AI Recommendations are suggestions QTRACA raises by reading one planning cycle — its forecast, its demand plan and the production plan that came out of them — and naming things worth a look that the numbers alone do not spell out. They are advice, not instructions. Accepting one records your decision; it never changes a plan, an order or a policy for you.
Where to find it: AI Recommendations in the Demand Planning section of the main menu. The switch that produces them is Forecast Settings, under Setup → Demand Planning.
What a recommendation is
Each recommendation is one short suggestion with a longer explanation behind it, plus the labelling that tells you how to treat it.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Priority | High, medium or low — how much attention the suggestion is judged to warrant. Shown as a badge. |
| Category | Which part of the operation it concerns: production, procurement, inventory, waste, supplier or general. Anything that does not fit one of those becomes general. |
| Action Type | Informational, suggested action, or requires attention. Anything unrecognised becomes informational, so an odd label never loses you the suggestion. |
| Product | The product the suggestion is about, where it names one. Many are about the plan as a whole and leave it blank. It is also what decides whether a later suggestion with the same title replaces this one, or stands beside it as a different product’s problem. |
| Status | Pending, Accepted, Dismissed or Superseded. A new recommendation is pending; you move it to accepted or dismissed; a later analysis moves it to superseded when it raises the same suggestion again. |
| Source | What was read to produce it. New recommendations name the Production Plan the cycle’s analysis ran against; older ones may name a Forecast Run or a Procurement Plan, from when each step was analysed on its own. |
Where they come from
One analysis per planning cycle. It runs once, after the production plan is generated, and reads the forecast and the demand plan behind that plan as well — so it is looking at the whole cycle rather than one step of it.
Earlier releases analysed the forecast run, the production plan and the procurement plan separately: several paid calls in a cycle, each judging part of the picture, and each able to raise a suggestion the others had already made. One call after the production plan is the point at which the demand, the works orders and the numbers behind them all exist.
Two conditions have to hold. AI insights and recommendations must be ticked in Forecast Settings, and the account must still have AI credit left for the month. If either fails, the step goes ahead exactly as it would otherwise and nothing is analysed — no recommendations appear, and no error is shown on the plan.
The analysis is deliberately kept out of the way of the plan. It runs as a separate background job, so it cannot slow a Generate step down or make one fail. That also means recommendations arrive a little after the plan itself; if the list looks unchanged, come back to it shortly.
A new recommendation replaces the open one it repeats. When an analysis raises a suggestion with the same title, about the same product, at the same site, as one still Pending, the old one moves to Superseded and the new one takes its place. Nothing is deleted — the superseded row keeps its wording and is still on the list behind the Status filter — but it stops counting as new and stops asking you to decide the same thing twice. Regenerating a plan five times therefore leaves one live suggestion about each thing, not five.
The analysis also writes a short AI Summary. It appears on the production plan, and the same summary is copied onto that plan’s demand plan — it is the cycle’s summary, so it belongs on both. A forecast run no longer carries one of its own. See Forecasts and forecast runs.
The list
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Priority | High, medium or low, as a badge. |
| Category | The part of the operation it concerns. |
| Title | The suggestion in a line. Open the row for the reasoning. |
| Product | The product the suggestion is about, where it names one. Blank for one about the plan as a whole. It cannot be sorted or filtered on — it lives on the product, not the recommendation. |
| Action Type | Informational, suggested action or requires attention. |
| Status | Pending, accepted, dismissed or superseded, as a badge. |
| Actioned By | Who accepted or dismissed it. Blank while it is pending. |
| Actioned | When that happened. Blank while it is pending. |
| Source | Forecast Run, Production Plan or Procurement Plan. |
| Created | When it was raised. The list is sorted on this, newest first. |
The Search Recommendations box narrows the list by Category, so typing procurement leaves the buying suggestions. Every filter the grid offers now reaches the server, and so do the sort and the page you are on — a match on page four is found. In the filter panel: Priority, Category, Action Type and Status are pick-lists; Title, Actioned By and Source are free text; Actioned and Created take a day.
- Status offers pending, accepted, dismissed and superseded. Filter to pending to see only what still wants a decision; filter to superseded to see what a later analysis has replaced. Actioned is not offered, because nothing sets it.
- Actioned By is free text over the person’s name, username or email, so “lovelace” finds Ada Lovelace.
- Source ignores spacing, so typing “production plan” finds them.
- The list opens newest first, and any sortable column re-sorts it.
Recommendations belong to the site whose plan they came from, so the list shows the site you are working in. A recommendation that can no longer be attributed to a site — its plan has since been deleted, or it predates site stamping — appears only when no site is selected. It used to show on every site’s list, which made one orphan look like a problem at every site you visited.
