Planning

The Planning dashboard is your command center for orchestrating production planning. It brings together forecasts, MRP runs, shortage review, and schedule revisions into one view so you can see what needs attention and take action without hunting through separate pages.

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Planning Dashboard

Navigate to Planning in the sidebar to see the command dashboard. Five cards show the state of your planning workflow at a glance.

Forecast Scope

Shows whether forecasts exist and are current.

• Ready means forecasts are loaded and you can proceed to MRP.
• Action Needed means no forecasts exist yet. Click View Forecasts to create one.

What a forecast is for

Demand enters planning through two lanes, and each has a job:

• Sales orders carry client demand — the finished goods a client has ordered. This is the authoritative, contractual demand. You never forecast a client’s finished good; you plan it from their order.
• Forecasts carry house and universal input demand — the long-lead, shared, buy-ahead materials you stock across many orders: house materials (Brella-owned) and universal packaging components (bottles, cans, closures, labels, cases, and so on) that aren’t tied to one client.

So the forecast create form only lists house materials and universal Brella-owned components. A finished good, or a client’s own proprietary material (even a custom bottle), is planned through that client’s sales order — it won’t appear in the forecast picker, and creating a forecast for one is rejected.

A material forecast is direct demand for that material: MRP nets it against on-hand stock and recommends a purchase order, no production explosion involved. This keeps the two lanes from double-counting — sales orders drive finished-good production (which explodes into its own material needs), while forecasts cover the shared inputs you buy ahead independently.

MRP Run

Shows the latest material requirements planning run.

• Complete means MRP ran successfully with no shortages.
• Action Needed means either no run has been done, or the latest run found shortages. Click Run MRP to start a new run.
• The card shows a constraint count (e.g., “3 shortages”) when shortages were found.

How availability is computed

Each material requirement is netted against projected availability, not raw on-hand:

projected = on-hand + incoming − committed

• On-hand counts only available lots. Lots on hold, in quarantine, or past their expiry date are excluded — stock you can’t legally or safely use is not supply.
• Incoming is the open balance of purchase-order lines (ordered minus received) on POs that have been sent or are partially received. Draft POs do not count — until a PO is sent, the vendor hasn’t committed to anything. If a shortage persists after you generated a PO, check whether the PO is still in Draft.
• Committed is demand that already claimed stock: material requirements of scheduled or in-progress manufacturing orders (minus what those batches have already consumed), plus confirmed sales-order lines that haven’t shipped yet.

Incoming supply is also time-phased by the PO’s expected date: a PO arriving after a requirement’s need-by date can’t cover that requirement, so the shortage still shows — only requirements dated on or after the PO’s expected arrival see that supply. A PO with no expected date counts immediately; set expected dates on your POs to get accurate per-date coverage.

Requirements are then walked in required-by-date order per material, and each requirement depletes the running balance for the ones after it. The Available column on a requirement row shows what was left for that requirement after earlier-dated demand drew down the pool — on hand, plus incoming that arrives in time, minus committed demand — so two batches sharing one ingredient can’t both claim the same bag of it.

Generate Manufacturing Orders

Once an MRP run is confirmed, the Planned manufacturing orders tab lists every finished good the run says to produce — one row per driving forecast or sales order, with its planned case quantity and need-by date.

• Generate Manufacturing Orders (the button above the list) creates a draft Production Order for every planned finished good in one step. Each new Manufacturing Order pins the current published Formula, Vessel BOM, Case BOM (and Pallet BOM, when the product ships palletized) exactly as a hand-created one would.
• The action is idempotent: running it again never duplicates a Production Order. A finished good that already has one — whether created here or from its sales order — is skipped. The result line reads, for example, “4 created, 2 already done.”
• The button is only available on a confirmed run. A draft run shows “Confirm the run first” — generating Manufacturing Orders is a production-release step, so the plan must be confirmed before it commits work.
• A finished good with no published Case BOM is skipped (it can’t be produced until its BOM chain is published), and the rest still generate.
• Prefer one Manufacturing Order at a time? Each row also has a Schedule link that opens the Manufacturing Order wizard prefilled with that finished good’s product, cases, and due date.
• In the Manufacturing Order wizard, search the full client, ready-product, and packaging-line catalogs by name or code. Prefilled records stay selected even when they are outside the first page of search results.

