The Planning Cycle and Time Horizons
PLAIO operates through a continuous planning cycle: Demand Planning (forecasts with business insight) → Supply Planning (inventory and replenishment plans) → Production Planning (shop floor scheduled with optimised workflow) → Review and Adjustment (refine assumptions and decisions). This cycle runs continuously, allowing organizations to adapt without restarting from scratch.
PLAIO Demand & Supply primarily operate on monthly planning buckets for demand and supply decisions. This prevents over-committing to specific daily targets when actual execution naturally varies within the month. While lead time (in Supplier Constraints) and Production Planner can be set in days, other planning results are aggregated at a monthly level to support clarity and stability.
Constraints and Change Management
Constraints are central to how PLAIO works. Capacity limits, lead times, inventory policies, and BOM relationships are all explicitly modeled in your Master Data to ensure plans are realistic. When constraints limit what is possible, PLAIO makes this visible by highlighting the cell, row, or triggering an exception—enabling planners to respond proactively.
As conditions evolve—demand shifts, supply is disrupted, capacity changes—PLAIO recalculates plans and highlights implications in the Worksheets. Rather than striving for static plans, PLAIO supports resilient planning that adapts without losing coherence or control.