Overview
Typical workflow around inventory planning involves creating a sales plan (i.e. demand plan) and calculating the inventory (i.e. supply) that is sufficient to fulfill the sales targets. Here is a good overview of the typical end-to-end merchandise planning workflows.
Once you have a Sales Plan in place, you will either be in a Receipt Planning mode or an Inventory Planning mode. Below is a quick visualization on how to think about the 2 time periods; Receipt Planning and Inventory Planning time periods.
Receipts Planning and Generating Inventory
Most typically, if you have Purchase Orders already On Order, you will not be able to push them out, cancel or amend them. For this period, which is typically as long as your Lead Time, the suggested approach is to Flow your On Order to Receipts.
Once you flow On Order to Receipts, or put in your Receipts Plans, you can use the Generate Inventory
function to project Inventory positions over a specific timeframe. Below are the steps:
Select the timeframe you want to run this function starting from on the grid
Right click on the grid
Functions >
Generate Inventory
After clicking on Generate Inventory
you will see a banner at the top of the page with shows you the function is enabled and the first week this function will impact. You will stay in this function until you click Save
or Cancel
.
Inventory Planning via WOS
For the time period where you have full control over your Inventory and Purchase Orders, you can plan to your WOS targets to drive ending inventory positions, and have the system calculate the needed receipts. While doing WOS planning, make sure that you set the metric Gross WOS Units
to output to Receipts Units
.
At any point in this workflow, you can right click on the time period from which you want Inventory to be updated from via, right clicking on the grid, and select Generate Inventory
.