Shortage Review

Shows open shortages that need resolution.

• Complete means no open shortages remain.
• Action Needed means shortages are waiting for review. Click Review Shortages to see them in your inbox.
• Waiting means no MRP run has been done yet, so there are no shortages to review.
• The card shows a count of critical shortages when any exist.

Schedule Revision

Shows draft schedule scenarios and their publish readiness.

• Ready means no draft scenarios exist. You can create one.
• Action Needed means one or more draft scenarios are waiting to be published or resolved. Click Open Schedule to work on them.
• The card shows a constraint count (e.g., “1 blocked”) when blockers prevent publishing.
• When placing a packaging run, search Manufacturing Orders by number or name and packaging lines by code or name. Editing a block searches only compatible tanks, rooms, or lines for that phase, so large plants are not truncated to a preloaded list.

Active Blockers

The bottom card aggregates all blocking constraints across every stage. It shows a total count plus a breakdown by type:

• Material — MRP shortages (not enough raw materials).
• Capacity — schedule conflicts (double-booked work centers, missing assignments).
• Compliance — compliance filing deadlines approaching or overdue.

When there are no blockers, the card shows “No active blockers.” The blocker counts refresh automatically every 30 seconds.

Resume Flow

The amber Resume Flow button appears in the top right of the dashboard. It reads the current state of all cards and suggests the most useful next action:

• Run MRP — when forecasts exist but no MRP run has been done, or the latest run is stale.
• Review Shortages — when MRP found shortages that haven’t been addressed.
• Publish Revision — when a draft scenario is ready to publish.
• Create Revision — when no draft scenarios exist and the schedule is clean.

The button is hidden when no clear next step applies.

Card Actions

Each card has an action button that opens the relevant page in a new browser tab. Keep the dashboard open alongside detail work so you can return to it and check overall status at any time.

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Limiting Factor Tool

The Limiting Factor tool lets you check whether you can make a target quantity of a finished good before committing to a schedule. It answers: “If I want to produce 50 cases of this product, what would stop me?”

Running a Check

1. Navigate to Tools > Limiting Factor in the sidebar (or use the embedded panel in the schedule revision flow).
2. Select a Case BOM from the dropdown. This defines the finished-good packaging spec: which recipe, which bottle, how many per case.
3. Enter a target quantity in cases.
4. Click Check Feasibility.

Reading Results

The results panel shows three sections:

Hero metric — the headline number. For example, “32 of 50 cases” means you can make 32 cases, but you asked for 50. The verdict banner below tells you whether the target is achievable:

• Green banner (“Can make 50 cases”) — nothing binds.
• Red banner (“Can only make 32 of 50 cases — limited by Neutral Grain Spirit (material)”) — something caps production, and the single binding constraint is named, along with its class (material or capacity).

The tool considers two resource classes and reports the one that binds first:

• Materials — do you have enough of each ingredient on hand right now? This compares your target against current inventory. It does not yet subtract material already promised to other scheduled-but-unissued batches — see the note below.
• Capacity — do the tanks and lines this recipe runs on have enough hours in the planning window, once you add this batch on top of what’s already scheduled? The capacity check does account for the committed schedule.

Whichever is tighter becomes the limiting factor. If materials are fine but a bottling line is already nearly full, capacity is named — and vice versa.

Note on shared materials. The material check reads current on-hand inventory, so it does not subtract ingredients already committed to other scheduled batches. When several scheduled batches draw on the same ingredient, that cross-batch depletion is computed by MRP today. Unifying it into this tool is a planned enhancement.

Material bars — a visual breakdown of each ingredient’s availability. Bars are sorted worst-to-best:

• Red (shortage) — not enough to meet the requirement.
• Yellow (tight) — enough, but less than 20% buffer.
• Green (OK) — sufficient inventory.

Each bar shows the required vs. available quantity and the UOM.

