where to find it: Procurement Plans in the Demand Planning section of the main menu, or step 4 of the Planning Cycle.

The words used here

Quick start

1. Approve a production plan.
2. Press Generate Procurement Plan on it, or Work out what to buy on step 4 of the Planning Cycle.
3. Read the plan, working from the Order By column and the Notes. Fix anything with no supplier.
4. Press Approve plan.
5. Press Create purchase orders to get one draft order per supplier, then price and send them from Purchase Orders.
6. Press Generate Supplier Forecasts to tell each supplier what is coming beyond this order.

Generating a plan

You ask for a procurement plan; nothing creates one on its own. Press Generate Procurement Plan on an approved production plan, or Work out what to buy on step 4 of the Planning Cycle. While the production plan is still a draft the button is disabled and reads “Approve the production plan before generating procurement from it.”

Two things about what comes out:

• The plan covers 30 days of ordering — the production plan’s date to thirty days later. What decides whether a material is in it is its order-by date, not the date production wants it: a long-lead material needed in ten weeks has to be ordered now, so it is bought now. That is the change that stopped long-lead items being ordered too late, cycle after cycle. A need whose order-by date falls after the period is left for a later cycle; a need dated before the period starts is late, and is still bought.
• Nothing short is an answer, not a failure. If you already hold or have ordered everything the works orders need, the plan is still created — empty, and saying so: “Nothing to buy: everything is covered by stock and orders”. Step 4 of the Planning Cycle reads as done, and step 5 reads “No supplier forecasts needed”. See When there is nothing to buy.
• A read that fails, fails the generation. Stock, orders and batches are not silently read as zero when a query goes wrong: generation stops with the reason and the plan in force is left exactly as it was. Generation also gives up after ten minutes — “Generation did not finish within 10 minutes. Try again.”

A failure shows “Could not generate.” and the reason — including “Procurement planning is switched off in Forecast Settings.”, which stops procurement plans being made at all. Every reason is listed in Running your weekly planning cycle.

Generating again creates another draft beside the approved plan; the approved one stays in force until you approve the new one.

Why you may be asked to buy more than last time

Two changes in this update move quantities on this plan. Neither is a new rule about buying — both are about supply being counted where it actually is. If you are comparing a new plan with one from before the update, this is what you are looking at.

1. An order counts in the week it arrives. The demand plan this all starts from used to count everything on order once, in the first week, whatever its expected date — so a delivery due in week 8 made week 1 look covered, production was never planned for it, and nothing was bought for that production either. Expect requirements to rise in the early weeks on the first plan after this update.

Three consequences follow from that one rule:

• An overdue order counts now — it is not going to arrive any later than it already has, so it is supply for the earliest week rather than for nothing. It is still flagged: “370 L on order is overdue since 10 Aug”. Counted, never trusted silently.
• An order landing between two of the plan’s weeks counts in the next week that exists. A demand plan holds only the weeks a product has demand in, so its weeks are not always one after another, and material arriving in a gap cannot help a week that has already gone.
• An order arriving after the plan’s last week counts for nothing in that plan, so the need is bought. It has not been lost: it returns to the reckoning as soon as the horizon reaches it. Cancel it only if you actually no longer want it.

The full rule is in When an order counts as arriving.

2. A component used at two levels of a recipe is made once, for both parents. It is no longer possible for one of your own part-made products to be planned for one parent and then left on this plan looking like something to buy. That is the symptom to recognise: a work-in-progress product of yours on a purchase order, with none of its own ingredients ordered for the half that went missing — and whether it happened at all depended on which ingredient the parent’s recipe happened to list first. Such a component is now planned at the deepest level anything uses it at, by which time every parent has added its need to the one figure. If you have seen that, it is fixed. See A component used at two levels.

The plan list

Procurement Timeline sits above the list and shows the plans being acted on — approved and executing — with their reference, status, period start and estimated value, colour-coded by urgency. Each row opens its plan. With none it reads “No active procurement plans.”

The list below shows each plan’s Plan Ref, Period Start, Period End, Status and Approved At. Superseded plans stay on the list with their badge.

Reading a plan

Above the table a line reads “11 lines · estimated 18,420.00” — the plan’s lines that have not been cancelled, and what they are estimated to cost.

Order By is the date you actually have to act on, and it arrives before Required By. Required By tells you when production needs the material; Order By tells you when it is too late.

