Firm And Planned

Summary 

The Firm And Planned screen shows your replenishment forecast in various formats.  The primary use for this screen is to be able to create exports to send to your vendors so that you can give them your forecast of what you believe you will be purchasing from them over the next 6-12 months. This article walks through the grid view and pivot view in the Firm and Planned screen. 

Grid view

The screen will open with the grid.  Many columns are available.  In addition to the relatively self-explanatory ones like Item, Site etc, there are a few bands of data.

One common approach is to filter by a particular supplier name or supplier code, and then group-by the Item number, and then sort by date, so that you have a supplier, by item, by date of the projected purchases for each item over the coming weeks or months.

Quantities - The values under the Quantities grouping represent your order quantities (in Stocking UoM), for firm, planned, and total. 

IMPORTANT: These are presented in terms of your stocking unit of measure NOT your purchase unit of measure ( see below).

Purchase Quantities - These are the same as your quantities showing above, but represented in terms of your purchasing UoM for the supplier.  That way, no conversion is required if you plan on sending the expected purchase quantities to your supplier.

Dollars - The values under the "Dollars" grouping represent the value associated with those order amounts

Cubes - And, finally, the values under the "Cubes" grouping represent the cubic volume of each order.  Note that this requires there to be valid Cube information for the item in the Item data feed.

Pivot view

The second tab shows the same information laid out in a pivot grid for enabling dynamic summation.  Use the field chooser icon to add/remove the fields you wish to see.  Click the arrows next to each value to expand or collapse a particular grouping:

Planned Qty is your StockIQ planned quantity in stocking UoM.

Planned Purchase Qty is your planned quantity in your purchasing UOM.

Often they are the same, which means the stocking and purchasing UOM’s are the same.

Display Options

By Default, the Firm and Planned report is shown with items grouped monthly by the order date, and this is the date shown under the "Period Date" column.

Click the "Display" button to view the display options, where you can change the interval to weekly data, and can select which date by which you want the data grouped/displayed.

• Display Interval - Allows you to show your data grouped by month or by week.
• By Date - Allows you to choose which date is used for grouping the data.
  • Order Date - Supply is grouped by the order date.  You can see this as the "Order Creation Date" on any firm open orders, or the value in the "Suggested Release" of the order schedule for planned orders.  This is useful for giving a supplier a sense of when they will see the orders you will (or have already) place upon them, e.g. your forecast to them.

• • Ship Date - Supply is grouped by the ship date in the ExpectedShipDate brought in to StockIQ. 
    • IMPORTANT: Make sure you have valid ship dates and shipping lead times in your system before using this option
  • Receipt Date - Supply will be grouped by the PlannedReceiptDate on your orders
• Show Load Balanced Plan - If you are using supplier load balancing, this will show the supplier load balanced plan instead of the "Raw" pre-balanced plan.  When enabled, this will act similarly to the Place Orders screen, in that your primary supplier AND non-primary suppliers involved in load balancing will be shown, so that you have your complete firm-and-plan for any given product involved in load balancing.