The Plan Supply panel will initially show a incomplete icon until it is configured. Once you have entered a valid stock holding strategy, you'll see a green check icon: 

Let's explore the configuration options available:

Choose a strategy

You can choose either a Stock Days (default) strategy, or a manual strategy. 

Stock Days (default) strategy:

The Stock Days strategy requires you to enter a Min Days of Stock, Max Days of Stock and Lead Days. 

AIM will calculate the future stock on hand by incorporating existing transactions and forecast demand to calculate necessary upcoming replenishments. For every day of your forecast, AIM will calculate the amount of demand forecast on the following days set in your strategy with the predicted stock available on that day.

If AIM calculates that you wont have enough stock to cover the strategy days-of-stock, it will size a replenishment based on the amount of demand that it requires for the following Max days. This system therefore calculates a dynamic, smart replenishment through the life of a product.

If your Min Days of Stock is less than your Lead Days, you are effectively asking the system to order stock too late to avoid a stock out. The system will use your Lead Days as your Min Days of Stock in this case. 

Manual strategy:

The Manual strategy replaces the Min Days and Max Days of stock, which are used to dynamically size replenishments, with a set Min Stock Quantity and Max Stock Quantity which will set a more static replenishment size.

The manually set min and max stock limits will operate in a similar way to AIM Modelling. 

Lead Days: 

AIM helps you set a lead time for supplier deliveries to ensure the replenishment is created with enough time for the product to arrive before a stock out. Click calculate from history to populate the lead days based on the average lead time of orders within the forecast history.

NOTE: If you enable Production Planning, the Lead Days setting is not used and will disappear from the panel. Production plans will use the Bill of Material duration settings to calculate the lead time of assemblies. 

Fix Replenishment Dates

This option gives you some control as to when the forecast will calculate when a replenishment is to be created. Let's compare the options:

Min Stock (default):

Replenishing when the forecast stock-on-hand is less than the forecast demand over the following days equal to the Min Days of Stock setting (or the Min Stock Qty if using the Manual strategy). 

In simple terms, the forecast will generate a replenishment when it happens to reach low stock. Keep in mind that this could be a weekend or public holiday. This is usually acceptable because you can take this replenishment and create an open transaction around the suggested time, and AIM will recalculate with this taken into account. 

Set Interval:

The 'Set Interval' option gives you the controls to regularly top up your stock on hand without hitting a minimum stock level. You can set the replenishment intervals to match a supplier agreement or delivery schedule that you tend to keep. For example, you may wish to manufacture a product once every 3 months.

You can also set the Start Date, so you can configure a 7 day replenishment interval starting on next Monday and repeating weekly. 

Additional settings

We have additional controls to configure a Minimum Order Quantity for your replenishments. Configure an increment size to control the step up in quantity above the minimum. 

Using the minimum of 100 and an increment of 10, the replenishments will be rounded to 100, 110, 120, etc. 

Configuring a minimum order quantity will override the strategy replenishment settings if necessary, but allows you to comply with some real-world limitations, such as a manufacturing minimum or supplier agreement.