Accepting and dismissing
A pending row offers two actions, Accept and Dismiss. Both ask you to confirm. The dialogs are titled "Accept Recommendation" and "Dismiss Recommendation", and both say the same thing about what you are agreeing to:
Accept "<title>"? It will be recorded against your name and stay on the list, so this is a note of your decision rather than an action QTRACA carries out for you.
That is the whole of what happens. Your name and the time are stamped on the record from your session — they are not something you can type in — and the status changes. No purchase order is raised, no plan line is changed, no stock policy is edited.
The choice is once only. Once a recommendation has left pending, the Accept and Dismiss actions stop being offered on its row, and the server refuses a change anyway with Already actioned. That is deliberate: it stops the record of who decided what being rewritten later.
The detail screen
Open a row to read the reasoning, which the Title column can only summarise. The header carries the title, a "<Priority> priority" badge and the status badge; the body below it is the full explanation.
Underneath are Category, Action Type, Source and Created. Once the recommendation has been accepted or dismissed, Actioned By and Actioned At appear alongside them.
The footer holds Accept, Dismiss and Back, with the same confirmation as the list. On a recommendation that has already been decided — or superseded by a later one — the two actions are gone and a note in their place reads “This recommendation has already been <status> — no further action is available.”
The priority and status badges use the same colours here as in the list, so a High priority row reads the same on both screens.
On the Planning Cycle
The Site health panel on the Planning Cycle carries a row reading AI recommendations and N new, which opens this screen. N counts the pending recommendations for the site you are working in, so accepting or dismissing one takes it out of the count — and so does a later analysis superseding it.
The row only appears when AI insights are switched on and there is at least one pending recommendation. An account that has dealt with all of them sees no row rather than a zero. See Running your weekly planning cycle for the rest of the panel.
Turning them off
Untick AI insights and recommendations in Forecast Settings. The hint beside it reads “Suggests actions once a planning cycle, after the production plan is generated. Uses AI credits.” With it off:
- no analysis runs, so no new recommendations are raised;
- the AI recommendations row disappears from Site health;
- the AI Recommendations screen and its menu item stay where they are, still listing everything raised before you switched it off. Nothing is deleted.
Switching it off part way through does not strand work already queued: the analysis checks the switch again before it calls out, and stops if it has been turned off in the meantime. See Forecast Settings.
Availability and permissions
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Module | Demand Planning, which also needs Manufacturing and Orders. See Getting started with Demand Planning. |
| Setting | "AI insights and recommendations" ticked in Forecast Settings, for anything new to be raised. |
| AI credit | The account needs AI credit left for the month. Each analysis costs a little credit, and when the month's allowance is spent analysis stops until it resets. |
| Permission | View access to Demand Planning shows the menu item. Reading, accepting and dismissing are open to the Admin, Demand Planner, Production Planner, Procurement Planner, Production Manager, Production User, QA Manager, Dispatch Manager and External User roles. |
| Site | A site is not a security boundary. The site selector decides which site’s recommendations you are looking at and acting 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 recommendations. 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. |
Things to know
- Nothing happens automatically. Accepting a recommendation does not create an order, change a plan or adjust a policy. It records your decision; the work is still yours to do.
- Recommendations are advice, and can be wrong. They are drawn from what the forecast or plan contains — quantities, line counts, dates, costs — and know nothing of a conversation with a customer or a supplier problem you are already handling. Treat one as a prompt to look, not a verdict.
- The analysis reads a sample, not everything. It is given the cycle’s figures — product counts, plan references, line counts and a selection of lines — rather than every row of every plan, so a suggestion about a 300-product plan is drawn from part of it.
- One analysis per cycle, and repeats replace rather than pile up. Regenerating the production plan runs the analysis again, and a suggestion it repeats moves the old one to Superseded instead of leaving two pending. The list still grows over time; what it no longer does is ask you to decide the same thing twice.
- “Actioned” cannot be set. Nothing in QTRACA ever sets it, so it is not offered in the Status filter; the only two things you can do are accept and dismiss.
- Dismissing keeps the record. A dismissed recommendation stays on the list with your name against it. There is no delete.
- A failed analysis is silent. If the AI call fails, or the account has run out of credit, the forecast or plan is unaffected and no message appears on it. An empty list after a Generate step usually means one of those rather than that there was nothing to say.
- Recommendations outlive the plan they came from. Deleting a plan does not remove its suggestions; they keep their title and body and lose the link to the source. One that loses its site with it shows only when no site is selected, rather than on every site’s list.