Planning Overview

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Overview

ProDex Planning is an Advanced Planning optimizer. Give it demand, on-hand inventory, BOMs, and per-interval resource capacity, and it computes the production plan that best fits over a horizon you configure in days, weeks, or months. It balances two competing objectives: hitting demand on time (lateness loss) and hitting inventory targets (inventory loss). The Solver behavior you pick on the planning model sets that balance. Resource capacity is treated differently: it is a hard constraint, never traded off. If the plan doesn’t fit inside the capacity you give it, the run reports infeasible rather than “close enough” — and tells you which constraint pinched. That is deliberate. A plan that quietly over-commits a bottleneck is worse than a plan that refuses to lie.

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Planning Model vs. Scenario

Two concepts do most of the work:

• A planning model is the reusable setup: horizon length and interval size, the resources production consumes, the BOMs the optimizer is allowed to see, the order and inventory tags it will honor, and the solver behavior. You author it once and reuse it across many plans.
• A scenario is one run of the optimizer against that model, with a specific start date and its own inputs attached — the demand book, arriving raws, today’s shelf stock, inventory targets, and per-interval capacity. You create one with New scenario and solve it with Run optimizer. Every scenario is persistent and re-openable, so you can always look back at what a plan produced and why. Planning Runs covers them in detail.

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What a Scenario Takes In

Every scenario carries five categories of input, covered in Demand and Supply: These inputs belong to the scenario.

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What a Scenario Gives Back

A solved scenario returns a production plan (what to produce, in what quantity, in which interval, on which production route) and a fulfillment date for each demand order it fills. The results view sorts orders into On time, Late, and Unfulfilled, and summarizes the plan with Fulfillment health and Inventory adherence. For the solver’s own figures — objective value, optimality gap, solve time — ask Dexter. Planning Runs covers validation and execution; Planning Results covers reading the output.

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Planning, Simulation, and Scheduling

Planning decides interval-level production quantities. Simulation pressure-tests whether those quantities can actually be executed on the floor under real timing, shift patterns, downtime, and variability. Planning gives you the number to commit to; simulation tells you whether the floor can hit it. Between the two sits job-level scheduling — placing specific jobs on specific machines in time. The Gantt workspace does this as an editable timeline you or Dexter build. What ProDex doesn’t have is an optimizing, changeover-aware sequencer: a plan from the optimizer doesn’t become Gantt jobs on its own, and the Gantt doesn’t sequence jobs for you.

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How You Drive Planning

You author models and scenarios in the planning UI or by asking Dexter. In chat, the pattern is direct: “Build a weekly model with these resources and these BOMs,” or “Create a scenario starting next Monday, load demand from the June order book, use yesterday’s on-hand from the ERP export, cap the packaging line at 80 hours per week.”