Reorder Planning

The Reorder Planning report answers the question every buyer asks each week: what do we need to order or make, and how much? It forecasts each product’s demand from how much stock you’ve actually used, measures how long your suppliers and work orders really take, and suggests an order quantity for anything that will run short before the next order could arrive.

Open Reports and choose Reorder Planning under Purchasing & Stock.

Reading the summary

The cards across the top count the products that need attention:

Order Now: at or below the reorder point. Order these today.
Order Soon: will reach the reorder point before your next review.
Stockout Risk: will run out inside the lead time, so even an order placed now may arrive late.
Needs Checking: products with a negative quantity on hand, or that look short by more than you’ve used in the whole history window. These get no suggestion until someone checks the stock (see Products marked Check).
Suggested Spend: the estimated cost of every suggested order, and how many of those suggestions have a strong or moderate confidence grade.

The product table

Each row is one product, with:

Source: Buy (from the named supplier) or Make (with the named Bill of Materials), or No source when neither is set up
Status: Order now, Order soon, Check, OK or No demand
Confidence: how much data the suggestion rests on (see Confidence grades)
Per Week: forecast demand per week
Position: on hand, plus what’s incoming on purchase orders and work orders, less what’s committed to sales orders and work orders
Cover (days): how long the position lasts at the forecast rate
Lead (days): the lead time used for this product
Reorder Point, Suggested quantity and Est. Cost

Click a column heading to sort. Use the filters above the table to show products that Need ordering, Need checking, All with demand or All products, and to narrow by source, supplier, minimum confidence or product name and code. Export XLSX downloads the filtered table.

The detail panel

Click a product to see why it got its suggestion:

Weekly demand: a bar for every week of history, with the forecast rate drawn across it, and a note of the demand pattern and forecasting method used
Confidence: the grade for each factor, so you can see which one is holding the suggestion back
Calculation: the full working, from on hand through position, lead time, demand over the lead time and safety stock to the reorder point, the order-up-to level and the suggested quantity
Replenishment: the supplier or BOM, the measured delivery or production times behind the lead time, and links to open the supplier, BOM or product

Settings

The settings above the table control the forecast:

History: how many weeks of usage to forecast from (13, 26, 52 or 104). Changing it needs Reload history.
Service level: how often you want to avoid running out, from 80% to 99%. A higher level holds more safety stock.
Review every (days): how often you plan to run the report and place orders. Suggestions top up enough stock to last until the next review.

Open Confidence thresholds and defaults to change what counts as strong, moderate and weak data, and to set the lead time used when nothing better is known: a default supplier lead time, a default work order lead time, and the working hours per day used to turn BOM step durations into days. Reset to defaults puts them all back.

These settings are saved on the device you’re using.

How the numbers are worked out

Demand is stock issued to sales orders and work orders (including kit components), less customer returns. Scrap, transfers and stocktake adjustments are not demand. History starts from the product’s first use or creation, so a new product isn’t diluted by empty weeks before it existed.

The forecast depends on how the product sells. Products that sell most weeks use exponential smoothing. Products that sell in scattered weeks use Croston’s method, which forecasts the size of each order and the gap between orders separately. A single demand in a month or more of history is treated as a one-off, not a rate.

Lead time comes from your own history where possible:

For bought products, the time from purchase order date to first receipt, per line
For made products, the time from work order creation to completion
With fewer than three measurements, the supplier’s quoted lead time (or the BOM step durations) is used instead if it’s longer
With no measurements at all, the supplier’s average across its other products, then the default

Safety stock covers both demand that varies week to week and lead times that vary delivery to delivery, at your chosen service level. The reorder point is the demand expected over the lead time plus the safety stock.

Order quantities are rounded up to what you can actually order: whole supplier packs no smaller than the supplier’s minimum order quantity, or whole BOM batches for a work order. Pack sizes and minimums come from the product’s supplier details.

Confidence grades

Every suggestion is graded Strong, Moderate, Weak or Insufficient data, from five factors:

weeks of history
weeks with any demand
how much demand varies from week to week
how many lead time measurements there are
with 16 or more weeks of history, how well the method would have forecast the most recent weeks

The overall grade is the weakest factor. Hover over a grade in the table, or open the detail panel, to see which factor set it. Treat a weak suggestion as a prompt to look, not an instruction to buy.

Products marked Check

A product is marked Check instead of getting a suggestion when:

its quantity on hand is negative, or
it looks short by more than everything used in the history window, which usually means stale open orders or stock that was never receipted.

Fix the underlying stock or orders, then refresh the report.

Tips

Run the report on the same day each week and set Review every to match.
Make sure each bought product has its supplier set up with a pack size, minimum order quantity and quoted lead time, and each made product has a BOM. Without them the report falls back to defaults.
Filter to Strong only or Moderate or better for a list you can order from with little checking, then work through the weaker ones by hand.