Supply Planning

NetSuite Supply Planning helps supply planners determine how to best establish criteria to fulfill demand plan requirements. Supply planning uses sales order details to generate dependent demand for work order components. The objective is to balance supply and demand to achieve your organization’s financial and service objectives.

Supply plans generate a suggested schedule for purchasing or manufacturing items for supply. A supply plan lists the suggested purchase orders and work orders that can increase item supply based on lead times and expected demand. Planners can create multiple supply plans which can vary depending on the planner’s criteria, such as planning horizon, planning scope, and planning rules.

To learn more about the Supply Planning Lifecycle, watch the following video:

Supply planners can use NetSuite to establish the following criteria to create a supply plan:

Planning Horizon – the number of days into the future the plan will cover. For example, if the plan start date is June 1 and the horizon is 30 days, the end date will be June.

Currently, there is no limit on the length of a planning horizon, but you should test larger datasets. For example, internal testing has shown that MRP may fail when using a planning horizon of 730 days and 100,000 item-locations but completes successfully when reduced to 400 days.
Planning Scope – the items and locations that are being considered for the plan and the associated demand source, or sources, for each location.
Planning Rules – determine how transfer rules work for specific items and locations. These rules, essentially define your supply chain.

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