When we run the MPS engine, most of the times we have only sales orders in our system or in general we consder only them in the calculation but, as you probably know, Business Central consider also other types of requirements, like Blanket Sales Orders and Demand Forecast (pay attention to the Sales Return Orders, that are considered as a Scheduled Receipt!).
In this post I would like to show what the system suggests when we have these types of requirements.
Blanket orders
Blanket orders are a sort of contract with a customer which establishes which item(s) will be sold, how much and when, like below.
In this case, as you can see, the customer is asking us the same item in the same quantity but in seven different weeks.
If we run the MPS by setting Lot-for-lot as Reordering Policy with a Lot Accumulation Period of 1W, we can see this result
Briefly, we cannot see any difference between this result and that one obtained with sales orders but if we run the Order Tracking functionality we can see this message
So the main difference between sales orders and blanket sales orders seems to be the way the MPS tracks them in the calculations: quantities in blanket sales orders are considered as Untracked Quantity.
But this is just the appearance.
Demand forecast
Suppose now to insert the same quantities and dates but as Demand Forecast
As before, when we run the MPS we see the same identical result in the Planning Worksheet and in the Order Tracking
To understand the difference we can run the MPS by considering Blanket Sales Orders and Demand Forecast at the same time. In this case, the demand is doubled.
Inspecting the differences
As you probably know the Demand Forecast in the MPS calculation is nectified by the Sales Orders. In other terms, the MPS suggests to produce in each period the maximum value between the sales orders and the demand forecast
so that for example, if we have 20 in sales orders and 25 in demand forecast, the system suggests 25. This means that the two quantities are not summed, as happens with blanket orders.
What happens when we create an order from a blanket sales order? Well, this order does not nectify the forecast, but it simply changes the Order Tracking
This is due to the fact that it comes from a previous blanket order.
Conclusions
Finally the most important difference between Demand Forecast and Blanket Sales Order is that the MPS nectifies the first with the Sales Orders, but not the second one, that is summed with the demand quantity
