Make Planning
Master the art of vintage make planning with Claret's comprehensive guide. Learn how to manage sales data, inventory, and ideal release dates for a seamless planning experience.
Managing vintage supply and demand is hard. It’s a problem many other industries don’t face. Claret has a whole module designed to help you plan how much to make of a certain vintage, or how much you’ll need to make to meet your ideal releases across your vintages. This module is called 'Make Planning'.
The Make Planning module is designed to bring together, into one place, your
Historical Sales Data for existing and previous vintages
Forecast Sales Data, mapped to vintage release dates
Inventory (Finished Good and Work in Progress)
And then to use this information to suggest an Ideal Vintage Make to meet your ideal release dates.
We know the ideal make isn't always possible though, so you can also manage your Planned Vintage Make and see how this impacts ideal release dates.
Viewing the Make Plan
To access the Make Planning module, go to the Make module and select 'Make Planning'
The main 'Make Planning' page is where the magic happens.
Select the Parent WIP Item (work in progress item) you would like to work with from the 'Parent WIP' selector. You can select one, or many, WIPs to display at a time.
The Make Planning Grid and Chart will then display.
There are Grid and Chart views that you can use to see and visualise the plans and timelines. Use the Grid and Chart toggles to turn each one on and off.
The data used in each section (and used to build the chart) will depend on your view configuration. To set this up, select the view menu in the top right of your screen
The view configuration screen then lets you set the data to use in the view.
Options are required for:
Hierarchy Type - The WIP item hierarchy you wish to work with
Supply Type - The supply plan used to read from and update the planned supply
UOM - The Unit of Measure the data will be displayed in
Sale Type to use for Sales Forecast - The sales type from which data will be pulled to calculate sales forecast for the child WIP
Sale Type to use for Sales History - The sales type from which data will be pulled to calculate sales history for the child WIP
The Make Planning Grid
We'll start with looking at the Make Planning grid. The grid displays the summary data for each Child WIP and the overall Make Plan (and is used to build the corresponding Gantt chart).
The relationship between Parent and Child WIPs are set on the Items page within the WIP-Aged Hierarchy types
Child Item Master Data
The first set of columns relate to settings on the child WIP item.
Vintage - This is a setting on the item and indicates which Vintage the Child WIP belongs to
Age Start Date - This is also a setting on the item and indicates the start date for ageing the item
Age - This is the sum of the routing steps set in the routing against the item. A Child item will have a default routing set against it, and the age is calculated by looking at total time for each step in the ageing process.
For example ZAMNVCAS15 is vintage 2015, and will start aging on 1 Jan 2016. The routing set against ZAMNVCAS15 in the item settings is 'High grade Cabernet Sauv'. This routing is set as 3 months barrel age and 3 months bottle age to give a total age of 6 months. So the ideal release date of ZAMNVCAS15 will be 6 months after the age start of 1 Jan 2016 - being 1 Jul 2016. This can be seen in the Ideal Release Date column further along in the gird. (See below)
To update vintage and routing details, go to the. WIP Aged Hierarchy type on the Items page and edit the items you wish to change.
Sales
Sales data used to determine the Make figures can be seen in the 'Sales columns.
Sales - History - Sales History for a Child WIP is determined by looking at all the items which include the WIP in their recipe. For example - if finished good item 123SVC15 contains ZAMNVCAS15 as part of it's recipe, then sales of 123SVC15 will be included in the Sales History for ZAMNVCAS15.
Sales - Forecast - As sales forecasting is generally done at the non-vintage level, any forecast Sales for the Parent WIP are apportioned across vintages based on the forecast ‘sell-date’. A forecast sale will be dynamically attributed to a vintage child WIP item if it is between the Ideal Release Date of the WIP item, and the Ideal Release date of the next WIP item.
Details of the historical and forecast sales making up the total against each WIP can be seen by clicking on the 'Total' value (highlighted in blue).
This shows, by month, the total sales (history and/or forecast) for each child WIP.
Inventory
Both 'Work in Progress' (WIP) inventory and Finished Goods inventory is taken into consideration in Make Planning.
Work in Progress figures are determined by adding together all the inventory of the child WIP (at all locations) with a status of 'active-WIP'
Finished Goods inventory is included for all finished goods items (at all locations) that contain the child WIP in their recipe.
To see a breakdown of Inventory visit the 'Inventory' page
Supply Plan
This is where the magic happens.
We can use the sales and inventory data both for this vintage, and previous vintages, to recommend an ideal make figure for each vintage.
This is the volume that will allow you to meet forecast demand, and run the vintage down perfectly to the ideal release of the next vintage. This is the number which, in a perfectly planned world, would see us meet the last month of demand exactly, and then release the next vintage exactly when planned (with no inventory remaining of the previous vintage).
This may not be how much the winemakers actually plan to make though, so let's start by looking at the 'Planned' supply plan/make.
This figure is read from the Supply Plan selected in the view configuration (see Viewing the Make Plan ) and is the total of all planned make for that child WIP. You can update this here in the Make Planning screen, and this will then update back into the Supply Plan.
This 'Planned' make figure then drives the next set of information.
Overall Position
All of our inputs now allow us to determine what will happen to the release dates if the 'Supply Plan' make figure is produced, rather than the 'Ideal Make'.
Surplus - This is how much under/over supply you will have if you sell all of the 'Planned' make volume as it stands. So, if you plan to make 100,000 gallons, but you already have 10,000 gallons in inventory, then if you sell 100,000 gallons, you will be left with 10,000 gallons surplus.
Packed - This is the volume already packed for sale - and is equal to total finished goods inventory plus any sales history.
To Pack - This is the volume left to pack - and is equal to the Planned supply figure less the 'Packed' amount (ie how much you plan to make less how much you've already packed).
Position - This is a key one. This is the volume you are likely to have remaining, based on current forecast sales, when the next vintage is due to be released.
If the 'Position' is a positive number, you're going to have volume left over at the current planned end of the vintage (and hence will flow into the timeline for the next vintage)
If the Position is a negative number, you're going to run out of this Vintage before the next Vintage is currently planned to be released.
The Release Date' data then shows us the impact on our release dates with our current 'Planned' make.
Ideal - simply the Age Start Date for the child WIP, plus the Age (as set in the routing)
Planned - the date the vintage will be released to meet forecast demand, based on the current planned supply. (And is determined by adding the MPIR value to the Ideal Release Date.
MPIR - the number of months of demand covered by the 'Position'. So if the position is calculated as 2107 gallons, and the forecast demand for the months following the ideal end of the vintage is 1000 gallons per month, then this vintage will go 2.1 months past the ideal release of the next vintage (ie the MPIR value will be 2.1).
Hovering over the 'i' icon on a column header shows further details on how the data in the column is calculated
The Make Planning Gantt Chart
The Make Planning Gantt Chart is a visual representation of the overall position for each Child WIP. It depicts the release end date if the 'Planned' supply figure is produced, and shows if this overlaps, or falls short of, the planned release for the next Child WIP.
Each Child WIP has a Gantt bar which shows its release period as follows:
Start Date - The Ideal Release Date
End Date - The next vintage Ideal Release Date + Months Past Ideal Release of this vintage. ie, how much longer (or shorter if the MPIR is negative) will this vintage spill over into the ideal timing for the next vintage.
The grid and chart columns displayed in the Make Planning View can be configured by hovering over any column header, and then clicking on the three bars that appear to bring up the column selector.
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