7.11. Inventory Planning Tab

The goal of the Inventory planning tab is to generate an ordering plan for locations that are not replenished from DCs. Ordering plan for DCs is on the Distribution center tab.

Depending on the Streamline configuration, an ordering plan may include any combination of the following:

• a transfer plan showing replenishments from DCs;
• a material requirements plan and a production plan;
• a purchase plan indicating items that should be ordered from suppliers.

A planning item in an ordering plan belongs to one of the four mentioned plans. Besides the ordering plan, this tab provides a range of other important outcomes, including expected overstock and stockout amounts.

Inventory planning tab contains a set of tabs or reports, a toolbar, and a table under each tab (see figure below).

By default, the tab area includes only one report All items and the New filter button that opens the Filter dialog. In this dialog, you can specify the filtering criteria for the new custom report. As soon as you configure the filter, Streamline creates a new report based on it and adds it to the set of tabs as a newly created tab.

The All items report, as well as any other custom report, is customizable. The table below shows the customizations and the scope they are applied to.

Also, you can export any report to an Excel file.

As you see, reports in this tab are interactive, since allowing manual change of the parameters, and are recalculated after the change. There are several ways to change replenishment parameters. The easiest one is modifying them right in the report by editing the columns having a yellow background.

• Search toolbar is used to search for a particular phrase in the Item code and Description columns of the currently active report. The search is not case-sensitive and searches for the substring in a string. To start the search or find the next occurrence, press Enter, or F3, or click on the search icon.

• Settings button opens the Inventory planning settings which are applied to all of the reports of this tab.

• Edit filter button opens the filter dialog for the currently selected report where you can edit filtering criteria.

• In transition details button opens the In transition details dialog.

• Export table button command exports the currently active report to an Excel file. Next to the button is a little black triangle that shows you additional exporting options:

• Export parameters button exports the replenishment parameters into the on-the-fly created Excel file where they can be edited.

• Import parameters button loads the Excel file created using the Export parameters button. You can optionally choose any other Excel file to load. To do this:

• Planned orders button opens the Planned orders preview dialog.

• Overall purchase value shows the total value of the current order in the supplier's currency. In other words, it is the sum of the Current order, Value column.

Each report in the Inventory planning tab contains a table. Columns of these tables are the same for each of them. Table columns can be divided into the following categories:

• Inventory information – descriptive information about the planning item.
• Replenishment parameters – the inputs of the inventory replenishment process. Some of them are constraints used in the optimization.
• Outcomes – an ordering plan and other inventory characteristics that are calculated based on the forecasts and replenishment parameters.

There is an ability to sort each report by a particular table column or even a set of columns in both directions. To sort by a single column, click at its header (see figure below). To reverse the sort, click the column header again.

Sorting is stable. It means that it keeps the order of records original for the records with equal values in the sorted column. This feature allows sorting by an ordered set of given columns.

Consider an example shown in the figure below.

Let's sort this table by the following three columns in the order – Category 2, Category 3, and Description. And, for instance, sort them in ascending order. To do this, we should start clicking column headers in the backward direction, since the result of the currently sorted column has a higher priority over the previous sorted columns. So, let's start with the Description column (see figure below).

Then, by the Category 3 (see figure below).

And finally, by the Category 2 (see figure below).

If you accidentally click on the header of a wrong column, repeat the right sequence all over again.

Additional capabilities of the table

Clicking on the Item code of the item moves you to the Demand tab and sets the cursor on a tree of a proper item code. Clicking on the Item type of the item, Streamline opens a Material/Product tree dialog for this item code.

Also, in order to quickly hide columns, right-click on the name of the column and select the hide column option in the drop-down menu.

The table below describes all of the columns.

Constraints Min lot, Max lot, and Rounding can't be given for manufacturing items. Streamline shows dashes in these columns for them. Empty cells or zero values in the Min lot, Max lot, and Rounding columns mean that no constraints are applied in the optimization.

The table below shows how Streamline determines the expected Delivery date for an order line depending on the Order type.

Where Today date is the current local date set in your operating system.

The table in the All items report has a color-coding helping you recognize red-flag items. To describe the color-coding, let's introduce the following notation:

• D(LT) – expected demand for the Lead time.
• D(LT+OC) – expected demand for the Lead time plus Order cycle period.
• ToReceive(LT+OC) – the total item quantity to be received during the Lead time plus Order cycle period.
• ToShip(LT+OC) – the total item quantity to be shipped during the Lead time plus Order cycle period.

Below we describe the meaning of colors used in the colored columns or sections of the table.

Next: Filter Dialog

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