Before
- Spreadsheets rebuilt after every MRP run
- Overloads marked by hand on printouts
- A schedule you hope finished
Roles
Materials Manager
a manufacturing professional who manages the flow of materials into a plant, balancing supply, capacity and schedules against demand
Your job, minus the screen work
You decide which planned orders become commitments, whether the plant can build them, and how the schedule absorbs the overload. Those calls move cash and customer dates. Getting ready to make them takes hours of exports and spreadsheets.
Where your week goes
- Exporting planned orders after each MRP run and filtering them in Excel
- Checking parts availability for large orders one at a time
- Printing load reports and marking overloads by hand
- Walking into the capacity meeting without a list of options
- Running the scheduler and reading results screen by screen
- Sending late lists to customer service days after the schedule changed
What an agent takes over
- firm
Firming prep
Sorts planned orders against your firming rules and flags the exceptions.
- load
Capacity grid
Builds load by work center and week, with overloads and options listed.
- schedule
Scheduler runs
Starts the finite schedule, checks it finished, and reads the result.
- share
Late list
Sends customer service the orders scheduled to be late as soon as you accept the schedule.
-
Work handoff
Passes approved orders to buyers and planners right away.
What stays with you
-
Inventory investment and service-level targets
-
Which customers absorb a shortfall
-
Overtime, subcontracting and capacity requests
-
Safety stock, reorder points and lot sizes
Apps you already juggle
ERP planning workbench, capacity and finite scheduling screens, BI dashboards, supplier and customer portals, Excel, Teams, Outlook and SharePoint.
- ERP planning workbench
- capacity and finite scheduling screens
- BI dashboards
- supplier and customer portals
- Excel
- Teams
- Outlook
- SharePoint
A week, before and after
After
- Review only firming exceptions
- Walk into the capacity meeting with options and costs listed
- Accept a schedule that was checked for completeness
- Spend freed time on policy, suppliers and working capital
See every workflow for your role
See all 30 planning workflows a materials manager shares, from MRP regeneration to kanban reviews.
Materials Manager workflow catalog 30 manufacturingNo prompts. No babysitting. No Integrations.