Help for BDP SmartFlow Supply & MRP

You most likely arrived here from inside Business Central. This page explains what each surface shows, the handful of words this product adds to Microsoft's own vocabulary, and what every named message means — including the ones that stop you, which are deliberate and say why.

Pre-release

No AppSource listing, no trial, and no build to install. The product compiles, its AL test suite runs on a real Business Central container, and its pages have been opened on a real client. This page is written against the shipped behaviour, not against a plan.

1. Start here: one paragraph

Business Central's planning engine calculates every MPS and MRP suggestion, and this product never touches that arithmetic. What it adds is a picture of the engine's output — a timeline instead of a grid, a graph instead of a column of demand pointers, a board instead of an ungrouped worksheet — and a small set of tools for recording what you decided about what the picture shows. Everything you decide survives the next planning run, which matters more than it sounds: a planning run does not amend last week's suggestions, it deletes them and builds new ones. Anything written onto a suggestion row is gone at the next run, by design, and always has been.

That single fact is why this product keeps its own durable identity for each piece of demand and supply, re-matches those identities after every run, and shows you plainly when a match could not be found rather than quietly dropping it.

2. The four surfaces

All four are views inside one screen, the Cockpit, switched with a tab strip. Every one of them also has a plain native Business Central page doing the identical job with no graphics — those native pages are built first and are never optional, so nothing here is reachable only through a chart.

Triage Board

Every planning suggestion for the scope you are looking at, grouped and filterable, with multi-select. Record a decision on one line or act on many at once. Carrying out runs Microsoft’s own Carry Out, per line, unchanged.

Supply Horizon

Projected inventory for one item, variant and location as a line moving through time, with a marker for every event that moves it. Confirmed supply and demand are drawn separately from suggested — never merged into one reassuring line.

Pegging Explorer

The demand-to-supply chain behind a suggestion, walked live from Business Central’s own tracking records and capped at a bounded depth. When the platform does not retain a chain for an item, the surface says so instead of drawing a shorter one.

Load Builder

Assemble a single-vendor purchase from suggestions and watch, live, how close it is to that vendor’s minimum and to the weight and volume it has to ship in. It shows the numbers; it never chooses lines, packs anything, or recommends rounding a quantity up.

3. The words this product adds

Microsoft's words keep Microsoft's meanings, everywhere and without exception — Requisition Line, Planning Worksheet, Action Message, Accept Action Message, Carry Out, Order Tracking, Reservation, MPS, MRP. These are the only new ones:

Anchor
A durable identity for one piece of demand or one piece of supply, kept in this product’s own tables. It is what survives a planning run deleting and rebuilding the suggestion rows, and it is what every decision below is attached to.
Rebind
The re-matching of Anchors to fresh suggestion rows after any planning run — including a run started by someone else, on a worksheet you never opened, without this product’s screens being open at all.
Orphaned
The visible state of an Anchor a rebind could not match. It is never deleted and never hidden. It stays flagged, is retried on every future run, and can be reviewed or dismissed by hand.
Verdict
Your recorded decision about a suggestion — accept, defer, or dismiss. A dismiss requires a reason, so a decision nobody can explain later is never recorded silently.
Pledge
A recorded intent that specific supply should serve specific demand. It is the missing middle ground between a hard reservation and nothing at all.
Load
A working grouping of suggestions for one vendor, measured against that vendor’s own threshold and against a capacity profile, until you carry it out.
Horizon
The projected-inventory timeline described above.
Ripple
The connected rows an edit touches, named as relationships. It shows each connected row’s last planned values — never a prediction of what your edit will produce.
Run Snapshot
This product’s record of when Calculate Plan last ran, by anyone, on any worksheet. Every surface showing planning-derived data displays that age beside it, because “the data is here” and “the data is current” are two different facts.

4. The sentence repeated on every surface that shows one

A Verdict does not change what the planning engine calculates. A Pledge does not reserve anything. A Load reserves nothing either.

These are this product's records of your decisions. Business Central is never told about any of them and computes its next run exactly as if none existed. If you find yourself planning around a Pledge as though the pledged units were locked, stop — and if you need Business Central to genuinely protect specific supply, place a native Reservation. Every screen that shows a Pledge links straight to one.

The full list of what this product refuses to do →

5. If a message stopped you

Nothing in this product fails or degrades silently: every outcome below is stated in those or close to those words, rather than as a generic failure. Find the one you saw.

Deciding and carrying out

“Your decision stands”
You accepted a line that Business Central’s own automatic check had independently un-ticked — most often an already-released referenced order, a starting date in the past, or a logged warning. Your decision took effect. The message exists to tell you why the engine itself was cautious. Nothing is required.
“…for a reason that did not exist when you decided”
Your standing decision is being replayed onto a fresh suggestion, and the engine now objects for a new reason. Your decision was not withdrawn. It is worth re-reading the suggestion with the new reason in mind.
“37 succeeded, 3 failed”
Native Carry Out runs per line with no batch transaction, so one line’s failure never rolls back another’s success. This product refuses to collapse that into a single pass or fail. Read the named failures individually; the successes are real documents and stand.
A dismiss refused with nothing recorded
A reason is required for dismiss specifically. Give a short one and try again.
A decision still visible though its suggestion seems gone
Its Anchor went Orphaned — this run found no matching suggestion. It is never deleted, and every future run retries the match.

