Morning: the health pulse
David opens the Cockpit and reads the three KPI (Key Performance Indicator) cards as his morning pulse: Availability, Inventory value, and Overstock value. If availability slid or inventory ballooned overnight, he wants to know before anyone asks. He skims the Exceptions queue to see what’s landing on his planners’ desks, but he doesn’t work the individual rows — that’s their job. See Cockpit KPIs.Approvals: the checks he owns
David holds the approver permission, so a few things route to him. In his Inbox — the sidebar task feed — he finds ” needs approval → You were asked to approve this PO.” His planners set purchase orders to Pending Approval when they cross a threshold, and that lands with him. Approving a PO (Purchase Order) isn’t a special accept-or-reject button — there’s no such thing on a purchase order. He reviews the order, and if it’s sound he advances its status from Pending Approval to placed. That move notifies the creator (“It was approved!”) and lets the order proceed to the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning system). The same goes for transfer orders, which route to him the same way. Work orders are stricter. Each one carries an explicit review step — Approved or Not approved yet — and a work order must be approved before it can be written to the ERP. David opens each pending build, checks the quantity and timing against demand, and marks it Approved so his planner can commit it. See Work orders.Note: Approval on a PO is the status advance — there is no separate accept/reject control. Only work orders have an explicit Approved / Not approved yet gate.
Midday: consensus and the demand plan
David is also the S&OP (Sales & Operations Planning) manager, which makes the demand plan grid his workspace — there is no separate “meeting screen,” the grid itself is where consensus gets built. He reads across the metric ladder: Target (leadership’s top-down goal), Baseline (the statistical forecast), Baseline Adj. (Baseline plus the included S&OP lines — derived, never typed), and Consensus (the agreed number). Unlike the other planners, David can edit Consensus and Target cells inline and bulk-adjust where a whole category needs to move. He works through the adjustments his planners have proposed — each with a required reason — Accepting the well-justified ones and Rejecting those that don’t hold up. Throughout, he watches the Forecast Gap vs Target: where Consensus and Target drift apart, the business and the plan disagree, and that’s the conversation he needs to lead. Where he’s confident, he edits Consensus himself to settle it.Afternoon: executive reporting
Leadership wants numbers, and David gets them from Views → Reports — ready-made analytics he doesn’t have to configure.- Planning overview — the aggregate picture: inventory, DOS (Days of Supply), COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), stockout risk, and cash. He toggles between units and money depending on who’s asking.
- Cash Requirements — a projection of spend, split into Confirmed vs Planned, so Finance can see committed cash versus what’s still just recommended.
- Supplier spend — spend by supplier year over year, which tells him where his concentration risk sits and whether any one supplier has grown too large a share.
Oversight: reviewing before it’s committed
Late in the day, one of his supply planners asks him to look at a scenario — a what-if copy of the plan modeling a large promotion — before anything is committed to the live plan. David compares it against baseline: which stockout alerts change, how the metrics move, what the next recommended PO looks like per product. He agrees with the call, gives the nod, and the planner commits it. That’s David’s day: not placing orders, but making sure the ones that get placed are the right ones — approvals cleared, consensus set, and leadership seeing the same truth he does.Tip: For the shared vocabulary behind all of this, see Key concepts.