Case

The important customer does not submit their orders to the company but there may be estimated volume the customer might require in the time of period. The estimated volume might come from the ordered quantity in the history.

Now the company already has other customer orders existing in the system. How the company are capable to reserve resource capacity and materials in Company Planner for the important customer estimated volume?

Solution

The solution might differs from actual situation. There are normally two ways to realize. 

Forecast

As you might recall something with "estimated volume". Yes, that is concept of Forecast. Company Planner(CP) normally acting as Master Production Planner and there is already concept of forecast in CP.  The reason that CP has forecast concept is indeed to drive the optimizer to consider the forecast quantity for each time of period.

Company Planner will take the forecast the same way as real orders in the system in optimizer runs. It will have supply orders and corresponding fulfillment so that you can check for each forecast how it is fulfilled in the supply chain just like a real order. 

In this way then we can even further to lock supplies for the forecast to exactly reserve material and capacity for important customers.

For more information about forecast in CP please refer to DELMIA Academy course:

DELMIA Academy - Course: Company Planner - How to use forecasts (v2017 Q2 5.4.2.1) (quintiq.com)

Stocking Order

In some customer they can create Stocking Order in ERP. The Stocking Order is just like a normal order that released to Company Planner and then in Company Planner will treat exactly the same as normal orders.