One of the issues when you use the standard planning worksheet or the MRP planning in Business Central is that you have only one way of planning.
Basically, when you are in the planning worksheet and you want to calculate the plan, it could be the requisition worksheet.
It’s the same.
You can only select between if it’s an MPS, a master production schedule or material requirement planning.
And then if you want to respect planning parameters and use forecast.
So that’s basically the setup you can do in here, which is not very flexible and you cannot set a defined what to plan with.
If you look on the other hand, on the simple MRP from the reverse planning, we have predefined many different templates in here and you can define your templates by yourself.
So you can select templates across your company so you can set up all the templates you want in here and define them and you can set them up with very much flexibility.
So for instance, you can calculate critical items triggered on zero on an inventory, a reorder point, etc.
So if you say I would like to look at this template, find items below safety stock in all levels, and you look at the template card in here, you can see and this is a default setup we bring to you, you can change it as you want, or you can make your own templates in here.
We can, for instance, say that we only want to plan including items that has actually demand, actual demand.
So if the item doesn’t exist on one supply, sorry, demand line somewhere, skip it, which makes it so much faster if you have like 50,000 item numbers.
Would you like to include all sales line? Would you like to include all purchase line, which purchase date would you like? So this is all lots of lots of setup you can do for this specific template.
Would you like to actually include inventory? If you are calculating and you’re not allowed to use the existing inventory in your calculation, you can deselect that inventory.
A little like planning order to order.
Which kind of production orders would you like to include? And so on.
Are you triggering on safety stock zero, reorder point? You can see this the template contains many different things in here.
If you run for all low-level code, it means that you calculate, if you deselect this one and you also try to deselect the other ones down here, when you select the calculate all low-level code, you have to suggest quantity to order using a quantity to order template and then carry out actions.
So it will calculate low-level code zero, put it in the reverse planning worksheet, then calculate low-level one, put it in the reverse planning worksheet, and of course, calculate the low-level code, suggesting quantity, putting it in the reverse planning worksheet.
So this way, it’s possible to actually calculate full-level code down, but with this functionality, you don’t get to modify the orders as you go along.
But of course, you could say run for all low-level code, respect filters or set up a filter in here and an item filter template that you only plan on low-level code 1, 2 and 3, for instance.
The item filter and SKU filter templates on each planning template, you could also define as you want.
So you could, for instance, take a template saying, I would like to calculate normal items below reorder point.
Let’s just say this one item below reorder point for specific vendor you could copy that template and say vendor 87 000 that’s what i’m using when i calculate for that one just as an example like this so now i have a template called vendor 87 000 because he lives somewhere out here i have the vendor here and i’m buying some of the items from him and when i his may be my biggest vendor so when i’m planning him, I want to have special planning parameters.
So now I have a template exactly for that vendor that I can just use when I want to.
And I could set up and once and for all, a item filter template.
I could create a new one that I call vendor 87,000, something like this.
Oops.
And I’ll set a filter on that one.
Block no inventory.
Yes.
Vendor number has to be 87 000.
now this template existing my system i can just use this one and i could also say how do i want to plan on this one which parameters should i use so this is a specific new template for that vendor and thereby you can define many templates with lots of lots of flexibility and you can make an agile planning routine where you can say Monday morning we start up by the most critical stuff doing this and then we do less critical stuff and less critical stuff as we go along.
So it’s very flexible to do many different ways of planning depending on what you’re doing.
Some of the predefined template we have come with is the most obvious one that we think you should use up here and then we have the transfer orders in.
You can choose either from safety stock reorder point zero and then production orders on different levels.
If you show additional template, we also made some of them that you can run automatically, where it’s set up to carry out automatically selecting the next template.
We also have forecasting template out of the box.
So if you want to break down sales forecast into purchase items, for instance, we prepared some template for you here.
If you have good ideas for new templates that we should have in the out of the box product you can just send us some good ideas and we would like to get in as much best practice in here as possible because the whole idea is to make it as easy as possible to get started with planning.