The plan rebuilds itself the minute something changes.
Most planners we meet run MRP once a night and live with a plan that is already stale by 06:00. Demand, plan, and inventory should be one ongoing calculation, not a Monday-morning ritual. The moment a shipment slips, a sales order lands, or a BOM revision posts, Polymr re-runs the MRP explosion against the current BOM and what is actually on the floor. Shortages show up in the planner’s queue within minutes. The planner spends the morning approving fixes instead of rebuilding the spreadsheet from scratch.
One planning screen. Every signal. The whole picture.
The MRP run summary below is the planner’s main screen. Run ID and timestamp across the header, three tiles for demand, supply, and gap, then the top eight SKUs that need action. Each row shows what is on hand, what demand is projected, what PO Polymr suggests, and which supplier it would go to. The run updates continuously; the timestamps are in minutes, not days.
MRP run · MR-2026.W22
Started 09:11 · finished 09:13 · 1,842 SKUs evaluated · trigger ASN-7711
| Item | On hand | Projected demand | Suggested PO | Supplier | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PMR-4031 | 14 | 280 | 320 | V-218 | critical |
| PMR-CN-44 | 0 | 440 | 500 | V-244 (alt) | critical |
| PMR-HF-22 | 38 | 320 | 400 | V-218 | critical |
| PMR-BR-08 | 120 | 440 | 440 | V-201 | short |
| PMR-SR-FK | 40 | 240 | 240 | V-244 | short |
| PMR-4406 | 84 | 180 | 160 | V-218 | short |
| HW-B8-A325 | 1,800 | 1,120 | 0 | - | cover |
| HW-W8-SPL | 2,400 | 1,120 | 0 | - | cover |
The MPS timeline shows what each shortage actually means.
Click into PMR-4031 and the MPS view opens across eight weeks. Supply against demand, week by week. The red bars are the shortages from the planning queue, drawn as coverage gaps so the planner can see exactly which week the line runs out and how big the recovery needs to be. The note at the bottom names the shipment slip that caused the gap.
The BOM rollup behind every shortage row.
Every shortage in the queue rolls up from the BOM. The indented view shows the path from parent to component, with on-hand and net requirement attached at every level. Substitute parts sit one column over, never on a separate screen.
| Component | Qty | On hand | Net req |
|---|---|---|---|
| PMR-4031 brake hub | 1 | 14 | 280 |
| Hub forging | 1 | 320 | 0 |
| Bearing race | 2 | 120 | 440 |
| Bolt M8x24 | 4 | 1,800 | 0 |
| Lock washer | 4 | 2,400 | 0 |
| Seal ring FKM | 1 | 40 | 240 |
MRP runs nightly. The plant changes by the hour.
Most planners we meet are running an MRP that batches once a night, against an inventory snapshot that is already eight hours old. The morning queue is wrong before they sit down. The first two hours of every shift go to reconciling on-hand against scrap reported overnight from the floor, vendor shipment notices that came in after midnight, and sales orders cut after the batch ran. Polymr re-runs the explosion every time a signal lands. The planner’s queue stays accurate as the day moves. The two hours of reconciling are gone because the reconciling is already done.
- Classic MRP
- Nightly batch. Morning queue stale before standup.
- Polymr incremental
- Re-explodes per slip, per SO, per rev. Latency cap 60 s.
- Planner workload
- Median reconciliation time recovered across the team.
- Coverage horizon
- Recommendations beyond the immediate shortage window.
A high-volume plant with takt-driven demand.
Anonymised engagement with an automotive supplier running takt-driven assembly. Once the live re-explosion was in place, the planner’s morning reconciliation dropped from a four- hour ritual to a fifteen-minute review of the queue.
- Situation
- Two stamping-and-assembly plants ran a 38-second takt against forecasted weekly volumes. Daily planner output drove material releases, work-centre assignments, and overtime calls for both sites.
- What was breaking
- A single inbound resin slip on PMR-4031 cascaded into a 9-day backlog across four downstream WOs before anyone caught it. Planners burned the first two hours of every shift reconciling on-hand against MES-reported scrap before they trusted the morning queue.
- Demand → planning → purchasing
- Delay recovery
- Margin and bottleneck analysis
Where planning connects to the rest of Polymr.
The planner’s queue is only as good as the shipment-slip signal feeding it, and the alternate-vendor recommendation is only as good as the scoring that ranks it. Each related workflow sharpens this one.
Receiving and delays
A planner’s queue is only as good as the slip signal. The receiving workflow is what feeds the red cells.
Supplier quotes, purchasing
When the recommendation is an alt-vendor or a split PO, the scoring matrix decides who wins.
High-volume manufacturing
The industry view: takt-driven plants, why every minute of stale planning costs a shift.