The story of Production Planner is really the story of how 32 Soft listens to QAD users and turns operational pain points into practical planning tools.
Our Production Planner has evolved into a powerful tool that generates 100% achievable production plans. As you’ll see in this timeline, each enhancement has been driven by a specific need in the manufacturing market: tighter inventory control, stronger capacity validation, better scheduling visibility, and faster decision-making.
2010 How It Began
Production Planner started in 2010 when a manufacturing customer wanted to streamline operations while keeping material inventory as low as possible. The first version focused on revealing component shortages for a list of work orders, using Excel-based what-if scenarios to test changes in dates, quantities, sequence, splits, merges, simulation orders, and holds.
This gave QAD users a practical way to compare existing and simulated work orders against available inventory, evaluate whether changes were achievable, and see exactly what would be required to make the plan work.
2015 Capacity Check strengthens confidence
By around 2015, manufacturers were facing increasing capacity constraints. Capacity Check functionality was added. This allowed users to run what-if scenarios in Excel and uncover both capacity constraints and material shortages, strengthening confidence in the production plan before execution.
2016 Schedule Graph View gives greater visibility
In 2016, the Schedule Graph View was added to give floor personnel a simple, visual way to understand what was happening in each work center. That made Production Planner more useful not just for planners, but also for the people carrying out the work.
Pandemic era: Feasibility analysis for tighter planning
When the pandemic introduced labor shortages, logistics disruptions, and supply chain instability, the need shifted again. We responded with a Feasibility Analysis Report that highlights weak spots in the plan, such as delayed purchase receipts or shortages in critical components, so users can plan around issues before they become schedule failures.
2022 Off-site inventory visibility for more accurate planning
As companies increased safety stock and moved inventory to off-site warehouse locations, Production Planner added off-site inventory visibility. This made it possible to calculate component availability and shortages more accurately across distributed storage environments.
2023 Hard demand vs. soft demand helps prioritize resources
In 2023, Production Planner added a hard-demand-versus-soft-demand differentiation. That helped planners prioritize production resources toward the most important orders and make better tradeoffs when supply or capacity was tight.
2025 Master Scheduling, Optimization, and Production Orders Pegging Monitor
In 2025, we introduced the Master Production Scheduling Dashboard to improve long-term visibility, short-term execution, and automated decision support. The dashboard provides a 28-day short-term planning window and a 28-week long-term planning window, with clear views of hard demand, soft demand, projected daily inventory balances, and capacity shortages.
Scheduling Dashboard benefits
- Improves resource planning up to 7 months ahead, including staffing, maintenance windows, and sales strategy adjustments.
- Supports inventory optimization by prioritizing hard demand over soft demand and maintaining safety buffer inventory.
- Increases capacity transparency by highlighting over-scheduling in real time and helping teams make realistic delivery promises.
The same year, Planned Order Optimization and Approval Workflow were added. The Plan2Firm function evaluates whether there is enough capacity for planned orders, while auto-leveling adjusts quantities and dates to fit available capacity. The system builds a scenario, and the planner can approve it or make corrections as needed.
Optimization benefits
- Speeds up the planned order firming process by smoothing spikes in capacity requirements.
- Supports better decision-making by suggesting scenarios while leaving final approval to the scheduler.
- Improves production output and resource utilization by reducing bottlenecks, lowering production cost, and supporting higher profit.
Production Order Pegging Monitor adds end-to-end visibility by linking specific sales orders to production orders, ensuring shop floor activity supports customer commitments.
Pegging Monitor benefits
- Improves customer service through more accurate delivery date estimates.
- Gives schedulers instant insight into which production delays affect high-value sales orders.
- Improves accountability by making bottlenecks in order fulfillment easier to identify.
Production planning is never just about making a schedule. It’s about balancing inventory, capacity, labor, customer commitments, and all the unexpected problems that come with manufacturing. The evolution of Production Planner shows a consistent pattern: 32 Soft builds around the realities QAD users face, then expands the solution as the manufacturing market changes. From shortage checking to capacity planning, from visual scheduling to optimization and pegging visibility, each step has been designed to help manufacturers build better plans, make faster decisions, and deliver with greater confidence.
