Products / SmartFlow Supply & MRP
A planning run deletes every suggestion it made last time.
That is Business Central working as designed, and it is why a planner’s notes live in a spreadsheet instead of in the system. SmartFlow Supply & MRP keeps the decisions — attached to the item and the order, not to the row that happened to represent them this morning — and draws the run they belong to. The engine still calculates every suggestion, and native Carry Out still creates every order.
The gap this fills
Correct suggestions you cannot see.
Business Central’s planning engine produces correct suggestions. What it does not do is draw them. Every availability view Microsoft documents — by event, by period, by location, by BOM level, by unit of measure, by variant — is a table.
A table is the right shape for reading one number and the wrong shape for seeing when cover runs out, what a suggestion is for, or which of two hundred of them matters first. So the planner reads rows, holds the shape in their head, and rebuilds the picture in a spreadsheet beside the system that already knows the answer.
There is a second gap underneath the first. A planning run does not amend last week’s suggestions, it discards them and generates new ones, so anything written onto a suggestion is gone at the next run. That is why the picture alone is not enough, and why most of this product is not the picture.
What it does not do
- It does not calculate. The native engine computes every suggestion.
- It does not create orders. Native Carry Out does that.
- It does not run a second planning engine beside Microsoft’s.
- It does not optimise, pack, or recommend a purchase quantity.
- It does not claim a shorter click count than native Order Planning.
The product ships a page of its own devoted to this list. A planning tool that quietly computes its own numbers is one nobody can reconcile.
The hard part
The part that is not a drawing problem.
Every planning run throws the previous run away. Anything a planner writes onto a suggestion normally goes with it — which is why most planning notes live outside the system.
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The engine discards and rebuilds
A planning run does not amend the previous run’s suggestions. It deletes them and generates new ones. Anything a planner writes onto a suggestion normally disappears with it.
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So nothing is keyed to a suggestion
Verdicts, Pledges and Loads are keyed to durable Anchors — the identity of the demand or the supply itself — rather than to the engine’s volatile rows.
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And a decision that cannot be re-matched says so
After every run each Anchor is re-matched to a fresh suggestion. One that cannot be matched is marked Orphaned with the reason it could not be, on screen, rather than quietly dropped. There are six reasons and they are named.
The engine’s own events drive this, not our screens, so a colleague running Calculate Plan from Microsoft’s own Planning Worksheet without ever opening this product still leaves every decision re-attached.
The cockpit
Four views of the same planning run.
Timeline
The Horizon
Supply and demand laid out over time, so a planner can see when cover runs out rather than reading it off a list of dates.
Graph
The Pegging Explorer
What a suggestion is actually for. Follow a planned order up through the demand that caused it, and down into what it depends on.
Board
The Triage Board
Many suggestions at once, sorted by what deserves attention, so the planner works a queue instead of reopening one item at a time.
Assembly
The Load Builder
A vendor’s suggestions grouped into one order being assembled, with its value, weight and volume adding up live against the minimum you negotiated and the container it has to fit in.
Purchasing economics
The numbers Business Central does not hold.
A buyer does not place one suggestion at a time. They assemble an order toward a vendor’s minimum spend and toward whatever it has to ship in, and today that assembly happens in a spreadsheet beside the worksheet.
Business Central has the physics already. Weight and cubage live on the item and on each unit of measure, correctly, in Microsoft’s own fields. What it has never held is the economics: there is no minimum-order field on a vendor anywhere in the platform, so nothing can tell a buyer they are four hundred short of free freight.
SmartFlow Supply & MRP adds that as its own master data. A Vendor Threshold is a named minimum order value or quantity, and a vendor can have several. A Capacity Profile is a container or a vehicle with dimensions and a weight limit. A Load groups one vendor’s suggestions, and its value, weight and volume accumulate live against both as the buyer adds and removes members. When half an item range has never had its weight filled in, the meter says the weight is unknown instead of showing a confident total built from half the data.
It does not choose what to add. There is no solver and no packing algorithm. It will not recommend rounding a quantity up to clear a threshold, because that is an edit to the engine’s own output and this product does not make those. The buyer decides. The numbers are finally on the same screen as the decision.
Evidence
Read on a real Business Central client.
Every line below is a measured result from the product’s own test record, not a projection. There are no benchmarks and no percentages here because none have been measured.
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A pegging chain recovered from Microsoft’s own tracking data. On a Business Central 28.3 container, following a component upward returned that component at quantity 16 pegged to its parent at quantity 8 — the bill of material’s 2:1, read out of the platform’s reservation entries rather than calculated by us.
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A timeline that agrees with Microsoft’s own numbers, column for column. The Supply Horizon’s running balance was read against Business Central’s native availability-by-event view at monthly periods with planning suggestions included, and matched on every column.
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A planning run this product’s interface never touched. A plan calculated from Microsoft’s own Planning Worksheet, with the product’s screens closed, was picked up and every decision re-attached.
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An item that dropped out of a run, and said which reason applied. Rather than a decision quietly disappearing, the Anchor came back marked Orphaned and named the cause.
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A suggestion carried out into a real purchase order. One suggestion in, one purchase order line out, through the single action path, with no failures.
Questions
Before you ask us
Does it replace Business Central’s planning engine?
No, and that is the design. The native engine computes every MPS and MRP suggestion, and native Carry Out creates every real order. This is a decision layer and a visual layer over the platform’s own output — never a second calculation running beside it.
Then what does it actually add?
Mostly it adds persistence. A planner’s decision on a suggestion is kept against the item and the order it concerns, so the next run does not erase it. On top of that it draws the run as a timeline, a pegging graph and a board, and it holds the purchasing economics Business Central has no field for, such as what a given vendor’s minimum order actually is. What it does not add is a second calculation. Every suggestion is still Microsoft’s, and every order is still created by Microsoft’s own Carry Out.
Does it optimise my purchase orders?
No, and it will not pretend to. It shows a buyer how close a vendor order is to that vendor’s minimum and to the capacity of whatever it ships in, live, while they assemble it. It never picks the lines, never packs a container, and never recommends rounding a quantity up. Suggesting a different quantity would mean overriding what Microsoft’s engine calculated, and a planning tool that quietly does that is one nobody can reconcile.
Is it faster than Order Planning?
We do not claim a shorter click count. Native Order Planning is already lean for a single order. The claim is the picture that no click count buys, and the ability to work a queue rather than an item.
Does a planner’s work survive the next planning run?
Yes, and where it cannot, it says so. Verdicts, Pledges and Loads are keyed to durable Anchors rather than to the engine’s rows, and every Anchor is re-matched after each run. An Anchor that cannot be re-matched is marked Orphaned with the reason, on screen. A decision that vanishes silently is worse than one that fails loudly, so this product does not have the first kind.
Who is it for?
Whoever runs MRP or the requisition worksheet, weekly to daily, at a small or mid-sized manufacturer or distributor — reached from the Production Planner or Purchasing Agent Role Centre. The operations manager who needs the same picture is the same person with a different title.
Next step
Bring one planning run and we will read it with you.
Thirty minutes with an engineer, on your own data. If native Order Planning already covers how you work, we will say so.
sales@dynamicspro.ca · Serving North America · 416-843-6575