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Introduction to the Purchase Order Plan Register

A Purchase Order Plan is a scheduling tool that you can use to plan future purchases based on the predicted future sales in Sales Forecast records.

Usually you will create Purchase Order Plans using the 'Create Purchase Order Plan' Maintenance function in the MRP module, but you can also enter them directly to the Purchase Order Plan register yourself.

The 'Create Purchase Order Plan' Maintenance function will create Purchase Order Plans as follows:

  1. It will check Sales Forecasts from the specified period for Items that need to be purchased (i.e. for Stocked Items without Recipes). Only Sales Forecasts that have been marked as OK will be checked.

  2. Each Stocked Item without a Recipe in Sales Forecasts will be included in its own row in the resulting Purchase Order Plan. The Needed Date for each Item will be the first day in the Sales Forecast period i.e. the first day in a week or month.

  3. The function will also check the Recipes used in Production Plan rows from the specified period for Items that need to be purchased (i.e. for components required by the Recipes). Again, only Production Plans that have been marked as OK will be checked. Each component that needs to be purchased will be added to the Purchase Order Plan.

  4. The calculation of the required quantity for each Item in a Purchase Order Plan will take into account the quantity in the Sales Forecast (i.e. the estimated quantity that will be sold during the Forecast period), the quantity currently in stock (or estimated to be in stock at the beginning of the Forecast period) and the quantity that is required to be in stock at the end of the period (taken from the Stock Policies setting).

    The calculation of the required quantity for an Item that needs to purchased because it is a component in a Recipe in a Production Plan will similarly take into account the quantity currently in stock (or estimated to be in stock at the beginning of the Production Plan period) and the quantity on unfulfilled Purchase Orders that is scheduled to arrive during the Production Plan period. This calculation will not use Stock Policies, because the Stock Policy for the finished Item will already have been used in the calculation of the quantity in the Production Plan.

  5. Each Purchase Order Plan row will contain a date when the Item should be ordered, to ensure that all units will arrive by the Needed Date. The calculation of this Start Date requires there to be a Purchase Item for each Item in which you have specified a Delivery Days (the number of days needed for the Supplier to deliver the Item). Usually this should be a Default Purchase Item, but if you have specified a Supplier in the header of a Purchase Order Plan or in an individual row, then the Purchase Item need not be marked as Default.
If you are using both Production Plans and Purchase Order Plans, you will usually need to create a Production Plan from a Sales Forecast, mark the Production Plan as OK, and then run the 'Create Purchase Order Plan' Maintenance function for an earlier period or periods. This is because the purchase of a component will probably need to be in an earlier period than its use in a Production. Please refer to the Dates and Workflow page for more details.

After you have marked a Purchase Order Plan as OK and saved it and you are ready to create Purchase Orders from the Purchase Order Plan, you can either run the 'Create Purchase Orders' Maintenance function or you can open the Purchase Order Plan and select 'Purchase Order' from the Create menu.

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The Purchase Order Plan register in Standard ERP:

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