Set item planning policies

A planning policy is an item's standing instructions to the engine: how it should be planned, whether it's made or bought, what turns a shortage into an order quantity, how long that order takes to arrive, and how much buffer to protect.

One rule matters more than everything else on this page: an item with no policy is not planned at all. It isn't planned with sensible defaults, and it doesn't appear in the plan as a gap — it's skipped silently. A run that returns far fewer planned orders than you expected is almost always a coverage problem, not an engine problem. That's why policies come first in the planning sequence, before you run anything.

Before you begin

• The products you want planned need to exist in the catalogue.
• You need permission to run planning. Creating, editing and bulk-applying policies all sit behind the same permission as starting a run — see Exports, imports and permissions.
• Decide, for each item, whether you make it or buy it. An item you plan as Make needs an active recipe, or the run raises No Active BOM against it instead of planning a build. See Create a recipe (BOM).

This page teaches the workflow and the model. For what every individual setting does, which lot-sizing rules read it, and what happens when you leave it blank, use Planning policy settings.

Start from the coverage banner

Open Manufacturing → Planning → Policies. If any product is missing a policy, a notice sits above the list telling you how many and why it matters:

5 products in your bills of materials have no planning policy yet. MRP only plans products that have a policy; the rest are skipped, not planned with defaults. 146 products in total have none.

It leads with products that appear in your bills of materials on purpose. Those are the ones a blank plan is actually missing — the components a build consumes and can't buy. Everything else you stock is counted too, but second.

The banner carries Bulk apply to all, which opens the bulk dialog already aimed at every product with no policy, and Add policy for doing one at a time. The banner disappears once every product is covered.

Steps

1. Go to Manufacturing → Planning → Policies and click Add Policy.

2. Choose the Warehouse.

   Leave it on Default — all warehouses for the item's baseline policy, used wherever no override exists. Pick a named warehouse instead to create an override that applies at that location only. Most items need only the default — see Defaults and per-warehouse overrides below.

3. Choose the Product.

   In the default scope the picker offers only products that have no policy yet, because a product that already has one is edited from the list rather than added again. When you've chosen a warehouse, every product is listed — an override sits on top of the default, so the product may well already have one.

4. Set the Planning Method — how supply is planned at all.

   MRP is full demand-driven planning and the usual answer. Reorder Point and Min / Max replenish against a threshold instead. MPS plans the item from a master production schedule rather than from exploded demand. None takes the item out of planning entirely, and the dialog says so: "This product is excluded from MRP planning (Planning Method = None). The parameters below are not used."

5. Set the Procurement Type — where supply comes from.

   Make produces it in-house and needs an active recipe. Buy purchases it from a supplier. Transfer moves it in from another warehouse along a distribution lane. Make or Buy makes it when an active recipe exists and buys it otherwise — that decision is about whether a recipe exists, not about which route is cheaper or faster.

6. Choose the Lot Sizing Rule — what turns a shortage into an order quantity.

   Extra fields appear as you choose, because each rule needs its own numbers. See Which fields appear for which rule.

7. Set Lead Time Source, and Lead Time (days) if you're typing it yourself.

   Lead Time (days) is editable only when Lead Time Source is Manual. The other sources read the recipe, the supplier's quote, or your own receiving history, and each falls back to the typed value when its own source has nothing to offer.

8. Fill in whichever of Safety Stock, Order Minimum, Order Multiple and Order Maximum apply. All four are optional, and all four are applied on top of whatever the lot-sizing rule produced.

9. Click Create Policy.

The product now appears in the Planning Policies list, and the next run plans it.

Defaults and per-warehouse overrides

A policy is scoped either to one warehouse or to all of them, and the run resolves which one to use per item and per location:

1. A policy for that exact warehouse, if one exists.
2. Otherwise the default policy, the one whose warehouse is Default — all warehouses.
3. Otherwise nothing — the item isn't planned at that location.

caution

An override replaces the default completely at its warehouse — the two are not merged field by field. If your default sets a 21-day lead time and a safety stock of 100, and you add a Chicago override to change only the lot-sizing rule, Chicago plans with whatever that override says for lead time and safety stock, not with the default's values. Fill an override in fully.

That's the trade-off worth being deliberate about: an override is the right tool when a location genuinely plans differently — a site that buys what the main warehouse builds, a regional warehouse resupplied by transfer — and the wrong tool for a small tweak, because it silently takes on the whole policy.

A policy's warehouse scope is fixed once it exists. Open an existing policy and the Warehouse field is locked: "A policy's warehouse scope can't be changed after it's created — add a new policy for another warehouse, or edit the one that already covers it."

Which fields appear for which rule

The dialog shows only the fields the choices above actually use, so what you see changes as you go.

Always shown: Planning Method, Procurement Type, Lot Sizing Rule, Lead Time Source, Lead Time (days), Safety Stock, Order Minimum, Order Multiple, Order Maximum.

