In my last article on static and dynamic master plans I settled where master planning writes its results and why most setups run two plans. I closed with a promise to follow the planned orders forward: how you turn those suggestions into real purchase and production orders, and how to read the action and futures messages that tell you what to reschedule before the warehouse ever feels it. That is today. The planned order is the most underrated object in D365 planning, because it is the hinge between a calculation and a commitment, and the habits a team builds around firming and messages decide whether planning is a tool people trust or a list they ignore.
WHAT A PLANNED ORDER ACTUALLY IS
A planned order is a suggestion and nothing more. When master planning runs, it nets demand against supply for each item and, where it finds a shortfall, it proposes an order to cover it: a planned purchase order for a bought item, a planned production order for a manufactured one, a planned transfer order to move stock between warehouses, or a planned kanban depending on your setup. None of these touch the real world yet. They carry no purchase order number, they place no demand on a vendor, and they consume no shop floor capacity beyond the plan. The crucial consequence of this is that planned orders are disposable. On the next regeneration the engine throws them away and recreates them from scratch, so anything you change on a planned order that you do not firm is lost. That disposability is a feature, not a flaw, but it catches people who spend an hour tidying planned orders and then watch the overnight run erase the lot.
Because planned orders are tied to the plan, the question of which plan you are looking at, from the previous article, matters here. You firm from the static plan of record, not the dynamic plan, precisely because the static plan holds still long enough for the firming decision to mean something.
FIRMING: TURNING A SUGGESTION INTO A COMMITMENT
Firming is the act of converting a planned order into a real order. When you firm a planned production order you get an actual production order with a number, a BOM and route attached, and a real claim on capacity. Firm a planned purchase order and you get a purchase order ready to confirm and send to the vendor. The moment of firming is the moment planning stops being advisory and starts creating obligations, so it deserves a deliberate process rather than a reflex click.
There are three broad ways to firm. The first is manual, one order at a time, from the planned orders list page: you review a suggestion, you agree with it, you firm it. The second is selective and batched: you mark a set of planned orders, often filtered to a buyer or a production unit or a date window, and firm them together. The third is automatic, governed by the firming time fence. Inside that fence the engine treats near-term suggestions as reliable enough to firm without a human in the loop, which is sensible for stable, fast-moving items but dangerous if applied blindly to everything. My general rule is to automate firming only where the demand signal is trustworthy and the cost of a wrong order is low, and to keep human review on long lead time, high value, or capacity-critical items.
Before firming in bulk it is worth using the planned order approval concept. Marking or approving planned orders lets a planner signal "I have looked at this and I agree" without committing yet, which separates the review from the commitment and gives you a clean filter for the firming run. On manufactured items, pay attention to how firming explodes the BOM: firming a parent planned order can firm or generate the component supply beneath it, and understanding that cascade is the difference between firming one order and accidentally committing a whole multi-level structure you had not finished reviewing.
ACTION MESSAGES: WHAT TO CHANGE ON ORDERS YOU ALREADY HAVE
Action messages are the engine's advice about orders that already exist, whether planned or firmed. Where a planned order says "you need new supply," an action message says "the supply you have is in the wrong place in time or quantity." The common ones are advance (pull an order earlier because demand moved in), postpone (push it later because demand moved out or disappeared), increase or decrease the quantity, and cancel when the demand behind an order has gone away entirely. These are the messages that keep your existing orders honest as the demand picture shifts day to day.
Two settings decide whether you ever see them and how much noise they make. First, action messages have to be switched on at the plan level, as I covered last time; if they are off on the plan, no coverage group setting will produce them. Second, the action message time fence and the delay and advance margins on the coverage group control the horizon and the sensitivity. A short margin generates a message for every tiny date difference and buries planners in trivia; too long a margin and you miss changes worth acting on. Tuning these is ongoing work, not a one-time setup, and the right level is the one where planners act on most of the messages they see rather than dismissing them.
FUTURES MESSAGES: WHAT IS GOING TO BE LATE
Futures messages answer a different question. An action message tells you what to change; a futures message tells you what cannot be met. When the engine schedules backward from a demand date and finds that lead time will not allow the supply to arrive on time, it records a futures date: the realistic date the order can actually be available, as opposed to the requested date that demand asked for. The gap between those two dates is the delay, and the important behaviour is that futures delays propagate. A late component pushes out the production order that consumes it, which pushes out the parent, which pushes out the sales line, so a single late purchase at the bottom of a BOM can surface as a customer delivery slip at the top. Reading futures messages is how you see that chain before the customer does.
In practice I treat futures messages as the early warning system and action messages as the daily maintenance list. Action messages are about keeping a healthy plan tidy; futures messages are about catching the things that no amount of rescheduling can fix without changing lead times, sourcing, or the promise to the customer. They are also a reality check on your master data: a flood of futures messages on items that should be easy to supply usually means the lead times in the system are wrong, not that the world is on fire.
