Every production plan starts from a demand number. In most plants, nobody has written down which orders are allowed into it. We think that unwritten rule causes more planning arguments than any capacity limit.
Walk into the planning meeting at a bakery plant and listen for the arguments. Sales says the plan ignored a big order. The planner says that order was never confirmed. Procurement says it bought flour for a plan that changed the next day. Under almost all of these arguments sits one question nobody has answered on paper: which orders count?
An order book is not one thing. At any moment it holds orders at different stages and from different channels. Consider a plant making bread, cakes and cookies:
| Order | Stage | Should it drive tomorrow’s bake? |
|---|---|---|
| Daily bread for regular outlets | Confirmed and repeating | Almost certainly |
| Sponge cake for a distributor, approved yesterday | Approved, not yet invoiced | Probably |
| Festival cookie packs quoted to a modern-trade buyer | Quoted, awaiting confirmation | It depends who you ask |
| Bulk rusk deal discussed on a call | Verbal, no paperwork | Usually not, but sales may disagree |
Each row is a judgement. In many plants, those judgements are made by the planner, quietly, inside a workbook, and differently depending on the week. That is not the planner’s fault. Nobody gave them a rule.
When the definition of firm demand lives in one person’s head, three things follow.
The last one is worth dwelling on. A daily variance report is only useful if everyone agrees the plan was a fair target. The plan vs actual guide covers how to read that gap; the rule about firm demand decides whether the gap is worth reading at all.
We would suggest the plant head, sales head and planner agree on a short written rule, and review it each quarter. It needs to answer only a few things:
Then the rule should be a setting the planning system reads, not a habit the planner remembers. In the production planner, open orders and bulk deals are read live from the plant portal, and which stages and channels count as firm demand are switches the plant sets, not code. The suggested plan then fills each line by priority from that demand, and pull-ahead uses whatever hours are left. If the rule changes, you flip a switch and the plan, the raw material need, the packaging plan and the buy list all move with it.
A rule does not remove judgement. A festival order that is not yet confirmed may still deserve a slot because the buyer always confirms late. That is fine, as long as the exception is visible. In the planner, planners can override any cell in the daily plan, and the audit log records who made the override and when. The exception stays a decision someone owns, rather than a number nobody can trace.
Take last month’s plan and list every order that drove it. Mark each one by stage and channel. If the team cannot agree why some were in and others were out, you have found the first thing to fix, and it is not a formula. Our capacity planning guide picks up from there, and the rest are in the production planning guides.
The set of orders a plant agrees should drive the production plan, usually defined by order stage and sales channel. It is a policy the plant sets, not something a formula can decide.
Without a written rule, plans cannot be explained, buying runs on an inconsistent number, and plan versus actual gaps point at the order book instead of the line.
It reads open orders and bulk deals live from the plant portal, and which stages and channels count as firm are switches the plant sets. Overrides are recorded in an audit log.
See it on your own data. Production & Procurement — Plan the line, buy on time. Book a 30-minute working session with an engineer.
