Requirements Planning Overview

Managing inventory is like balancing a seesaw—too little inventory and you’re unable to fill orders in a timely manner, which could lead to customer dissatisfaction. Too much inventory and items sit on shelves, adding to your costs. You’d be able to solve these inventory problems, if only you could see them coming.

The Requirements Planning (RP) application for Traverse helps you balance future supply with demand so that you can solve inventory problems before they happen. Requirements Planning helps you plan accurately so that you can anticipate surplus or shortage, determine purchase or production requirements, manage inventory to retain less product on the shelves, increase customer satisfaction via better service, and institute cost-effective buying plans.

Requirements Planning works with the Traverse Inventory, Sales Order, MFG-Production, Project Costing, Bill of Material/Kitting, and Purchase Order applications. Requirements Planning uses the sales information and history entered in Sales Order to forecast demand for inventory items. RP then contrasts that sales information with the purchase and work order information from Purchase Order, MFG-Production, and Bill of Materials/Kitting, as well as the current inventory status information from Inventory to determine whether you’re purchasing or assembling enough of the appropriate items to meet forecasted demand and identify surplus or shortage. If Requirements Planning determines that you could fall short, you can automatically generate purchase transactions (purchase orders, purchase requisitions, order requests) and work orders to balance supply with demand.

Like all Traverse applications, RP contains a number of report and inquiry functions to help you view and analyze your data and make the best business decisions. These reports and inquiry functions work the way you do: two RP report formats allow you to view information as you prefer, planning reports let you verify purchase and work orders before you place them, and inquiry functions give you an instant, on-demand picture that you can drill through for more detail.

Application Interaction

RP requires the Traverse Inventory application, and optionally interfaces with the Purchase Order, Sales Order, Project Costing, MFG Production, Bills of Material/Kitting, Service Director, and WM Transfer. You get the best use (and most accurate forecasting) when you interface RP with all available applications. When you interface RP with any of these applications, RP can access the demand and supply information in those applications to accurately forecast inventory needs. In addition, RP can automatically enter purchase transactions (purchase orders, purchase requisitions, order requests) and work orders into Purchase Order and MFG Production or Bills of Material/Kitting when inventory shortages are identified. Alternately, you can use RP’s planning reports to manually enter purchase transactions and work orders.

Workflow

The RP application gives you the tools you need to manage inventory problems and balance supply with demand. To get maximum benefit from the application, there are tasks you must perform on a regular basis as part of your workflow. The processes you use as you work with RP include RP processing and requirements analysis.

These processes, and the functions or procedures they include, as described, are meant to give you an idea of how RP works with other applications and what you may need to keep in mind as you work.

RP Processing

You can think of RP as primarily a reporting application: first you gather the inventory, sales, purchase and manufacturing information you need to make accurate forecasts, then you use that information to generate reports that help you identify potential problem areas. Based on the report information, you can then generate purchase requisitions and work orders to address and correct deficiencies.

Follow these steps to generate data and produce the reports you need to determine distribution requirements after you’ve set up the system:

  1. Use the Generate RP Data function to gather inventory, sales, purchase and manufacturing information.
  2. Produce the Standard RP Report and Daily Detail RP Report to identify surplus and shortages not easily seen in other reports, summarized either by periods or by day. The two formats allow you to use whichever you prefer to view the data.
  3. Produce the Component Pegging Report to audit the RP reports to better understand their numbers and how the information was calculated.
  4. Generate purchase transactions and production orders/work orders using the Requirements Planner to ensure you have an appropriate number of inventory items to meet forecasted demand.

For more control, you can also use the planning reports as a base from which to manually create purchase requisitions and work orders in Purchase Order and MFG Production or Bill of Materials/Kitting.

Requirements Analysis

RP includes several interactive view functions and lists to provide you with the information you need to analyze your business practices. To make the most of your processes, use the functions described below.

Blanket Orders

Use the functions in the Blanket Orders menu to contract large orders to be shipped over a period of time. You can create Blanket Orders, release them to the Sales Order application, and produce various reports related to your Blanket Orders.

Use the following functions to enter and release blanket orders and print reports to tell you what the status of the blanket orders are.

If you have additional questions, see the Requirements Planning Common Questions page.

Interactive Views Functions

Use the functions on the Interactive Views menu to quickly get access to information without printing a report. Interactive View functions contain much the same information as reports, but in an interactive format that you can sort and drill down through to view more detail.

  • The Planning View function provides you with information similar to the RP reports, but in a more concise format, displaying only one item at a time. A graphical view of the view information is also available, and drill-down options are available to help you view more detailed information.
  • The Item Activity View function displays all current activities for an item filtered by source and date.
  • The Component Pegging View function shows you where demand for inventory items originates. Additionally, the report lists all sales orders, sales forecasts, production orders, purchase orders and purchase requisitions.
  • The Daily Availability View function provides an item’s availability information on a day-to-day basis, similar to that in the Daily Detail RP Report.
  • The Forecast Detail View function shows you details for forecast IDs.
  • Use the Supply Demand View function to view generated RP data.

Master Lists

Master lists contain the basic master information you entered in the Setup and Maintenance functions to set up the system. Master lists do not contain any calculated data, transaction information, or history. Produce these lists after setting up or changing basic information in the system to verify that your master information is correct and as part of your audit trail.

Periodic Maintenance

Use the Periodic Maintenance function on the Periodic Processing menu to delete existing RP, sales forecast, and master schedule information as necessary. Generally, the system removes old data when you generate new information, but you may want to perform periodic maintenance to delete old data you don’t want others to access or to create more space, if needed.

Because this function permanently deletes data from your system, use it with caution.