Join five planning tracks into one release

Reconcile the quantity before the clock

Northstar expects fifty-one bottles of demand next week and has six bottles of separate prior backlog. Eighteen usable bottles are on hand and ten arrive before demand. Net new need is twenty-nine. A forecast that already includes a customer order must not have that order added again. This reconciliation is the demand and inventory handoff.

The supply handoff checks executable quantities. Supplier availability is twenty-four, manufacturing can support thirty-two, and shipping can handle thirty. In this simplified comparison all three figures mean finished-good equivalents available for the same week. The smallest is twenty-four, leaving five of the twenty-nine net requirement uncovered before recovery. Machine time cannot manufacture missing input availability.

Distinguish capacity from yield allowance

For a conditional plan that recovers enough inputs, expected yield is ninety-seven percent. Thirty starts give twenty-nine point one expected good bottles, so thirty starts are the rounded planning quantity for a need of twenty-nine. Expected output is an average, not a promise that this particular batch yields enough. Add a quality-count checkpoint before shipping.

Each start uses twelve minutes. Thirty starts consume three hundred sixty run minutes. One thirty-minute setup makes total load three hundred ninety within a four hundred eighty minute usable shift. The ninety-minute headroom is time, not finished inventory. Keep the unit labels visible so no one treats it as ninety extra bottles or as a cure for the original supply gap.

Turn the plan into conditional instructions

The recovery scenario provides thirty physical input units before shift start, each sufficient for one bottle start. This is a separate approved scenario from the original finished-good-equivalent limit. Show the change in assumptions explicitly. Run setup zero to thirty and production thirty to three hundred ninety, then count actual good output.

The five-track chain is demand planning, inventory planning, supply planning, constraint planning, and production scheduling. Scheduling accepts their reconciled outputs, assigns time, and returns feasibility exceptions. The capstone does not claim the earlier plans are perfect. It teaches a traceable conversation in which a missing input, changed promise, or yield loss is visible before a release becomes a customer commitment.

Build, test and explain a plan

Build a five-tab or five-section plan using only the table. Show original supply limit and conditional recovered-input plan separately. Stress receipt delay so the10 bottles arrive after demand; then separately reduce usable shift to360. Finally use actual accepted output28 from30 starts, with original on-time receipt. No hidden overtime, extra supply, or stock is allowed. The eight hours are self-paced estimates for modeling, scenario work, checks, and explanation; they have not been experimentally validated.

Use paper or a spreadsheet. The estimates below include the study and worked example already on this page.

Your deliverables

• Input dictionary and checked schedule table.
• Scenario comparison with job-level or quantity-level evidence.
• Decision memo and teach-back record.

Keep these three ideas

• Trace demand through stock, supply, constraints, and a dated production release.
• Which constraint or metric changes the choice in this case?
• What assumption must be confirmed before this plan can be released?

Common mistakes

• Comparing plans before checking every stated constraint.
• Changing several assumptions at once and losing the explanation for the result.