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Most “the plan is wrong” questions are answered by two pieces of master data. Make Time on a product you make decides when a works order has to start. The purchasing terms on a supplier product decide who you buy a material from, how much goes on the order, in what unit, and by when it has to be placed.

Neither is filled in for you. This article covers what to set, where, and exactly what each field changes in a plan.

Where to find it:
Make Time — Setup → Products, then the product type (for example Work in Progress), then the product, in the Batch Settings group.
Purchasing terms — Setup → Suppliers, then the supplier, then its Products tab, then the edit pencil on the row (Edit Supplier Product), in the Purchasing group.

Two kinds of “how long”

QTRACA keeps them apart deliberately, because they answer opposite questions and live in different places.

Make Time on a made product

Make Time (Days) sits in the product's Batch Settings group, under Shelf Life. Its help text reads:

Days from starting production to having it. Not a supplier lead time — that is on the supplier product. Leave at 0 for same-day.

The default is 0, which means same day. That is the value every existing product has, so nothing changed when the field appeared — you have to set it.

What it changes

Production planning dates a works order by working backwards from when its output is needed:

• A works order is planned to start Make Time days before the date the thing that consumes it needs it.
• That chains down as deep as the recipes go. With a 2-day custard inside a 3-day tart base, the base starts five days before the tart is wanted.
• A sub-assembly's own ingredients are then wanted by the sub-assembly's start date, which is what sets procurement's Required By and, less the buying lead time, its Order By. Get Make Time wrong and the purchase orders go out on the wrong day too.
• A date that would fall before the plan was made is clamped to the plan date, so no plan is born already late. The line says why: “Needed by <date>; with N days to make, start today.”, or for a sub-assembly “Needed by <date>, which has passed; make this first.” Those notes appear in the Notes column on the production plan's lines.

Sub-assembly works orders are always given High priority, because something else is waiting on them. For the whole picture see How sub-assemblies are planned in Production Planning.

Set Make Time on anything with a maturing, chilling, proving or curing step. Those are exactly the products whose works order has to start days before the thing that uses them, and exactly the ones that read as “late” on the Planning Cycle when it is left at 0.

Supplier purchasing terms

A supplier product is the record that says “this supplier sells us this material”. It is what makes the material buyable at all. Add it from the supplier's Products tab; the purchasing terms are the Purchasing group at the top of the form.

Which lead time wins

1. The supplier product's Lead Time (Days), when it is set and greater than zero.
2. Otherwise the stock policy's Lead Time Days for that product at that site.
3. Otherwise 7 days.

The supplier's figure wins because it is the one that will actually be true of the delivery.

Which minimum wins

The supplier's Minimum Order Qty beats the stock policy's Min Order Qty. Theirs is the figure enforced at the point of order; the policy's is your own house rule for when the supplier states nothing. The note on the line names which one applied, so the two can never be confused:

• raised to supplier minimum 2,000
• raised to minimum order qty 500

The minimum is only one step in how the order quantity is decided — the safety buffer, the max stock cap, the order multiple and the max order cap all take part. That precedence is set out in full in How the order quantity is decided on Procurement Plans.

Which products can have a supplier product

Only things you buy: raw materials and packaging. Finished goods and work in progress are made or sold, so they are refused with “must be a purchasable type (RM, PC)”. Their sell-side prices belong on a price list instead.

Something you buy in and sell on unchanged is a raw material (a stock item on accounts without the manufacturing module), not a recipe-less finished good. Set up that way, procurement adds it as a purchase line straight from the demand plan and a supplier forecast covers it in the same cycle.

Which supplier the planner buys from

When a material has more than one supplier at the site, the planner picks one in this order:

1. The supplier marked Preferred supplier.
2. Otherwise the most recently effective price line.
3. Otherwise the oldest record.

Two further rules matter:

• The site's own records come first. If the site has any supplier products for the material, only those are considered. Records created before products carried a site stand in only when the site has nothing of its own — they are a stopgap, never blended in beside the site's real answer.
• One supplier selling two ways is not a choice. The same supplier with a bag price line and a pallet price line counts as one supplier, so it never raises the “none is preferred” warning.

When none is preferred

Nothing stops or fails. The planner buys from one of them, predictably, and then says out loud that you did not choose:

• The procurement line carries the note “No preferred supplier: N suppliers; buying from <supplier name>”, visible in the line's Notes column.
• The Planning Cycle raises a warning blocker: “N products have several suppliers and none is preferred”, detailed “Mark the supplier you buy <codes> from as preferred.” The row opens the procurement plan, where you can see who was chosen.