How the order quantity is decided

Required Qty is not demand less stock. It is what your agreement with the supplier and the space in your store actually allow. Other articles link here rather than repeating it.

First, what is genuinely needed

1. Gross demand is added up across the whole plan — every works order’s recipe, and the ingredients of every sub-assembly inside them, converted into the material’s stock unit. Products you buy in and resell are added from the demand plan’s own figures, because no recipe mentions them.
2. The safety buffer is added. The requirement to cover is gross demand plus the stock policy’s Safety Stock Qty: netting to exactly zero would leave the buffer the policy asks for permanently unfilled.
3. Stock on hand and stock on order are taken off. On order means open purchase order lines at this site — draft, sent and partly received orders. An order is counted for a material only where it arrives in time to be of use to it: by the last date anything on this plan needs that material, or by today plus the material’s lead time, whichever of the two is later. An order due after that is supply for a later need, so it does not count here. The note says “less 2,000 kg on order” when it did.
4. The result is floored at zero. A material with nothing short gets no line at all.

The “today plus the lead time” half of that cut-off is there on purpose. An order that arrives no later than a new one could is this need’s supply whether it is late or not. Cut at the need date alone, an order raised yesterday for a need already inside its lead time was not counted at all, and regenerating the plan bought the same need a second time.

Then, only where something is short, in this order

0 or blank means “no rule” for every one of these figures. A blank Max Order Qty does not cap at nothing; it simply does not cap. Set them on Stock Policies, and the supplier’s minimum, cost and lead time on the supplier’s Products tab.

Order-by dates and what is overdue

• Required By is the earliest date anything on the plan wants the material. A later need never pushes an earlier one out: the order has to arrive for the first run that needs it.
• Order By = Required By less the lead time. Where a sub-assembly is involved, Required By is the date that sub-assembly has to start, not the date the finished good is wanted — which is why Make Time on a made product changes when its ingredients are ordered. See How sub-assemblies are planned.
• Order By is not moved forward to today. It keeps its real date, in the past if that is the truth, so you can see by how much you are late. The line then carries “Order today; should have been ordered by 7 Sep to arrive in time” with a warning triangle — and once it is ordered, that instruction is replaced by “Ordered 14 Sep, after its order-by date of 7 Sep”, which is the fact rather than an instruction already carried out. A line ordered before this change keeps whatever note it was written with.
• On the Planning Cycle the same thing shows as a warning: “N materials are past their order-by date”, with “Earliest should have been ordered by 7 Sep. Order today.”

Which supplier is used

For each material, planning looks at the supplier rows for that product at this site, and takes them in this order:

1. The one marked Preferred supplier.
2. Failing that, the one with the most recent Effective From.
3. Failing that, the oldest row — a predictable answer rather than a random one.

Where a product has several suppliers at the site and none is preferred, the line is still bought, and says so: “No preferred supplier: 2 suppliers; buying from Dairyland Ingredients”. The Planning Cycle raises the matching warning, “N products have several suppliers and none is preferred”. Mark one, and the choice stops being arbitrary.

Where a product has no supplier row at all the Supplier column is blank. That is a setup problem now, not something to shrug at: the line cannot be turned into a purchase order, and no supplier forecast can cover it. The Planning Cycle shows it as critical — “N products have no supplier”, with “Supplier forecasts cannot include MILK. Add it to a supplier.”

What the notes mean

A note with no line of its own to sit on — a recipe loop is one, and so is a refusal on a material nothing was ordered for — is written to the plan’s own Notes rather than dropped. Read the plan header as well as the lines.

Creating purchase orders

Create purchase orders appears on an approved or executing plan that still has pending lines with a supplier. It asks first:

Create purchase orders
“This creates 3 draft purchase orders (one per supplier) for 11 lines. 2 lines have no supplier and are skipped. Nothing is sent to suppliers.”

What it does:

• One draft order per supplier, not one per material, with its notes recording the plan it came from.
• Each line is expected on the day it can realistically arrive — today plus that line’s own lead time — and the order’s own expected date is the latest of its lines’. A line with no lead time recorded is expected on its Required By date instead; the lead time is not guessed. On a line that is already past its order-by date this matters: the expected date is when the delivery will really turn up, not the date production wanted it.
• Quantities are converted into the supplier’s order unit and rounded up to whole units where the unit is something you count — pallets or bags, not kilograms. Where the supplier sells in packs, the line’s note shows both figures: “1,148.86 kg → 2 × pallet (1,800 kg)”.
• Each line is priced the way a buyer’s line is — contract price first, then catalogue — for that exact unit and pack. A line nothing prices is still ordered, but left blank rather than 0, and noted.
• Lines are marked ordered and linked to their purchase order, and the plan moves to executing.
• Nothing is sent. The orders are drafts, for a buyer to check in Purchase Orders and send.

