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.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.| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
| Inventory — start / end | Inventory on hand at the start and end of each period. |
| WOS — start / end | Weeks of Stock (how many weeks your inventory covers) at the start and end of the period. |
| DOS — start / end | Days of Stock, the same coverage read in days, at the start and end. |
| COGS | Cost of Goods Sold — forecasted units × unit cost. |
| Consumption | Demand that draws stock down for raw materials or production. |
| Sales forecast | Your consensus forecast — the agreed demand plan. |
| Target | The top-down goal from leadership. |
| Forecast gap (abs / %) | The difference between forecast and target, shown as an absolute number and a percentage. |
| Supply | Incoming stock, from purchase orders. |
| Cash requirements | Cash needed, by month, to cover incoming supply. |
| Stockout risk | Revenue at risk from potential stockouts. |
| Expiry risk | Inventory value at risk from lots expiring before they’re used or sold. |
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 revenue) 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.
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.