Inventory & Materials module
On-hand, open purchase orders and your bill of materials in one workspace. Projected inventory for every item, material requirements driven by the production plan, and the order-by dates that decide whether a shortage is still fixable.
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On-hand plus open purchase order receipts minus demand, walked period by period, with the safety-stock floor drawn and the stockout date named.
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Each suggestion carries a quantity, a latest order-by date and the lead time it was calculated from. Nothing is committed to any system.
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Your bill of materials explodes against the schedule you actually intend to run, not against a forecast that ignores capacity.
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Lots with their ages and values, so the capital sitting still is as visible as the shortage coming.
The part most tools get wrong
Purchase orders run late. Most planning tools quietly treat an overdue receipt as though it landed on time, and the plan looks fine until the line stops.
Here, past-due purchase order lines are folded into the current period and flagged, and the screen says plainly that the projection holds only if those deliveries actually land. When a material goes short, the shortfall carries the date, the quantity and the purchase order whose timing decides it. And when the lead time is longer than the time remaining, the product says that ordering today cannot fix this period, so the real options are expediting or a spot buy.
Ask them on the screen or ask the agent. Both read the same data and return the same numbers.
Inventory, purchase orders and material requirements resolve per plant, with an all-plants view that reconciles exactly to its members. Where one site is short while another holds excess, the system quantifies the transfer next to the purchase option, states the assumption behind it, and recommends neither. That decision belongs to your planner.
Inventory & Materials runs as its own workspace with its own address. It reads the forecast when you have one, and takes your own demand plan as a file when you do not, so a team that wants materials planning without demand forecasting can buy exactly that. The production schedule from Capacity drives the material requirements, and the agent answers across all of it.
A 20-minute demo run against a real mid-market dataset. No data prep, no commitment.
15 years in supply chain at Walmart, Campbell's, and Kimberly-Clark.
If you sign up and BetterDemand doesn't pay for itself in year one — every dollar back.