How PLAIO Works

The planning cycle

PLAIO operates through a continuous planning cycle:

1. Demand Planning — forecasts refined with business insight.
2. Supply Planning — inventory projections and replenishment plans.
3. Production Planning — a shop floor schedule with an optimised workflow.
4. Review and adjustment — refine assumptions and decisions.

This cycle runs continuously, so you adapt to change without restarting from scratch.

Time horizons and buckets

Demand and Supply primarily operate on monthly planning buckets. Lead times (set in Supplier Constraints) and the Production Planner can be set in days, but other planning results are aggregated to a monthly level to support clarity and stability.

Constraints

Constraints are central to how PLAIO works. Capacity limits, lead times, inventory policies, and BOM relationships are all explicitly modelled in your master data so that plans are realistic rather than aspirational.

When a constraint limits what is possible, PLAIO makes this visible — by highlighting the cell or row, or by raising an exception. This lets planners respond proactively rather than discovering the problem downstream.

Change management

Conditions evolve: demand shifts, supply is disrupted, capacity changes. PLAIO recalculates plans and highlights the implications in the worksheets.