Scenarios and tentative capacity — what-if planning without touching the live schedule
Test an enquiry, an outage, overtime or a dropped order against a copy of the live plan and read the impact; plan quotes above a win-probability threshold as tentative load that never holds a firm slot.
Section 01
A second version of the schedule
1 minute
Two questions a planner asks every week cannot be answered by the live schedule: “if we take this enquiry, what happens to everything else?” and “how much of next month is already spoken for by quotes that will probably land?” Both need a version of the plan that is not the real one. SAP calls it long-term planning — a simulative run that “never affects the original planning data”; Dynamics 365 keeps a static plan, a dynamic plan and any number of what-if plans; Epicor schedules jobs “in a what-if mode” and shows the change impact. Brytebuild does the same in two pieces: Scenarios for the first question and tentative demand for the second.
Both run the same finite-capacity scheduler that plans your works orders — the same calendars, downtime, changeovers and sequencing — on a copy. Nothing you do on these pages moves a planned slot, changes a promise date or books a centre. When you decide, you act on the real records: raise the works order, record the downtime, change the centre’s hours.
Section 02
Building a scenario
2 minutes
Name it after the question (“Halcyon enquiry + bench overtime”), add assumptions, press Compute. A scenario is saved with its assumptions and its last result, so you can come back to it, change one thing and compute again; changing an assumption clears the stale result until you do.
| Assumption | What it does in the copy |
|---|---|
| Hypothetical order | A product, quantity, due date and optional name. Its route (setup once, run time per unit, subcontract days) is scheduled alongside the open works orders. On an equal due date the firm orders keep their slots; an enquiry due earlier is sequenced ahead, as the real scheduler would do once you raised it — and the impact table tells you who it pushes. |
| Work centre outage | A centre unavailable between two times: operations stop before the block and resume after it, exactly as recorded downtime is treated. |
| Capacity change | Hours per day on a centre (overtime, a second shift), optionally working weekends too. The centre keeps its queue; only its day gets longer. |
| Due-date change | Pull an order forward or push it back and see how the sequence — earliest due first — reshuffles around it. |
| Order to remove | What if this one were cancelled or outsourced? Its hours leave the plan and the orders behind it move earlier. |
| Include tentative demand | Adds the quotes that meet your probability threshold (section 04) behind the firm orders. |
Anyone who can see the schedule can open scenarios and read results. Creating, editing and computing one needs the works-order edit right — the same right as running the scheduler.
Section 03
Reading the impact
2 minutes
The summary chips come first: how many open orders are in the scenario, how many move, how many are newly late (or no longer late), whether the hypothetical orders and tentative quotes make their dates, and how many centre-weeks are overloaded. Then the detail:
| Table | Read it as |
|---|---|
| Hypothetical orders | Route hours, when the enquiry would start and finish, its due date, and On time / Late. A product with no route shows “no route — no load”: it cannot be scheduled until it has one. |
| Firm orders that move | Each works order whose finish changes: finishes now → would finish (+/− hours), due date, and Newly late / Later still / On time, with the customer and sales order behind it. This is the cost or the gain of the assumption. |
| Work-centre load by week | Utilisation before → after for every centre and week over the horizon, from the planned slots themselves. Changed cells are tinted; overloaded ones are red. In the example above, 16 h/day on the assembly bench took its busiest week from 72.5 % to 37.5 % and pulled eight orders earlier — and showed the enquiry was still bound by a different centre. |
A scenario never rewrites the live schedule — there is deliberately no “apply” button. If the answer is yes, raise the works order, record the downtime under the work centre, or change the centre’s hours; the scheduler and the Disruptions page take it from there.
Section 04
Tentative demand from quotes
2 minutes
Off by default. Turn it on and set a minimum win probability. From then on every draft or sent quote whose probability is at or above the threshold (and that has not expired) is planned as un-firm demand — the Dynamics 365 rule, where a master plan “includes sales quotations” above a probability percentage. A quote with no probability counts only when the threshold is 0.
Give each quote its two planning facts on the quote page — win probability % and requested date — when you create it or, for a sent quote whose prices are frozen, from the Planning strip on its detail page. Then:
| Where | What you see |
|---|---|
| Planning › Capacity | A hatched segment stacked on the firm booking in the week the quote is wanted (else its validity week), the hover showing hours and the utilisation with tentative included. Firm and tentative are never added into one number. |
| Tentative demand table | Under the bars: each qualifying quote with customer, probability, route hours, wanted date, and — from one run of the scheduler with the quotes queued behind the open orders — when it would start and finish and whether that is on time. If all of them landed and any firm order would be pushed late, it names those orders. |
| Scenarios | Tick Include tentative demand to plan with them. |
Tentative demand is visible load, not a reservation. The live schedule and promise dates (capable-to-promise) ignore quotes entirely, so a firm order is never delayed by an enquiry that may not come. When the quote converts to a sales order it leaves the tentative set and its works order is planned for real; when it is lost, rejected or expires it simply disappears.
Applying a scenario to the live schedule; material (MRP) simulation inside a scenario — scenarios are about capacity; cost or throughput differences; probability-weighted quantities; opportunity records (the probability sits on the quote itself); drawing tentative jobs on the Gantt; comparing several scenarios side by side.