Planned, firm and released
Every suggestion a planning run produces is a planned order, and it sits in one of three states. Knowing which one you're looking at tells you who owns the numbers on it, whether the next run can change them, and whether you can still back out.
| State | Who owns the numbers | Survives the next run | Reversible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Planned | The engine | No — recalculated from scratch | Nothing to reverse |
| Firm | You | Yes | Yes — unfirm it |
| Released | The real order it became | It's no longer a suggestion | No |
Planned
The default. The engine proposed it, and the engine owns it entirely.
A planned order is not a record of a decision — it's the current answer to a question. Run the plan again and every planned order is thrown away and recomputed. If demand moved, the quantity moves. If nothing changed, an equivalent order reappears, but it isn't the same one: it carries a new identity.
That has a practical consequence worth knowing before it surprises you. A selection of planned orders you made before a re-run refers to orders that no longer exist. Acting on a stale selection reports that those orders are gone, and asks you to reload the plan. That's the plan telling you it moved on, not an error.
Firm
Firming takes ownership away from the engine and gives it to you.
A firm order survives the next run untouched. It also counts as supply in later runs — the plan treats it as something genuinely coming, so a second run doesn't plan the same shortage all over again.
You can go further and pin a quantity, a due date, or both. A pin says this number, regardless of what the engine now thinks. Later runs and Carry Out both read the pinned value in place of the engine's own, so a pin is the thing that ends up on the real purchase or manufacturing order.
Use firming when you've made a decision the engine doesn't know about — you've agreed a quantity with a supplier, or you're deliberately building early to cover a shutdown. Leave everything else planned so the engine can keep doing its job.
Firming is fully reversible: unfirm the order and it goes back to being the engine's, pin and all. Because a pin describes one specific order, you can only set one while a single order is selected — firming a whole filtered set stamps no pin.
See Firm and pin a planned order.
Released
Releasing — Carry Out on screen — is the moment the plan stops being a plan.
Depending on how the item is supplied, a released order becomes a purchase order to the supplier, a manufacturing order to build it, or a warehouse transfer to move it. From that point the real document owns the numbers, and the planned order becomes the record of where that document came from.
This cannot be undone, and the reasons are worth stating plainly:
- The document it created is real. A purchase order may already be with a supplier.
- The released planned order is the only thing linking the plan to the order it produced. Discarding it would erase the audit trail — which is why a released order can't be dismissed, and why re-running the plan leaves it alone.
If a carried-out order was a mistake, cancel the document it created rather than looking for a way to reverse the release.
When Carry Out skips something
Carrying out a selection reports how many were released and, separately, how many were skipped and why. The plan can propose an order it doesn't have enough information to turn into a real document:
| Skipped because | What to fix |
|---|---|
| The demand warehouse can't receive supply | Enable receiving on the warehouse, or plan the demand somewhere that can |
| No supplier on the buy order | Set a supplier on the item, or on the planned order itself |
| No recipe on the make order | Give the item an active recipe — see Create a recipe (BOM) |
| No source warehouse on the transfer | Add a transfer lane — see Plan replenishment across warehouses |
Nothing is created for a skipped order, and it stays in the plan for you to fix and carry out again.
Accepting is not a state
Accept is a separate mark you can put on a planned order in any state, and it changes nothing about how the order behaves. It's a note to yourself and to whoever else works the plan: I've looked at this one and I agree with it.
Use it to work a large plan in passes — triage everything first, then carry out what you accepted. Dismiss, by contrast, removes a suggestion from the plan altogether, and is the right answer for an order you don't want. A released order can't be dismissed.