Generation and maintenance of planned orders are an important part of the material planning process and they should be incorporated into the scheduler to provide the most realistic schedule. Below are a few notes I took away from a recent implementation.

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.