Planning and the master schedule

Drag work on a timeline by work centre, and forecast what to make and buy in the months ahead.

Planning is for this week and next. The Master schedule is for the months ahead. Both come with Professional and above.

The planning board

Go to Planning. Each row is a work centre, and each bar is a step of an order. Work is planned inside the work centre's working hours, around time off and work already planned.

Choose 3 days, Week, 2 weeks or Month.

• Blue - planned
• Orange - running
• Red - blocked or out of order
• Grey - done
• Striped - time off

Tap a bar to open its order. Drag it, with a mouse or a finger, to move it to another time or work centre. Work waiting for it follows.

Not planned yet, below the board, lists steps with no time.

On an order, More > Plan again plans it afresh, and Clear the plan takes it off the board. A backup work centre takes over when it would finish sooner.

Working hours

Set shifts under Settings > Working hours. A night shift past midnight is two lines, one on each day. See Settings.

The master schedule

Go to Master schedule and click Add product. Its components join by themselves.

For each period you see:

• Starting stock
• Forecast - type what you expect to sell.
• Needed by other products
• Open sales
• To make or To buy - the suggestion, which you can change.
• Already ordered
• Forecasted stock
• Available to promise

Each period starts from the last one's forecasted stock. Colours on the To make row: green is ordered, yellow is below the suggestion, red is above it.

Click Order under a period to make the orders.

A product's settings

Click Settings beside a product:

• Keep at least, Smallest order, Largest order
• Ordering - I press Order, Orders this period by itself, or Never
• Vendor, for what you buy

Suggest forecast fills the forecast from the same period last year, the last 30 days, the last 3 months or the last 12 months. Scale by % adjusts it: 110 expects 10% more.

Under Settings > Preferences, choose whether the schedule shows months, weeks or days, and how many.