Supply Planning and MRP Overview

GoldFinch Supply Planning helps businesses balance expected demand with available and incoming inventory. It identifies potential shortages and recommends appropriate replenishment actions—all within Salesforce.

Using Material Requirements Planning (MRP), GoldFinch connects sales, purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, and warehouse information to provide planners with a coordinated view of future requirements.

What Is Supply Planning?

Supply planning determines how a business can meet expected demand using current inventory and planned replenishment.

GoldFinch evaluates projected demand and supply over a defined planning horizon. When available supply is not sufficient, the system can recommend:

• Purchase Orders for externally sourced items
• Work Orders for manufactured items
• Transfer Orders for inventory supplied by another warehouse

These recommendations help purchasing, production, and warehouse teams coordinate their activities around shared demand information.

What Is MRP?

Material Requirements Planning is a systematic method for determining:

• What materials and products are needed
• How much is required
• Where the inventory is needed
• When replenishment should be available
• Whether an item should be purchased, manufactured, or transferred

For manufactured products, MRP can evaluate multiple levels of formulas or bills of material. Demand for a finished product can therefore generate requirements for subassemblies, raw materials, packaging, and other components.

Evaluate Demand and Supply Together

GoldFinch Supply Planning brings relevant demand and supply information into a connected planning process.

Sources of demand may include:

• Open Sales Orders
• Sales Forecasts
• Work Order component requirements
• Transfer Order requirements
• Safety stock targets

Sources of supply may include:

• Current available inventory
• Open Purchase Orders
• Open Work Orders
• Incoming Transfer Orders

Evaluating these sources together helps planners understand projected inventory positions and identify shortages before they affect customers or production.

Generate Replenishment Recommendations

When projected inventory is insufficient, GoldFinch can calculate a recommended replenishment quantity and date based on the planning policies assigned to each item and warehouse.

Recommendations can reflect considerations such as:

• Replenishment method
• Lead time
• Safety stock
• Reorder quantity
• Order multiples
• Preferred vendor
• Source warehouse
• Purchasing responsibility

This helps organizations apply consistent planning policies while accommodating different products, suppliers, warehouses, and manufacturing processes.

Review Before Creating Orders

Supply Plan results are recommendations, not posted inventory transactions.

Planners can review the proposed replenishment actions, investigate the underlying demand and supply, and make appropriate adjustments before creating actual Purchase Orders, Work Orders, or Transfer Orders.

This review process combines system-generated analysis with the knowledge and judgment of experienced planners.

Support Purchasing, Manufacturing, and Transfers

GoldFinch can recommend different types of supply orders according to how each item is replenished:

Purchased Items

The Supply Plan can recommend Purchase Orders based on expected demand, available supply, vendor lead times, and purchasing policies.

Manufactured Items

For manufactured products, the Supply Plan can recommend Work Orders and calculate the components needed to support production.

Transferred Items

For inventory replenished from another location, the Supply Plan can recommend Transfer Orders between warehouses.

This integrated approach coordinates procurement, production, and distribution in a single planning process.

Plan Across Multiple Warehouses

GoldFinch supports supply planning by item and warehouse. Each location can have planning policies that reflect its operational needs.

This is useful for organizations that:

• Operate multiple warehouses or production facilities
• Maintain different inventory levels by location
• Purchase and manufacture the same item in different locations
• Replenish regional warehouses from a central facility
• Assign responsibility by planner or purchasing agent

Key Benefits

GoldFinch Supply Planning and MRP can help organizations:

• Identify potential shortages earlier
• Reduce stockouts and fulfillment delays
• Avoid unnecessary purchasing and excess inventory
• Coordinate sales, purchasing, production, and warehouse activities
• Connect finished-goods demand with component requirements
• Improve replenishment decisions across multiple warehouses
• Give planners visibility into the reasons behind recommendations
• Reduce reliance on disconnected planning spreadsheets

Supply Planning on Salesforce

Because GoldFinch is built natively on Salesforce, supply planning operates alongside customer, opportunity, order, inventory, purchasing, and manufacturing information.

This connected environment helps teams understand what needs attention, why it matters, and what replenishment action to consider—without moving planning data into a separate system.