Constraint summary — three rows at the bottom: Materials, Capacity, and Compliance. Each shows a count of issues. The Capacity row now counts over-scheduled work centers — any tank or line that would exceed 100% of its available hours once this batch is added. Each over-scheduled work center is listed below the summary with its true utilization (for example, “BT-02 — 132%”), so you can see how far over the line is, not just that it is over.

Embedded in Schedule

When you are working on a schedule revision (at Calendar > Schedule), the Limiting Factor tool is available as a collapsible Feasibility Check panel. This lets you check material availability for a manufacturing order without leaving the scheduling flow.

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Demand Horizon

The Demand Horizon page shows your production demand organized into three time windows. Each window represents a different level of commitment and planning detail.

Navigate to Planning > Demand Horizon (or click the back link from the horizon page to return to the main Planning dashboard).

The Three Horizons

Locked (default 2 weeks) Near-term firm commitments. You can see individual batches with their scheduled dates and quantities. Changes to the schedule within this window require a versioned revision with a stated reason. This prevents casual changes to near-term commitments that downstream teams (purchasing, floor operations) are already acting on. The window length is a company setting — Settings → Company profile → Locked planning window — defaulting to 14 days; Ops can shorten or lengthen it.

Firm (3 months) Medium-term planning commitments. Demand is shown as weekly aggregates: total cases planned per week and how many batches make up that total. These commitments are expected to hold but can be adjusted without the locked-window friction.

Directional (12 months) Long-range demand signals. Monthly bars show rough volume by month. Use this view for capacity planning and raw material procurement lead times. The further out the signal, the less reliable — the visual opacity on this tile is intentionally lower to communicate that.

Navigating Horizons

The three tiles across the top of the page are the navigation. Click a tile to filter the detail view below to that horizon’s timeframe. The active tile gets an amber highlight. No page reload happens — the switch is instant.

Lock Semantics

When you publish a schedule scenario that includes entries within the locked window (default two weeks; configurable in Company profile), vestl requires a versioned revision with a stated reason. The system enforces this in two layers:

• The publish readiness check flags entries in the locked window as locked-window changes.
• These appear in the readiness panel alongside other blockers (missing tanks or lines, double bookings).
• Unlike hard blockers, locked-window changes can be overridden: provide a publish reason explaining why the change is necessary, and the publish will proceed.
• Hard blockers (missing tanks or lines, double bookings) always prevent publishing and cannot be overridden.

This means planners can still make urgent changes within the locked window, but they must document why. The reason is captured in the publish history for audit and team communication.

How far a published plan is authoritative

Publishing a scenario makes it live to the floor — but not every entry in it is equally firm. A published plan is authoritative through the firm window (the locked window plus the firm horizon, out to roughly 90 days). Entries scheduled beyond that — in the directional window — still publish and are visible, but they are directional planning, not floor commitments.

The plan status bar surfaces this as an informational note (“N runs are scheduled beyond the committed horizon…”) whenever a scenario has directional-dated entries. It is not a blocker — it never prevents publishing. It simply tells the planner (and the floor) which runs to treat as firm and which are still tentative long-range plans that will be revisited as they move closer.

Committing a run: pre-lock and lock

Beyond the time-based locked window, you can commit an individual run by hand. Each schedule block on the List view carries a commitment chip with three levels:

• Plan — the default. Fully fluid; move or re-route it freely.
• Pre-lock — a soft commitment. It signals that the run is close to committed, but you can still move it without friction.
• Lock — a firm commitment. A locked run cannot be moved to a different date or work center without a written override reason. Editing just its notes, or re-saving it in place, is always allowed.

Click the commitment chip to cycle a run through the levels. Locking is the counterpart to the time-based window: the locked window commits everything in the near term automatically, while a lock commits one specific run whenever you decide it’s firm — a signed order, a booked changeover, a client promise.

Commitment travels with the run: locking a run on a draft keeps it locked when you publish, and a new draft inherits the live schedule’s locks so you always see what’s already committed before you start editing. Every lock and unlock is audit-logged.

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Field Reference

Dashboard Cards

Limiting Factor Tool

Demand Horizon