Build a master production schedule

A planning run only plans what something is asking for. If the only demand in your account is customer orders, you can never plan ahead of your customers — there is no way to build stock for a season, a product launch, or a promotion, because on the day you need to start, nobody has ordered it yet.

The master production schedule is where you say what you intend to build anyway. Each entry is a quantity of one product, at one warehouse, in one period: 450 of this, in the week of 19 October, at Main Warehouse. The planning run reads those entries as demand exactly as it reads an open sales order, so every component underneath the item gets planned, sized and started on time — weeks before the first order arrives.

That is the whole point of it. The schedule is a statement of intent, and it is the only demand source you control directly.

Before you begin

• The item needs a planning policy. A run skips any item whose Planning Method is None, and any item with no policy at all — its schedule entries then sit there doing nothing. The method named MPS is the one to choose for an item whose supply you drive from the schedule rather than from orders. See Set item planning policies.
• An item you plan to build needs an active recipe. Without one, the run raises a No Active BOM message instead of planning its components. See Create a recipe (BOM).
• You need permission to change planning data. Without it you can read the schedule, but the Add MPS Entry button and the editable grid cells are unavailable, and the grid says so directly.

Steps

1. Go to Manufacturing → Planning, then click MPS in the button bar across the top of the Planning pages.

2. Stay on the Entries tab. Every entry in the schedule is listed here, one row per product per warehouse per period, with Product, Warehouse, Bucket Start, Quantity and Source.

3. Click Add MPS Entry.

4. Fill in what defines the entry — a product, a warehouse, a period and a quantity:

   • Product — the item you intend to build.
   • Warehouse — where the scheduled quantity is demanded. The schedule is held per warehouse, so this is required; the picker groups warehouses already in the schedule under In the schedule, above the rest.
   • Source — leave it on Manual when you are typing the number yourself. See Where an entry came from below.
   • Bucket Start — the first day of the period the quantity belongs to. Use the same day of the week for every weekly entry (every Monday, say), or the first of the month for monthly ones.
   • Quantity — how many units to schedule in that period.

   Add Entry stays unavailable until those four are filled in, and hovering it names the one that is missing — "Select a warehouse", "Enter a quantity greater than zero".

5. Click Add Entry. The row appears in the list immediately.

The entry is now demand. The next planning run will net it against stock and anything already on its way, explode the item's recipe, and plan the components underneath it. Nothing happens to your inventory in the meantime — an MPS entry creates no orders and moves no stock.

What the plan does with an entry

Bucket Start is a period, not a delivery date. With a weekly or monthly bucket size, the whole quantity is treated as demand at the start of that period. That is deliberate — it makes the plan start work early rather than late — but it means an entry dated the first of the month is planned as though all of it is wanted on the first.

The schedule adds to customer orders, it does not replace them. An entry and an open sales order in the same period are both demand, and both are planned.

A forecast does not stack on top. When you tick Include forecast demand on a run, the forecast for a period is consumed by the committed demand in that period — sales orders and master schedule entries both count. Demand the forecast already predicted is not planned a second time because you also typed it into the schedule.

Bucket Start is a plain calendar date in your account's timezone. There is no time component and no conversion.

Reading the bucket grid

The Entries tab is a list. The Bucket Grid tab is the same data laid out the way a planner thinks about it: products down the side, periods across the top.

Set the view with the controls above the grid:

• Warehouse — the grid plans one warehouse at a time, because the schedule is held per warehouse.
• Bucket size — Day, Week or Month. This sets the width of each column.
• Start — the first period the grid shows.
• Buckets — how many periods to show.
• Add products — search for a product to put a row on the grid, including one with nothing scheduled yet.

A read-out to the right tells you what you are looking at — "4 products × 13 buckets".

Each column is headed with its period (Wk of Sep 21, Wk of Sep 28, and so on), and the grid carries a Total column down the right and a Total row along the bottom, so you can read a product's whole horizon or a period's whole load without adding anything up.

Click a cell to edit it. A cell turns into a number field, and what you type is saved against that product, warehouse and period. Clearing a cell deletes that entry — with the same confirmation you get from the Entries tab.

note

The grid shows one warehouse at a time, and opens on the warehouse your Entries tab is filtered to, or failing that the first one that actually has entries. If a grid looks emptier than you expect, check the Warehouse picker first — the ones already carrying a schedule are grouped under In the schedule at the top of the list.

Two other things narrow what you see: a note under the grid warns you when entries fall outside the Start and Buckets window you chose, and on a very large schedule a banner tells you rows were left out, in which case use Add products to pull the row you need onto the grid.

An off-cycle column

A column headed with a date and the word Off-cycle is a period that does not line up with the bucket size you picked — it comes from an entry saved against a different date. A Thursday entry shown on a weekly grid that runs Monday to Monday gets its own column rather than being quietly folded into the week around it.

It is worth tidying up. Entries on consistent period boundaries are far easier to read, and easier to reason about when you compare one run against another.

What the grid does not show

The grid shows the master schedule only. Forecast, customer orders, projected available balance and available-to-promise are not on it. To see demand and supply netted against each other period by period, use the time-phased plan instead.

Where an entry came from

Every entry carries a Source, which records where the number originated. It does not change how a run treats the entry — all three are demand in the same way — but it tells you which numbers are yours to edit.

Source	Meaning
Manual	A planner typed it, here or through an import. This is the default on a new entry.
Forecast	It was generated from a demand forecast.
DRP	It was raised by distribution requirements planning at a supplying warehouse — see Plan replenishment across warehouses.

Filter the Entries tab by Source to separate what you decided from what the system worked out.

Editing and deleting entries

On the Entries tab, use the row actions to edit or delete an entry.

Editing opens the same dialog with the Product fixed — an entry is identified by its product, warehouse and period, so to move a quantity to a different product, delete the entry and add a new one. Warehouse, Source, Bucket Start and Quantity are all editable, and the button reads Save Changes.

Deleting asks for confirmation. Clearing a cell on the Bucket Grid does the same thing and asks the same question, so there is no way to remove an entry by accident.

Changes take effect on the next planning run. The plan you are looking at was produced from the schedule as it stood when that run started — editing the schedule never rewrites a run that has already finished. Start a new run when you want the plan to reflect what you changed.

Building a schedule in bulk

A schedule is a grid — one row per product, per warehouse, per period — which makes it the one thing in planning that is often quicker to build in a spreadsheet. The Import button on this page loads entries from a file or pasted data, and the Export button takes the current schedule out in the same shape, so you can export, edit and re-import.

See Import MPS entries and planning policies.

Next steps

• Run a planning cycle — turn the schedule into planned orders
• Read the time-phased plan — see the schedule netted against stock and incoming supply
• Trace why an order exists — follow a planned order back to the schedule entry that caused it
• How a planning run works — where the schedule sits among the three demand sources