Added by the Lot Sizing Rule:

Lot Sizing Rule	Extra fields
Lot for Lot	None — it orders exactly the shortfall
Fixed Order Quantity	Fixed Order Quantity
Min / Max	Reorder Point, Reorder Up To Level
Economic Order Quantity	EOQ Ordering Cost, EOQ Holding Cost %
Period Order Quantity	Period Order (days)
Days of Supply	Days of Supply

Added by the Planning Method: Reorder Point and Min / Max both add Reorder Point and Reorder Up To Level, since those methods replenish against a threshold rather than netting demand.

Setting Planning Method to None goes the other way: the notice appears and the rest of the parameters are switched off, because nothing reads them.

The three coherence rules

Some combinations can't be planned, and the policy is refused rather than saved in a state the engine would have to guess its way around. There are exactly three:

Rule	When it applies	What you see
A fixed batch size must be a real number	Lot Sizing Rule is Fixed Order Quantity	"Fixed Order Quantity must be greater than zero when the Lot Sizing Rule is Fixed Order Quantity."
An economic batch needs both costs	Lot Sizing Rule is Economic Order Quantity	"EOQ Ordering Cost and Holding Cost % are both required when the Lot Sizing Rule is Economic Order Quantity."
A threshold method needs its threshold	Planning Method is Min / Max or Reorder Point	"Reorder Point is required when the Planning Method is Min / Max or Reorder Point."

The Economic Order Quantity rule is caught before you can submit: choosing it shows the rule as a notice above the two cost fields, marks either one you leave blank once you've been in it, and leaves Create Policy unavailable with the same sentence on hover. The other two surface when you save.

The same three rules apply to a bulk apply, where all of them are checked up front — hover a greyed-out Apply button and it names which one is unmet.

Editing a policy

Click the pencil in the row's Actions column. The dialog opens as Edit Planning Policy with the item's SKU and name beneath the title, everything as it stands, and the Warehouse field locked. Change what you need and click Save Changes.

A policy change is read by the next run. It doesn't rewrite planned orders that already exist, so after a meaningful change — a new lot-sizing rule, a different lead time — run the plan again to see its effect.

Applying a policy to many products at once

Setting a few hundred components to the same policy one dialog at a time isn't realistic. Bulk Apply Policy in the page header writes the same parameters across a whole set.

1. Click Bulk Apply Policy, or tick rows in the list and use the same button from the selection bar.

2. Choose Products to apply to. Three options, each with a live count:

   • Selected policies — the rows you ticked.
   • All policies matching the current filters — every row the current filters select, not only the page on screen. Filter the list first, then open the dialog. A very large filtered set is refused with the number it matched and a request to narrow the filters.
   • All products with no planning policy — the coverage gap, which creates new policies rather than updating existing ones. This option asks which Warehouse the new policies belong to, because a new policy needs a scope.

   For the first two options every policy keeps the scope it already has: "Each policy is updated in its own warehouse scope — a warehouse override stays an override, and a product default stays the default."

3. Under Attributes to apply, tick only what you want written. "Only ticked attributes are written. Anything left unticked keeps whatever each product already has." Tick all turns everything on at once.

   This is what makes bulk apply usable for a narrow correction: tick Lead Time Source alone and every other setting on every product is left as it was.

   Two attributes can't be untied. Planning Method and Lot Sizing Rule sit on every policy, so they're always part of a bulk apply — their tick boxes are fixed on. A field the chosen rule requires is fixed on for the same reason: pick Economic Order Quantity and both cost fields are written whether you tick them or not. Hovering any fixed tick box says which rule is holding it.

4. Read the preview at the bottom of the dialog. It tells you how many policies will actually change, how many already match and will be left alone, and names a handful of the affected products as chips you can click through to. The Apply button counts only the rows that will really be written, so a set where nothing would change leaves it unavailable with the reason on hover.

5. Click Apply to N products and confirm.

   The confirmation repeats the attribute list you're about to write and warns that it overwrites those attributes on every product in the set and cannot be undone. A progress bar reports how far through the batch it is.

caution

Bulk apply overwrites. A ticked attribute is written to every product in the set, including products where someone deliberately set a different value. Use the preview and the product chips to check the set is the one you meant before confirming.

A setting the dialog doesn't offer

Safety Lead Time (days) — extra days of cushion added on top of the item's lead time — is accepted, stored and planned with, but there is no field for it in the dialog. The only way to set it is the spreadsheet round-trip: export the planning policies, fill the column in, and import the file back. See Import MPS entries and planning policies.

That same round-trip is the fastest route for a first-time setup of any size, since it carries every setting the dialog has as well.

Next steps

• Planning policy settings — every setting, what it does, and which rules read it
• Run a planning cycle — put the policies to work
• How a planning run works — how lot sizing, safety stock and lead time change the numbers you get back
• Import MPS entries and planning policies — load or update policies in bulk from a spreadsheet
• Plan replenishment across warehouses — the lanes an item set to Transfer is resupplied along