A WORKING RHYTHM
Putting it together, a planner's day on the static plan tends to look like this. Open the plan after the overnight regeneration. Scan futures messages first to see what is at risk of being late, because those are the items that may need escalation, expediting, or a conversation with sales. Then work the action messages to reschedule and resize existing orders so supply lines up with current demand. Then review and firm the planned orders that need to become real this cycle, marking as you go and firming the marked set in a batch. The order matters: deal with what is breaking before you commit new orders, so you are not firming supply against a picture you are about to change.
WHAT GOES WRONG
• Editing planned orders without firming. Changes to unfirmed planned orders vanish on the next regeneration. If a change matters, firm it or push it back into master data, do not hand-edit the suggestion.
• Automatic firming applied too widely. A firming time fence covering long lead time or high value items commits orders no one reviewed. Automate only where the demand is trustworthy and a wrong order is cheap.
• Action messages off at the plan. Carefully tuned coverage group margins produce nothing if the plan-level switch is off. Check the plan first.
• Action message margins too tight. Tiny margins bury planners in trivial reschedule suggestions until they stop reading any of them. Tune to the level where most messages are worth acting on.
• Ignoring futures messages. They are the only early signal that a date will be missed. A growing futures list usually points at wrong lead times in master data, so treat it as a data quality alarm too.
• Firming a multi-level parent before reviewing components. Firming explodes the BOM and can commit component supply you had not finished checking. Know the cascade before you firm.
TAKEAWAYS
The planned order is the hinge of the whole planning process: a free, disposable suggestion right up until you firm it, at which point it becomes a real obligation on a vendor or the shop floor. Firm deliberately, from the stable plan of record, using marking and approval to separate review from commitment, and reserve automatic firming for the items where it is genuinely safe. Read the two message types for what they each are: action messages are your daily maintenance list for the orders you already have, and futures messages are your early warning that a date will slip and the warning that your lead time data may be wrong. Get this rhythm right and the per-item tuning and the plan structure from the previous articles finally pay off, because the suggestions the engine produces actually turn into orders the business can rely on.
Next time I will change direction from planning to the cost of what you bring in, and look at landed cost in D365: how the landed cost module captures freight, insurance, duties, brokerage, and other charges on imported goods, groups them on a voyage, and apportions them across the items so the inventory value reflects what the stock actually cost to land rather than just the vendor price on the purchase order.
In this series: previous article The Master Plan in D365: Static vs Dynamic Plans and Why You Run Two
In my last article on static and dynamic master plans I settled where master planning writes its results and why most setups run two plans. I closed with a promise to follow the planned orders forward: how you turn those suggestions into real purchase and production orders, and how to read the action and futures messages that tell you what to reschedule before the warehouse ever feels it. That is today. The planned order is the most underrated object in D365 planning, because it is the hinge between a calculation and a commitment, and the habits a team builds around firming and messages decide whether planning is a tool people trust or a list they ignore.
WHAT A PLANNED ORDER ACTUALLY IS
A planned order is a suggestion and nothing more. When master planning runs, it nets demand against supply for each item and, where it finds a shortfall, it proposes an order to cover it: a planned purchase order for a bought item, a planned production order for a manufactured one, a planned transfer order to move stock between warehouses, or a planned kanban depending on your setup. None of these touch the real world yet. They carry no purchase order number, they place no demand on a vendor, and they consume no shop floor capacity beyond the plan. The crucial consequence of this is that planned orders are disposable. On the next regeneration the engine throws them away and recreates them from scratch, so anything you change on a planned order that you do not firm is lost. That disposability is a feature, not a flaw, but it catches people who spend an hour tidying planned orders and then watch the overnight run erase the lot.
Because planned orders are tied to the plan, the question of which plan you are looking at, from the previous article, matters here. You firm from the static plan of record, not the dynamic plan, precisely because the static plan holds still long enough for the firming decision to mean something.
FIRMING: TURNING A SUGGESTION INTO A COMMITMENT
Firming is the act of converting a planned order into a real order. When you firm a planned production order you get an actual production order with a number, a BOM and route attached, and a real claim on capacity. Firm a planned purchase order and you get a purchase order ready to confirm and send to the vendor. The moment of firming is the moment planning stops being advisory and starts creating obligations, so it deserves a deliberate process rather than a reflex click.
There are three broad ways to firm. The first is manual, one order at a time, from the planned orders list page: you review a suggestion, you agree with it, you firm it. The second is selective and batched: you mark a set of planned orders, often filtered to a buyer or a production unit or a date window, and firm them together. The third is automatic, governed by the firming time fence. Inside that fence the engine treats near-term suggestions as reliable enough to firm without a human in the loop, which is sensible for stable, fast-moving items but dangerous if applied blindly to everything. My general rule is to automate firming only where the demand signal is trustworthy and the cost of a wrong order is low, and to keep human review on long lead time, high value, or capacity-critical items.
