MRP & Finite Capacity Planning

The problem

NetSuite's supply planning will tell you what to make and when material is short. It will not tell you whether the shop floor can actually absorb the load. Planners end up exporting Work Orders and Purchase Orders to a spreadsheet, hand-building a Gantt chart, and re-doing it every time a rush order lands or a machine goes down. The result is a plan that is stale the moment it is printed, expedited buys that were never needed, and promise dates that come from optimism rather than from available machine hours.

The specific gaps discrete manufacturers hit are consistent: multi-level explosion through phantom and sub-assembly BOMs is hard to see end-to-end; Work Centres have no hard capacity ceiling, so infinite loading is the default; lot sizing rules are limited; and there is no single board where a planner can drag an operation and immediately see what it breaks downstream.

What ECOSIRE builds

We build a planning engine and a scheduling UI as native NetSuite customizations in your own account. Nothing is a hosted black box — the SuiteScript, custom records, saved searches and Suitelets ship to you as an unmanaged bundle or SDF project you own outright.

The MRP engine

A Map/Reduce script runs the regeneration. The map stage reads independent demand — Sales Orders, Transfer Orders, Forecast records, and a custom Demand Override record for planners who need to seed a number by hand — and nets it against on-hand, on-order and committed quantities from the Item and Inventory Detail records. The reduce stage explodes each parent through its Assembly Item BOM revision, respecting phantom levels, component yield, and effective/obsolete dates, then writes planned orders into a custom Planned Order record with a low-level code so every part is planned exactly once at the deepest level it appears.

Lot sizing is configurable per item through a custom sublist on the Item record: lot-for-lot, fixed order quantity, period-of-supply days, or minimum/multiple rounding. Safety stock, purchase and manufacturing lead times, and shrinkage factors are read from standard NetSuite fields where they exist and from a custom segment where they do not, so you are not maintaining a parallel item master.

Finite capacity

We extend Manufacturing Work Centres with a Capacity Calendar custom record: shifts per day, hours per shift, number of parallel machines or operators, planned downtime, and an efficiency factor. A second Map/Reduce pass takes every Work Order Operation — setup time, run rate, and queue/move time from the routing — and loads it against that calendar. Where load exceeds available hours the engine either forward-schedules into the next available bucket or backward-schedules from the required date and flags the operation as late, depending on the policy you choose per Work Centre.

The output is a load profile you can read: hours required versus hours available per Work Centre per day or week, with the specific Work Orders driving any overload listed underneath.

The schedule board

A Suitelet rendered with a client-side scheduling grid gives planners a drag-and-drop Gantt across Work Centres. Moving an operation triggers a RESTlet call that re-runs the constraint check for the affected Work Centre and its downstream operations, then writes the new planned start and end back to the Work Order Operation record. Colour coding shows late, at-risk and firm-planned orders. Firmed orders are locked so the next MRP regeneration will not move them.

Exceptions and actions

A User Event script on Sales Order, Work Order and Purchase Order keeps the plan honest between regenerations: a date change, a quantity change or a cancellation writes an exception row rather than silently invalidating the plan. Exceptions land on a saved-search-driven dashboard — reschedule in, reschedule out, order past due, capacity overload, material short. Planners convert approved Planned Orders into real Work Orders or Purchase Orders in bulk from that dashboard; the conversion runs as a Scheduled Script so large batches do not time out.

OneWorld and multi-location

Planning is netted per subsidiary and per location. Inter-company and inter-location supply is respected, so a plan for a subsidiary that receives from a sister plant generates a Transfer Order suggestion rather than a duplicate buy. Custom segments can be used to plan by product line, programme or contract where you need a further cut.

Who this is for

Discrete and mixed-mode manufacturers running NetSuite Manufacturing with real routings, real Work Centres and multi-level BOMs — typically make-to-order or make-to-stock shops where the constraint is machine or cell hours rather than material. If you assemble simple kits with no routings, this is more machinery than you need.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We walk your BOM structure, routings, Work Centre setup, lot sizing rules, subsidiary and location layout, and the exceptions your planners care about. We look at the actual records in your sandbox, not a questionnaire. 2. Fixed quote. You get a written scope, a fixed price, and a delivery window. Typical build time is two to four weeks from the point the scope is signed. 3. Build. We develop against your sandbox account so the code is written against your real BOMs, your real custom fields and your real roles. 4. Install in test. Deployed to your sandbox or a Release Preview account first. You run your own data through it — a full regeneration against a copy of live demand — and we tune lot sizing, calendars and script governance together. 5. Production install. Deployed as an unmanaged bundle or SDF project. Roles, permissions and script deployments are configured with you, not around you. 6. Support. A defined post-go-live support window is included in the quote for defect fixes and configuration adjustments.

The code is yours. There is no runtime licence, no phone-home, and no dependency on ECOSIRE remaining in the picture.