When it finishes, the screen lists the orders it created with links, how many lines had no supplier and were skipped, any lines it refused, and any it ordered without a price.

Lines it refuses, and why

The rule is refuse rather than guess. A refused line stays pending with the reason in its notes, so you can fix the cause and run it again — running it twice never duplicates an order, because only pending lines are ever ordered. A line is refused when:

• the chosen supplier has no price row for that product — “No price line for name for CODE”;
• the quantity cannot be put into the supplier’s unit, or a pack has no unit;
• the quantity is not positive, or the product has no unit at all;
• it could not be received. An order in pallets is received in pallets and stocked in kilograms, so the product needs that conversion and it has to agree with the pack size — a 1,000 kg pallet that the product’s own conversion calls 900 kg means one of the two is wrong, and receiving would book whichever the conversion said.

When the whole action is refused

There is no Execute button. A plan reaches executing when purchase orders are raised from it — that is what executing means. Moving a plan there by hand with no orders on it only blocked its own replacement for a reason that was not true.

Telling suppliers what is coming

The Supplier forecasts card at the top of the plan reads “One forecast per supplier, to send them what you expect to order.” Press Generate Supplier Forecasts, or Generate supplier forecasts on step 5 of the Planning Cycle.

• The plan must be approved (or further on). On a draft the button is disabled and reads “Approve the procurement plan before generating supplier forecasts.”
• One draft forecast per supplier on the plan.
• A forecast is not a copy of this plan’s 30 days. It covers the production plan’s whole horizon, week by week. This plan’s own purchases are the near weeks, marked Planned order; the months of production beyond them are marked Forecast, not an order. A supplier who only ever saw the next thirty days could not plan around you.
• Products with no supplier cannot be included, and the failure names them: “No supplier is set up for MILK and SUGAR. Add the product to a supplier before generating forecasts.”
• A second press answers “Supplier forecasts are already being generated for this plan.”
• Once a forecast from this plan has been approved or sent, Generate is refused rather than putting a new draft beside what the supplier has already been told: “Supplier forecasts from this plan are already approved for Dairyland Ingredients. Archive them to generate again.”

See Supplier Forecasts for what the forecasts contain and how they are approved and sent.

When there is nothing to buy

A cycle where everything is already covered used to look like a failure. It is not, and the screens now say so:

• The plan is created, with no lines, and shows “Nothing to buy: everything is covered by stock and orders” in its notes, and the same sentence with a full stop as a banner on the screen.
• Step 4 of the Planning Cycle reads done, and step 5 reads “No supplier forecasts needed”.
• Generate Supplier Forecasts is refused with its own reason, not a generic one: “Nothing to buy, so no supplier forecasts are needed.”
• Approve is not offered, because there is nothing to approve. Pressing it anyway answers “Nothing to buy — there is nothing to approve.”
• Except where it replaces something. An empty plan can be approved when doing so retires an older approved plan — a newer “nothing to buy” answer has to be able to take a stale plan full of purchases out of force. Then Approve is offered, and its confirmation names what it supersedes.

Cancelling a plan

Cancel plan is offered on a draft, an approved plan and one that is executing. A completed or superseded plan cannot be cancelled. It asks first, and the confirmation counts what will change:

Cancel procurement plan
“Cancel PR-P1000005? 4 pending lines are cancelled, and supplier forecasts not yet sent are archived. Purchase orders already raised stay open: PO-P1000021 and PO-P1000022.”
Buttons: Cancel plan / Keep plan

• Pending lines are cancelled. Nothing is being bought for a plan nobody is working to.
• Purchase orders already raised stay open, and the confirmation names them. They are real orders with a supplier on the other end; the plans in force go on counting them as stock on order.
• Supplier forecasts not yet sent are archived. A draft or approved forecast for a cancelled plan would otherwise stay approvable and sendable. A forecast already sent stays — the supplier has it.