Before firming in bulk it is worth using the planned order approval concept. Marking or approving planned orders lets a planner signal "I have looked at this and I agree" without committing yet, which separates the review from the commitment and gives you a clean filter for the firming run. On manufactured items, pay attention to how firming explodes the BOM: firming a parent planned order can firm or generate the component supply beneath it, and understanding that cascade is the difference between firming one order and accidentally committing a whole multi-level structure you had not finished reviewing.
ACTION MESSAGES: WHAT TO CHANGE ON ORDERS YOU ALREADY HAVE
Action messages are the engine's advice about orders that already exist, whether planned or firmed. Where a planned order says "you need new supply," an action message says "the supply you have is in the wrong place in time or quantity." The common ones are advance (pull an order earlier because demand moved in), postpone (push it later because demand moved out or disappeared), increase or decrease the quantity, and cancel when the demand behind an order has gone away entirely. These are the messages that keep your existing orders honest as the demand picture shifts day to day.
Two settings decide whether you ever see them and how much noise they make. First, action messages have to be switched on at the plan level, as I covered last time; if they are off on the plan, no coverage group setting will produce them. Second, the action message time fence and the delay and advance margins on the coverage group control the horizon and the sensitivity. A short margin generates a message for every tiny date difference and buries planners in trivia; too long a margin and you miss changes worth acting on. Tuning these is ongoing work, not a one-time setup, and the right level is the one where planners act on most of the messages they see rather than dismissing them.
FUTURES MESSAGES: WHAT IS GOING TO BE LATE
Futures messages answer a different question. An action message tells you what to change; a futures message tells you what cannot be met. When the engine schedules backward from a demand date and finds that lead time will not allow the supply to arrive on time, it records a futures date: the realistic date the order can actually be available, as opposed to the requested date that demand asked for. The gap between those two dates is the delay, and the important behaviour is that futures delays propagate. A late component pushes out the production order that consumes it, which pushes out the parent, which pushes out the sales line, so a single late purchase at the bottom of a BOM can surface as a customer delivery slip at the top. Reading futures messages is how you see that chain before the customer does.
In practice I treat futures messages as the early warning system and action messages as the daily maintenance list. Action messages are about keeping a healthy plan tidy; futures messages are about catching the things that no amount of rescheduling can fix without changing lead times, sourcing, or the promise to the customer. They are also a reality check on your master data: a flood of futures messages on items that should be easy to supply usually means the lead times in the system are wrong, not that the world is on fire.
A WORKING RHYTHM
Putting it together, a planner's day on the static plan tends to look like this. Open the plan after the overnight regeneration. Scan futures messages first to see what is at risk of being late, because those are the items that may need escalation, expediting, or a conversation with sales. Then work the action messages to reschedule and resize existing orders so supply lines up with current demand. Then review and firm the planned orders that need to become real this cycle, marking as you go and firming the marked set in a batch. The order matters: deal with what is breaking before you commit new orders, so you are not firming supply against a picture you are about to change.
WHAT GOES WRONG
• Editing planned orders without firming. Changes to unfirmed planned orders vanish on the next regeneration. If a change matters, firm it or push it back into master data, do not hand-edit the suggestion.
• Automatic firming applied too widely. A firming time fence covering long lead time or high value items commits orders no one reviewed. Automate only where the demand is trustworthy and a wrong order is cheap.
• Action messages off at the plan. Carefully tuned coverage group margins produce nothing if the plan-level switch is off. Check the plan first.
• Action message margins too tight. Tiny margins bury planners in trivial reschedule suggestions until they stop reading any of them. Tune to the level where most messages are worth acting on.
• Ignoring futures messages. They are the only early signal that a date will be missed. A growing futures list usually points at wrong lead times in master data, so treat it as a data quality alarm too.
• Firming a multi-level parent before reviewing components. Firming explodes the BOM and can commit component supply you had not finished checking. Know the cascade before you firm.
TAKEAWAYS
The planned order is the hinge of the whole planning process: a free, disposable suggestion right up until you firm it, at which point it becomes a real obligation on a vendor or the shop floor. Firm deliberately, from the stable plan of record, using marking and approval to separate review from commitment, and reserve automatic firming for the items where it is genuinely safe. Read the two message types for what they each are: action messages are your daily maintenance list for the orders you already have, and futures messages are your early warning that a date will slip and the warning that your lead time data may be wrong. Get this rhythm right and the per-item tuning and the plan structure from the previous articles finally pay off, because the suggestions the engine produces actually turn into orders the business can rely on.
Next time I will change direction from planning to the cost of what you bring in, and look at landed cost in D365: how the landed cost module captures freight, insurance, duties, brokerage, and other charges on imported goods, groups them on a voyage, and apportions them across the items so the inventory value reflects what the stock actually cost to land rather than just the vendor price on the purchase order.
In this series: previous article The Master Plan in D365: Static vs Dynamic Plans and Why You Run Two
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