Planning View
The Planning View is the deep-dive companion to the SDI Dashboard. Where the dashboard summarizes the whole plant, Planning View gives you the full time-phased plan for one item — exactly how on-hand, demand, and supply evolve period by period, and precisely when and why a shortage appears.
For the concepts behind netting and shortages, see Supply-Demand Intelligence (Overview).
Where to Access
- Planning View —
/mfi/planning(also reached from a shortage row's View Planning chart icon on the SDI Dashboard).
Selecting what to plan
- Item — the item to analyze (required).
- Location — optional; leave blank for all locations.
- Bucket — time granularity: Daily or Weekly.
- Recalculate — re-runs MRP for just this item so the grid reflects the latest demand and supply.
Your selection is kept in the page URL, so browser back/forward and shared links restore the same view.
Time-Phased Planning Grid
The central grid has one column per period and these rows:
- On Hand — the starting balance (shown in the first period).
- DEMAND section (shown as negatives, red):
- Sales Orders
- Work Orders (dependent/component demand)
- Forecast
- SUPPLY section (shown as positives, green):
- Purchase Orders
- Work Orders
- Transfers
- Projected Available — the running balance after each period. Cells turn red with a ⚠️ wherever a shortage occurs.
This is the classic MRP grid: read left to right and you can see the exact period the balance crosses zero and how big the gap is.
Acting from the grid
Click any Projected Available cell to open the Adjust Supply dialog for that period:
- It shows the current projected balance and the shortage quantity.
- If the system has a suggestion for that period, you can Accept it (creates the PO/WO), Modify it (pre-fills the manual form with the suggested quantity), or Dismiss it.
- Or create manual supply: pick a Supply Type and Quantity, then Create Supply. Assemblies can choose Work Order or Purchase Order; non-assemblies default to Purchase Order.
- If a purchase needs a vendor the item doesn't have, you're guided to create the PO manually with a vendor selected.
Side panels
Below the grid, four panels give the supporting detail for the selected item:
- Shortages — each shortage with its severity, date, and units short, plus a View Impact link to the Shortage Impact analysis.
- Suggestions — system recommendations for this item, with priority, type, and Accept / Dismiss actions.
- Demands — the item's demand records (type, quantity, date, status).
- Supplies — the item's supply records (type, quantity, expected date, status).
When to use Planning View
- To understand why an item is short — which specific period and which demand drove it negative.
- To test a fix — add supply in the right period and watch projected availability recover.
- To plan a single high-value or long-lead item carefully rather than in bulk.
Tips
- Switch to Weekly buckets for long-lead items to see the trend without daily noise; use Daily for near-term firefighting.
- The first On Hand value anchors the whole projection — if it looks wrong, reconcile inventory before trusting the plan.
- Use Recalculate here after editing the item's demand or supply so the grid is current without re-running the whole plant.