Production Planning and Capacity Scheduler

The problem

Once you have work orders, the next question is the hard one: can you actually make what you have promised, with the material and the machine hours you have, by the dates on the sales orders? No Zoho application answers that. Zoho Inventory tells you what you hold today. It does not net demand against supply across a horizon, it does not tell you what to buy and when, and it has no concept of a work centre being full on Thursday.

So planning happens in a spreadsheet that is out of date by lunchtime. Purchase orders are raised late because nobody netted future demand against open POs. Two jobs are scheduled onto the same machine on the same day. A customer is promised a date that was never checked against capacity, and the first anyone knows is when the job does not ship.

This is a build-to-order engagement. Nothing is downloadable today. ECOSIRE scopes your planning model, quotes a fixed price, and builds it into your own Zoho org over a typical two to four week lead time.

What ECOSIRE builds

Material requirement planning

We build an MRP engine in Zoho Creator and Deluge that runs across a planning horizon you define. It collects demand — open Zoho Inventory Sales Orders, released and planned work orders, forecast records and safety stock targets — and supply — on-hand stock by warehouse, open Purchase Orders with expected dates, and work orders due to complete. It explodes demand through the bill of material so a shortage of a finished good becomes a dated requirement for every component and sub-assembly beneath it.

The output is a time-phased netting picture per item and warehouse, and a set of planned orders: suggested purchase orders with quantity and required-by date, respecting supplier lead time, minimum order quantity and order multiple; and suggested work orders with a start date derived by backward scheduling from the need date. Planners review the suggestions in a Creator screen and convert approved ones straight into Zoho Inventory Purchase Orders or into work orders via the REST API, rather than retyping them.

Machine and labour capacity

Work centres carry a calendar — working days, shift patterns, holidays, planned maintenance — and an available capacity per period. Every scheduled operation consumes capacity from its work centre. The result is a load profile per work centre per day or week: what is committed, what is available, and where the plan is over capacity. Overload is shown before it becomes a missed shipment rather than after.

We support both an infinite view, where you see the overload and decide, and finite scheduling, where the engine will not place more work into a period than the calendar allows and pushes the remainder forward.

Shop-floor sequencing

For each work centre we produce a dispatch list: the operations queued, in the sequence the rules produce, with the job, quantity, due date and estimated run time. Sequencing rules are configurable — earliest due date, order priority, shortest setup, or grouping by setup family to avoid unnecessary changeovers. A planner can drag or re-rank the sequence manually, and the engine re-derives dates from the new order. Shop-floor users see the current dispatch list for their work centre in a Zoho Creator screen or a Sigma widget, and record start, pause and completion against it.

Capable-to-promise for sales

Because capacity and material availability are both modelled, we can answer the date question at the point of sale. A custom function callable from a Zoho CRM Deal or a Zoho Inventory Sales Order returns the earliest achievable date for a requested quantity, given current material, current load and lead times. That date is written back to the record so the salesperson quotes something the plant can actually hit.

Exceptions instead of reports nobody opens

A scheduled Deluge function raises exceptions rather than expecting anyone to read a plan every morning: an order that will be late, a component that will go negative on a specific date, a work centre over capacity in a given week, a purchase order that needs expediting. Exceptions are delivered as Zoho CRM tasks, email, or Zoho Cliq messages via Zoho Flow, assigned to the owner who can act on them.

Who this is for

Manufacturers who already have BOMs and work orders — whether from a prior ECOSIRE build or their own configuration — and whose constraint is now planning rather than recording. Make-to-order shops that must quote realistic dates. Businesses with long-lead-time components where late purchasing is the recurring failure. Plants with a small number of genuinely constrained machines where sequencing decides throughput.

This assumes a working BOM and work order model exists. If it does not, that is scoped first — a planning engine on top of no BOM has nothing to explode.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We establish your planning horizon and bucket, what counts as demand, whether you plan by warehouse or globally, your supplier lead times and order rules, which work centres are genuinely constrained, your shift calendars, and which sequencing rule reflects how the plant really decides.

2. Fixed quote. You receive a written scope covering the MRP logic, the capacity model, the sequencing rules, the exception matrix and the integration points, at a fixed price. The listed price is a starting point; the quote reflects the approved scope.

3. Build. We develop in a sandbox: the Creator planning application, Deluge MRP and scheduling logic, scheduled functions, Zoho Flow orchestration, REST API integration with Zoho Inventory and Zoho Books, and Sigma widgets for the load profile and dispatch list. Typical lead time is two to four weeks, driven mainly by how many planning rules and constraints are in scope.

4. Install in test, then production. We install into your test org and run the plan against your own data — a real horizon of sales orders, real stock, real open POs — and compare the suggested purchase and work orders against what your planner would have decided manually. That comparison is the acceptance test. We tune the rules until the plan is trusted, then promote to production.

5. Support. Delivery includes configuration handover, planner and shop-floor training, and a defined support window for defect fixes and configuration adjustments. Additional constraints, new sequencing rules or further integrations are quoted separately.

The planning application, the Deluge logic, the flows and the documentation all live in your own Zoho org and keep running independently of ECOSIRE.