Production Planning
Name the delivery date. The plan works backwards.
Six months of plantings, back-calculated from what you promised to ship — against the capacity you actually have.
A spreadsheet plan will happily tell you that you can grow four hundred cases a week. It does not know that your nursery holds what it holds, that you do not run Sundays, or that a tray carrying two varieties is not the same as a tray carrying one. So the plan is a wish, and the shortfall turns up later as a phone call to a customer.
Production Planning runs a six-month horizon against the constraints that actually bind — nursery and rack capacity, operating days, mixed varieties sharing a tray. And it runs in the useful direction: output first. You set the delivery target, and the schedule back-calculates the plantings, the transplant dates and the harvest dates that get you there.
The plan is not a picture of the farm. It is the thing the farm runs on. Tasks generate from it, inventory demand is forecast against it, and the hours it will take are known before you commit to it.
Questions
The things people actually ask.
Can it plan more than one variety on a tray?
Yes. Mixed varieties are a first-class case rather than a workaround, because splitting a tray across two crops is how real farms cover small orders without giving up a rack.
What happens when the plan changes mid-cycle?
You change the target and the schedule re-flows. The tasks generated from it follow, so the day's work reflects the plan as it stands rather than the one that was printed on Monday.
Is the plan connected to what we have actually sold?
Yes. Committed demand from the order book — one-off orders and standing weekly deliveries — is the thing the plan is answering. Where the plan does not cover that demand, the Crop-Mix Advisor proposes the plantings that would.
See Production Planning on a real farm.
We'll walk an order all the way through to its margin — on live farm data, not a slide.