Pledges

“Pledged 40 of 25 available”
More is pledged against this supply than exists. This is never blocked and never auto-corrected: which Pledge should give way is your call, on your priorities.
A supply quantity shown as Unknown
The underlying suggestion cannot currently be resolved — between planning runs, or before a rebind has matched it. Never read this as zero. Wait for the rebind, or re-plan the item if you need an answer now.
A Pledge marked Honoured
The demand it was pledged against is now satisfied. This is an observation, not proof that your specific pledged units are the ones that moved — Business Central was never told to prefer them. For that guarantee, use a native Reservation.
Clearing a Pledge is refused
Only a Pledge that has reached Honoured, Broken or Orphaned can be cleared. Break it first if it is no longer needed, or let it resolve.

Loads

“No target configured”
The Load has no vendor threshold and/or no capacity profile attached, so only the percentage view is affected. The raw totals are still exact and still enough to work from.
“Target no longer available”
A threshold or profile that was attached has since been deleted. This is deliberately worded differently from “never configured”, because they are different situations. Attach a replacement, or keep reading the raw totals.
An over-capacity warning that blocks nothing
The Load exceeds its capacity profile. You may be overloading on purpose, so nothing is prevented. Remove a line to clear it, or proceed.
A known/unknown split instead of one total
At least one member has no weight or volume for the unit of measure it is being purchased in. This product will not estimate that figure by scaling from another unit; populate the item unit of measure if you want a complete total.
Adding a line is refused
The suggestion’s vendor does not match the Load’s. A Load is always single-vendor — start a separate one.
An edit refused on a carried-out Load
A completed Load is a historical record, frozen at the moment of carry out. Start a new one.

Supply Horizon

“Not a stock item”
The item is not inventory-tracked, so there is no projected inventory to draw. Nothing to fix.
The suggested line absent while the confirmed line draws
No planning run has touched this item, or the last one produced nothing for it. That is different from “no shortage”, and this surface never conflates the two. Run Calculate Plan for the item if you want a suggested line.
“This suggestion no longer exists”
A re-run or a carry out changed the data between opening the view and clicking the marker. Refresh — this is a timing fact, not a mistake you made.
A truncation note on a busy period
The period held more events than the surface draws in full. The period’s own total is still correct; only the detail list under it is capped. Use the period drill-through for every line.
“SmartFlow cannot tell which planning worksheet to re-plan this item into”
Re-plan item writes its suggestions into a specific worksheet, and nothing for this item is currently bound to one. Run Calculate Plan once from the planning worksheet you want the item planned into — that creates the binding — then try again.

Pegging and Ripple

“Multi-hop tracking is off for this item”
The item’s reordering and order tracking policy combination does not retain a chain across a planning run — most often the order tracking policy is None. That is a platform setting, not a fault in this surface. Change it and re-run the plan if you need the deeper chain.
“This chain continues past 20 levels”
Business Central’s own tracking walk stops there. This product announces the cutoff rather than showing a partial graph as though it were complete.
A raw reason code instead of plain language
The quantity was adjusted for a reason this product’s label map does not yet cover. The raw code is shown rather than guessed at — tell us and the mapping gets added.
Ripple dates that do not match what you expected after an edit
Ripple shows each connected row’s last planned values. It asserts relationships, never consequences. Use Re-plan item for real recalculated numbers.

6. Three things worth knowing before you look for them

  • There is no preview of what a re-run would produce.

    No incremental single-line recalculation exists inside Business Central's planning engine, and building an approximate one would drift from the real answer over time. Re-plan item is the honest substitute: a real recalculation, with a real wait, clearly labelled as one.

  • The two nightly jobs may run later than the time on their own Job Queue Entry.

    That is a Business Central behaviour, not this product misbehaving. Compare the entry's Starting Time against the actual start time on its Job Queue Log Entry and you may find they don't match some nights — the same gap has been seen on a standard job Business Central ships itself, in companies where this product was never installed, so it isn't something introduced here and isn't something this product can control. It doesn't matter for these two jobs specifically: both are built so that running late, or running twice back to back, changes nothing beyond what the first run already did. Nothing to configure and nothing to fix here — if the gap concerns you, it's a question for whoever administers your Business Central environment, not for this product.

  • There is no undo of a carry out.

    Once it creates a purchase order, production order, transfer or assembly, that is a real Business Central document, and undoing it is undoing a real document. Undoing your selection before you press the button is free and always available.

7. Something here didn't match what you saw?

Then one of the two is wrong, and we would rather know which. Tell us the surface, the exact wording on screen, and what you expected instead.

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