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Autoplan is ION’s supply-planning workspace. You give it a demand, a quantity of a top-level part needed by a due date, and it explodes the part’s released bill of materials, nets every component against on-hand inventory and open orders, and proposes the supply actions that close the gaps: draft purchase orders for buy parts and draft runs for make parts. You find it under Supply Chain > Autoplan. Autoplan never changes your factory on its own. Everything it proposes is a draft inside the plan until you review it and commit it, at which point ION creates real draft purchase orders and runs. See Create and apply a plan.

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Demand and supply

A plan starts from a single demand: the top-level part, the quantity, and the due date. Autoplan derives everything else from that demand and the part’s released BOM, rolling the required quantity down through every level of the assembly. Supply is what already covers that demand: available inventory, on-order purchase orders, and runs linked to the plan. Your organization’s demand settings control how demand is calculated and what counts as supply, for example whether uncommitted purchase orders count. See Configure demand settings.

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How Autoplan proposes supply

For each component in the plan, Autoplan compares the requirement against supply and assigns an action: Each line also carries a coverage verdict that tells you how urgent it is: Autoplan schedules each line backward from the due date using lead times, producing an order-by date, slack, and a critical-path flag. In the plan’s Build tree view, each assembly also shows a Clear to build read: Clear when every child component is covered, Blocked when at least one is not. That is your signal for whether an assembly can start today.

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Plan lifecycle

A plan moves through a small set of states, shown as a status pill on the plan:
  1. Ready: the plan is staged. Autoplan has resolved the BOM, and you review the demand, planning assumptions, and part policies before running it.
  2. Running: the engine is computing the plan.
  3. In progress: results are ready. You work the plan, staging proposals into a draft package and committing them to ION.
  4. Failed: the plan could not be generated. The reason is shown, and you can retry.
  5. Archived: the plan is closed and read-only. Archiving lets you release the plan’s unconsumed inventory allocations back to available supply, or keep them reserved.
Two actions move a plan forward inside that lifecycle:
  • Refresh re-pulls live supply from ION and recomputes the same plan in place. The plan header shows a “Supply as of” timestamp so you know how current the picture is. Refresh after anything changes in your supply chain or on the floor.
  • Committing the staged package creates the proposed purchase orders and runs in ION. Purchase orders are created in draft status, so nothing is issued to a supplier until you take the normal purchasing steps.

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Planning assumptions and part policies

Every plan carries a set of planning and purchasing assumptions: spare quantity, minimum stock, attrition rate, minimum batch quantity, buffer lead days, and more. Plan-wide defaults are set when you create the plan, and each part can override them individually. These policies change the quantities and dates Autoplan proposes, and the plan shows you the exact effect of each value. See Edit part policies in a plan.