Tick Preferred supplier on the right one and generate the procurement plan again.

When there is no supplier at all

A bought material with no supplier product anywhere is still planned — you need to know you are short of it — but it cannot be ordered or forecast:

• The procurement line appears with no supplier, and the preview row on the Planning Cycle says no supplier.
• The Planning Cycle raises a critical blocker: “N products have no supplier”, detailed “Supplier forecasts cannot include <codes>. Add each to a supplier.” With one product the row opens the product; with several it opens the procurement plan.
• Generating supplier forecasts reports “No supplier is set up for <codes>. Add the product to a supplier before generating forecasts.” Forecasts are still produced for every supplier that is set up — the unsupplied products are simply left out.
• Creating purchase orders skips the line and counts it as refused, with “No price line for <supplier> for <code>” where a supplier is named but has no matching price line.

A blank supplier used to be normal for anything you make. It no longer is: made components are exploded into their own ingredients, so a line with no supplier now means a genuinely bought item that nobody has set up.

Ordering in the supplier's own unit

Planning works in the product's stock unit throughout: recipe quantities, stock on hand and the plan's own lines are all converted into it. Only at the point of ordering or telling a supplier is the quantity put into their unit.

• With a Pack Size set, the order is whole packs, rounded up, and the note shows both figures — for example 1,148.86 KG → 2 × PALLET (1,200 KG).
• With only an Order Unit, the quantity is converted into it. A countable unit (each, bag, drum) is rounded up to a whole number; a weight or volume keeps its decimals, because half a tonne is a real order and half a bag is not.
• Supplier forecast lines are in the supplier's order unit too, but they are not rounded up to whole packs — a forecast is what to expect, not what goes on a truck. They keep three decimal places, and a positive requirement is never shown as zero.
• With neither set, everything stays in the product's stock unit.

When a unit cannot be converted

QTRACA refuses rather than guesses: a guessed unit is a wrong order nobody can see. The quantity is left out and named, never counted as zero.

• The line keeps its note — for example “No conversion from KG to PALLET for <code>…”, “No stock unit set for <product>”, or, at order time, “Not ordered: no conversion from PALLET to KG for <code>, so it could not be received”.
• A critical blocker on the Planning Cycle names how many products are affected.
• Stock alerts for that product pause rather than alert on a made-up figure, and the stock policy says why in its status line.
• A pack that disagrees with the product's own conversion is refused too: “Not ordered: pack <code> says X KG per PALLET but the product conversion says Y”. One of the two is wrong, and receiving would book whichever the conversion said.

Fix the conversion on the product, then generate the plan again.

Availability and permissions

• Make Time (Days) is shown only when the account holds the Demand Planning module, or is on an older arrangement that keeps every screen it already had. Nothing else in QTRACA reads the field, so accounts without the module are not asked for a number that goes nowhere. See Module requirements and availability.
• Editing a product needs the product permission; editing a supplier product needs the supplier permission. Neither is a demand planning permission — these are shared master data.
• Supplier products belong to a site, taken from the product. A supplier product moved to another product picks up that product's site.
• A site is not a security boundary. The site selector decides which site’s products and supplier products 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 these screens and change site can read that site’s records. 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

• Changing these fields does not change an existing plan. A plan is a snapshot. Generate the procurement plan again — the new one arrives as a draft beside the one in force.
• Only one preferred supplier per product per site. Ticking a second one silently un-ticks the first, in the same save. There is no way to prefer two.
• Currency and Effective From are not on the form. They are stored, and Effective From takes part in choosing a supplier when none is preferred, but you cannot set either here. Mark a preferred supplier rather than relying on dates you cannot edit.
• A zero or blank figure means “no rule”, not zero. A blank Minimum Order Qty means the supplier states no minimum, so the stock policy's applies.
• A supplier product cannot be removed while it has stock or open transactions. The attempt is refused with “Cannot delete a supplier product whilst it has stock or open transactions”.
• Make Time is not capacity. It shifts dates; it does not limit how much can be made in a day. Batch size limits live on the stock policy as Max Batch Qty.
• A recipe that loops is ordered once. If two products list each other as ingredients, the explosion stops rather than running away, and the loop is logged.