It’s important to have accurate need dates and priorities on work orders of all levels, specially if you want to take full advantage of a rule based optimization engine such as the one in PlanetTogether. (To find out more about PlanetTogether’s optimizer read this blog post by my colleague)

With PlanetTogether, planners have the option to dynamically set the need date, priority and hot flag on child work orders based on the data on (parent) work orders they will be supplying materials to. The optimization engine calculates material requirements and corresponding required dates, then looks for work orders producing these items and makes sure the need date and priorities are set so that the material is ready “just-in-time” for the next work order to use.

Using this feature, or trying it in “What-If” mode is as easy as three check boxes:

For starters, planned orders which are not firmed up can change very frequently, so you might want to leave them out of the schedule for stability and only schedule firm planned orders.

Secondly, once the firm planned order is turned into an actual order in MRP, the unique key that identified the planned order is gone and the new actual order has a completely different key. This means that, to the scheduler software the actual order imported is a brand new order. To overcome this problem, PlanetTogether allows you to import an “Old Key” field associated with the new order; through this “Old Key” PlanetTogether will know the actual order is replacing the planned order and preserve scheduling information such as start and end dates.

Also, because planned orders are different in nature than actual orders, we want to make sure we implement the necessary visual hints so the scheduler can easily distinguish the two types of orders.