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What this page is for

The Planning overview is the top-down view of your plan. Instead of one product at a time, it rolls the whole plan up across your hierarchy and lays it out as a time series - one column per period, with headers like “Sep 25,” “Oct 25,” and so on. You can read it in units or currency. It’s built for leadership and S&OP review (Sales & Operations Planning) - the monthly conversation about whether the plan hangs together, where cash and risk sit, and how the forecast compares to the goal. Individual planners use it to sanity-check the aggregate before drilling into product-level screens.

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What you see

Each row is a metric; each column is a period. Reading a row left to right shows you its trend over the horizon.

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How to read it

Follow the trend across the columns, not just any single cell:
  • Inventory and coverage (WOS/DOS) drifting down period over period is an early warning that the plan tightens later in the horizon.
  • Forecast gap shows whether the plan is chasing or falling short of leadership’s target - a widening gap is a talking point for the S&OP meeting.
  • Stockout risk and expiry risk point at the two failure modes: too little stock (lost margin) and too much of the wrong stock (value written off). Watch which one grows.
  • Cash requirements lines up spend against the calendar so finance can see the peaks coming.
Switch between units and currency depending on the audience - operations often think in units, leadership in dollars.

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Weighted coverage

WOS - start / end and DOS - start / end pool the stock and the demand of every product in your selection. A slow seller with plenty of stock then “covers” a best seller that is about to run out, and the row looks healthier than the shelf. The weighted rows look at each product on its own. For every period, they take each product’s own coverage - the value its row shows when you expand the metric into products - and weight it by the product’s share of the units sold (its sales forecast). Products that sell a lot count a lot. Which months set the shares is your choice: open Display and pick Weighted by sales of - this month, 3, 6 or 12 months. The window moves with the columns. The start of March weights by the units sold from March on, and the end of March from April on, so the end of one month is the start of the next. The rows show the window you picked after their name. A few rules decide which products count:
  • A product that sells but has no stock and no incoming supply counts with 0. It pulls the weighted coverage down, which is the point.
  • A product that sells nothing in the window does not count. That includes raw materials and WIP, and products that only sit in stock.
  • A product with nothing to cover (no demand left against its stock) is left out, and the others’ shares grow.
  • A month in which no product sells shows -.
MOS is the weighted weeks divided by 4.33, so stock that covers exactly one month of demand reads as 1.0. The Total column shows the average of the months on screen, like WOS and DOS. Expanding a weighted row into groups weights each group’s products only. Each product row shows that product’s own coverage. Example: three products sell 50%, 30% and 20% of the units. Their own coverage is 3, 4 and 11 months of stock. The weighted MOS is (3 × 0.5) + (4 × 0.3) + (11 × 0.2) = 4.9 months.

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Obsolete inventory

The Planning overview counts the products you plan (finished goods with a forecast and, with Include BOM components, active raw materials and WIP) plus the stock of obsolete products. A product, active or inactive, is obsolete when:
  • it has stock on hand,
  • it has no forecast from the current month on, and
  • no open or recommended production (work orders, purchase orders, assembly builds) uses it.
That is the rule behind the Cockpit’s Obsolete stock alerts. The Cockpit’s Current overstock alerts leave obsolete products out, since all their stock is already flagged as obsolete. Switch on Exclude obsolete inventory under Display to leave it out. The obsolete stock adds to every stock row: Inventory - start / end, WOS / DOS / MOS, Supply (open orders still arriving for obsolete products) and Expiry risk. Nothing sells it, so it stays the same from month to month, and WOS, DOS and MOS go up. The weighted coverage rows, COGS, the sales forecast and stockout risk do not change. Obsolete raw materials and WIP count only while Include BOM components is on. In the chart, the obsolete part of each inventory bar is shown in pale yellow at its top, above the in-use stock in yellow. Hover a bar to see the total, the in-use and the obsolete amount. When you expand a stock row into its products, obsolete products carry an Obsolete label next to their name.

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Example

In an S&OP review, the team scans the Sales forecast and Target rows and sees a forecast gap opening up in Q4: the plan is 8% under the goal. The Stockout risk row rises in the same months, and Cash requirements spikes in October. Together those three rows frame the decision - pull supply in, or accept the shortfall - before anyone opens a product-level report.
Tip: Start every review at the aggregate here, spot the two or three periods that look off, then drill into Inventory metrics per product to find the SKUs driving them. See also Demand planning overview and Cash Requirements.