The Business Central planning worksheet
How MRP works in Business Central — the planning worksheet, reordering policies, supply, demand, and the regenerative engine behind it.
The planning worksheet is Business Central's MRP engine. It calculates net requirements for every planning-relevant item across your locations and proposes the orders needed to keep supply aligned with demand. Properly configured, it's the difference between firefighting shortages and running a calm supply chain.
Inputs. The engine considers all supply and demand signals. Supply: on-hand inventory, open purchase orders, open production orders, open transfer orders, planned orders inside the planning horizon. Demand: open sales orders, service orders, components in production orders, transfer requirements, forecast lines, blanket sales orders, and projected demand from job tasks.
Reordering policies. Each item card sets a reordering policy that drives planning behaviour:
- Lot-for-Lot — plan exactly the quantity required by demand on each date.
- Fixed Reorder Qty — order in fixed lots (e.g. carton of 24).
- Maximum Qty — top up to a maximum when below reorder point.
- Order — plan only on direct customer demand (true MTO).
Lead times, safety stock, safety lead times, minimum order quantities, lot multiples, and order modifiers fine-tune the suggestions.
Running the worksheet. A planner opens the planning worksheet, sets a date range and a filter, and runs Calculate Regenerative Plan or Calculate Net Change Plan. Regenerative recomputes from scratch; net change updates only items affected by changes since the last run. The output is a list of suggestions — new purchase orders, production orders, transfer orders, plus reschedule and cancellation actions on existing orders.
Acceptance. Planners review suggestions and accept them with the Carry Out Action Message function, which creates or modifies the suggested supply orders. Accepted suggestions disappear from the worksheet.
Action messages. New, Change Qty, Reschedule, Reschedule & Change Qty, Cancel — each indicates what the engine wants you to do, with reasons (early supply, late supply, demand changed, etc.).
Subcontracting and assembly. Subcontracted production operations auto-suggest purchase orders to the subcontract vendor; assembly items can use a simpler assembly planning routine.
Where it stops. The engine is single-level and not finitely capacity-constrained. For demand sensing, complex scenario planning, or full S&OP, customers add an ISV module or step up to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
Related guides
- Assembly orders in Business CentralHow Business Central handles assembly orders — assembly BOMs, assemble-to-order vs assemble-to-stock, and when to use assembly vs production orders.
- Inventory and warehouse management in Business CentralHow Business Central tracks items, locations, lots, serials, and warehouse operations — from basic stock to directed put-away and pick.
- Inventory costing methods in Business Central, comparedFIFO, LIFO, Average, Standard, and Specific — what each costing method means, and how to choose the right one in Business Central.
- Item attributes and variants in Business CentralHow Business Central handles product variations — variants for stock-keeping, attributes for searching, and where the model fits and where it doesn't.
- Item categories in Business CentralHow to structure a Business Central catalogue with item categories — hierarchy, defaults, attributes, and the integration with templates and reporting.