Exporting a plan, and its activity

Export CSV in the plan’s toolbar downloads the plan as a spreadsheet file named for the plan (for example PR-P1000014.csv), one row per purchase line, quantities in each line’s own unit. The file is built on the server, so it is the same file whichever screen asked for it, and a line the grid has paged past is still in it. Quantities are rounded to three decimal places and dates written as 2026-10-06, so a spreadsheet sorts them correctly. Accented supplier and product names survive being opened in Excel, and a text value that starts with =, +, - or @ — even behind a leading space — is written with a leading quote so the spreadsheet reads it as text instead of running it as a formula. Numbers are never touched, so a negative adjustment stays a number you can add up. If the download fails the screen says “The CSV could not be exported. Try again, or ask your administrator.”

The procurement export carries Product, Description, Supplier, Required qty, Unit, Order by, Required by, Est. cost, Status, Purchase order and Notes, ordered by order-by date.

The Activity panel at the foot of the plan lists When, Who and What — newest first, and in your account’s time zone rather than the reader’s, so an entry reads the same for everyone:

Generating a plan runs as a background job, so its Created entry shows System in the Who column rather than the person who pressed Generate. Raising purchase orders is the one background job that records who asked for it; everything done on screen names the person who did it. A plan with nothing recorded reads “Nothing recorded yet.” — which is what a plan made before this release shows, because the trail starts when it was built and is not filled in backwards. A panel that could not be read says “Could not load the activity:” with the reason. The panel shows a plan’s history, not a paged log: the most recent 200 entries.

Plan status

Approving a newer draft supersedes the approved plan for the same production plan, and its draft supplier forecasts are archived at the same time. The confirmation says so: “PR-P1000005 becomes the procurement plan in force. PR-P1000004 is superseded and its draft supplier forecasts are archived.”

Approving is refused once the older plan has raised orders — “PR-P1000004 already has purchase orders raised; complete it first.” — or has been completed: “PR-P1000004 is already completed for this production plan.” Those orders exist, so the plan that holds them is not taken away. It is also refused when the production plan behind the draft has been cancelled, completed or replaced, naming the plan to generate from instead.

Availability and permissions

• Part of the Demand Planning module, which requires Manufacturing and Orders. See Getting started with Demand Planning.
• Plans are scoped to your current site, and so is the choice of supplier.
• A site is not a security boundary. The site selector decides which site’s plans and suppliers 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 this screen and change site can read that site’s plans. 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.
• Viewing is open to administrators, production managers and users, QA managers, dispatch managers, demand planners, production planners and procurement planners.
• Approving, editing and generating supplier forecasts need an administrator, production manager or procurement planner.
• Create purchase orders needs an administrator, production manager or external user — the roles that may raise a purchase order anywhere — or a procurement planner. Raising the orders is part of the planner’s job, and the orders arrive as drafts for a buyer to price and send.
• Generate procurement plans must be on in Forecast Settings, or generation fails with the reason.

Things to know

• Expect the early weeks to ask for more, once. Orders now count as supply in the week they arrive rather than all in week 1, so material a distant delivery used to hide is bought where it is needed. See Why you may be asked to buy more than last time.
• One of your own part-made products can no longer land on a purchase order because it was used at two levels of a recipe. It is planned at the deepest level anything uses it at, so every parent’s need is in the one figure before it is made.
• Materials are exploded all the way down. An ingredient you make yourself is opened up into its own ingredients, and gets a works order of its own on the production plan — it is not bought as though it were a raw material. See How sub-assemblies are planned.
• A blank Supplier is a problem, not a normal case. It used to mean “something you make”; made items are now planned as works orders, so a blank supplier means a bought item nobody has set up — and it blocks supplier forecasts.
• Estimated cost is an estimate. It uses the unit cost held against the supplier product. The real price is resolved when the purchase order is created.
• The plan is a snapshot. It reflects stock, orders and the production plan as they stood when it was generated. Generate again to bring it up to date — a fresh draft appears beside the plan in force.
• Only draft plans can be deleted. Lines are edited only while the plan is a draft, and only a line that is still pending; the plan’s own Notes can still be changed while it is live.
• When a plan cannot be loaded the screen says “The procurement plan could not be loaded.” with a Try again button, rather than an empty page. After a refused action it shows the reason and re-reads the plan.
• The screen shows both links up the chain. Production Plan is the plan these purchases were exploded from, and Demand Plan is the demand plan behind that; each is a link straight to the record. The Notes also record the production plan in words (“Auto-generated from production plan PP-…”), along with any refusal that had no line of its own to sit on.
• An older plan’s leftover lines are not carried forward. If a newer plan is in force, a pending line on the older one has to be ordered from the newer plan or by hand.