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You planned to manufacture 100 shirts and saved the Production Order, and the system told you it is not ready for release: four of your six components do not have enough stock. So you need to know exactly what to buy, in what quantity, from which supplier, and by what date, for each component separately, and after deducting what is in your warehouse and what you have already ordered from your suppliers.

That is what Procurement planning gathers for you on one screen. It calculates the order's requirement for each component, deducts your warehouse balance and whatever you are expecting on open purchase orders, suggests what remains to be bought along with its supplier, price, and order-by date, and then converts what you approve into draft purchase orders ready for review and sending.

This guide covers the full cycle: how the Production Order alerts you, how to read what you need to buy, and how to create purchase orders from it and receive your components so you can release the order.

For more on Production Orders, see How to Create and Execute a Production Order.

Where planning starts

The Production Order alerts you when your stock is not enough. As soon as you select the item, quantity, and warehouse — and before saving the order — the system checks the component balances in the warehouse you selected, and displays a notice above the material requirements table if the component quantities are not enough to manufacture the required quantity of the assembly item.

The notice does not just tell you how many components are short; it distinguishes between shortages that are ready to order, because the component has a supplier and a price, and shortages that are missing a supplier or price and cannot be ordered until you set them up.

To review your purchase requirements and create purchase orders for what needs buying, click "Save and review purchases".

The procurement planning screen

The screen shows one row per component in the item's Bill of Materials, split into two tables. The upper table holds the components you need to buy.

and the lower one, titled No purchase needed, holds what is already covered by your stock or by open purchase orders.

Note: If every component in your order falls short — as in this example — the lower table is empty, and all your rows sit in the upper one.

What you need to buy, and how the system arrived at it

Each row in the upper table is a component whose balance is not enough to execute the order, together with the quantity you need to buy for it to be complete.

The system arrives at that quantity in three steps: it starts from the standard quantity — what the order requires of the component per the Bill of Materials, multiplied by the planned quantity — then deducts what is in stock in the order's warehouse, then deducts whatever is on purchase orders sent to your suppliers, and what remains is the shortage, which is what you need to buy.

Example: The thread required 2,000 meters — ten meters per shirt across two hundred shirts — and your balance was 1,150 meters with no open purchase orders on it, so its shortage came to 850 meters.

Note: The standard quantity is calculated with the yield percentage if one is set for the component, so it rises to make up for the loss. The cotton fabric, for instance, required 333.33 meters rather than 300, because its yield is 90%. If you see a quantity larger than what you calculated, check the yield percentage in the Bill of Materials.

Note: The order-by date is the last day you can order the component for it to reach you before production starts, and the system calculates it from the order's start date and the component's lead time.

You enter the lead time yourself on the component's item card, in the Supplier purchase prices section, on each supplier's price row. If you leave it empty — as in this example — the system shows the order-by date as the same as the order's start date on every row.

A special case: a component that needs setup before ordering

The system calculates your requirement for every component, but it cannot suggest buying one if you have not given it a supplier, a currency, and a price. So it prevents you from selecting the row until its details are complete, and shows a red exclamation mark beside the row to alert you that these need adding before you can create purchase orders.

Hover over the exclamation mark and the system tells you exactly what the row is missing.

To fix it, click the "Add Price" or "Add Supplier" from the Unit cost column

Choose the supplier and enter the price and all needed details, Then click "Save".

You return to the procurement planning screen: the exclamation mark disappears from the row, the supplier name, unit cost, and order-by date appear, and its checkbox becomes selectable.

Note: The standard cost shown in the material requirements table on the order is not the same figure. That one comes from the Bill of Materials and is used to measure variances; what procurement planning needs is the purchase cost on the item card. A component can therefore have a standard cost and still be missing a price for ordering.

Select what to buy and create the purchase orders

Once your rows are complete, tick the components you want to buy using the checkbox at the start of each row — or the checkbox in the table header to select them all — then click "Review and create purchase orders", which shows the number you selected in brackets.

You move to the Review purchase orders screen. Here you can adjust what the system suggested for each row — the purchase quantity, the supplier, the currency, and the unit cost — before any of it becomes a document. The summary at the top tells you how many components you selected and how many purchase orders will be created from them.

And the table below shows how the system will split them: one row per supplier, with the number of its components and its total amount. Components from the same supplier are grouped into a single purchase order rather than one order per component.

Once you have reviewed and adjusted them, click "Create draft purchase orders".

A green success message appears counting the purchase orders created, along with the order numbers and their supplier names as links that open each order directly.

What was created are drafts, not final purchase orders — meaning nothing has reached your suppliers and nothing has entered your warehouse. So two steps remain ahead of you:

Send each order to its supplier
Then receive the components with a purchase invoice

After clicking a purchase order link, you can send the order to the supplier by clicking Send, or click To invoice to convert it into an actual purchase invoice without going through the step of sending the order to the supplier, if that is what you want.

Enter the rest of the purchase invoice details, then click "Authorize".

Back on the Production Order after Authorize all bills for the material needed, you will find all the material requirements available, and you can release it by clicking "Release".