Building a Planning Basket
Once you've decided which demand you want to act on, you gather it into a basket — a working list you build up and then act on all at once. Think of it like the shopping basket you fill as you walk the aisles: nothing is bought while it's in the basket, so you're free to add, remove and rethink until it looks right. When you're happy, you act on the whole basket in one go.
This page explains how to fill a basket and the choices you make for each line. Turning the basket into real orders is covered in Raising orders.
Availability depends on your plan and your role.
What a basket is
A basket is simply a list of the things you've decided to source, held in one place while you plan. You add demand to it from your review of what's needed, and for every line you answer one question: are you going to buy this, or make it yourself?
Because nothing happens until you act on the basket, you can take your time. Add a few lines, change your mind, split one across two suppliers, come back tomorrow — the basket waits for you. It only becomes real orders when you choose to raise it.
The one choice per line: Buy or Make
Every line in the basket has a direction — Buy or Make. This is the heart of planning: for each thing you need, you decide whether it comes from a supplier or from your own workshop.
| Direction | Choose it when… |
|---|---|
| Buy | Someone else supplies the finished thing — you're purchasing it in. |
| Make | You produce it yourself from parts and a recipe. |
Pick the direction, then fill in the few details that go with it, described below.
When you Buy: back-to-back or drop-ship
If you're buying a line, you choose how the goods reach your customer. There are two ways, and the difference is simply whether the goods pass through your own warehouse.
| Way to buy | What happens | Choose it when… |
|---|---|---|
| Back-to-back | You buy it in, receive it into your warehouse, then ship it to your customer. | You want to check, store or combine the goods before they go out. |
| Drop-ship | The supplier ships it straight to your customer — it never touches your warehouse. | You want the fastest route and don't need to handle the goods yourself. |
Then, for the buy line, you pick the supplier and set the expected price — what you expect to pay. This is your planning figure; you'll get a chance to confirm it before anything is committed.
Splitting one line across suppliers
Sometimes no single supplier can give you everything, or you want to spread an order. A single buy line can be split between two or more suppliers — for example, 60 units from one supplier and 40 from another. You set how much goes to each, and each share carries its own supplier and expected price. When you later act on the basket, each supplier's share becomes its own order.
When you Make: recipe, route and components
If you're making a line yourself, you tell Bizconnekt two things about how it's built:
- Its recipe — the list of parts that go into the product. (This is its bill of materials, or BOM: what the product is made of.)
- Its production route — the path the job takes on the floor, step by step, to turn those parts into the finished product.
Deriving the components — so nothing is forgotten
Here's the choice that saves the most work: when you make something, you can derive its components. Choosing to make one item automatically adds buy-or-make demand for the parts it needs, straight into your basket.
So if you decide to make a product and it needs three sub-parts, deriving pulls those three into the basket for you — and now you can choose, for each one, whether to buy it or make it too. Nothing that the product depends on slips through the cracks, because the basket fills itself down the chain as you decide.
A worked example
Say a customer needs 100 finished units and you have none in stock. In your basket you might:
- Set the finished product to Make, choose its recipe and route, and derive its components.
- One derived part you set to Buy, drop-ship it, pick a supplier and an expected price.
- Another derived part you set to Buy, but split it — 60 from your usual supplier, 40 from a backup — and give each an expected price.
- A third part you already make in-house, so you set it to Make too.
Nothing has been ordered yet. The basket now holds the whole plan, ready to become real orders when you say so.
Related guides
- Demand planning — how the whole planning flow fits together
- Reviewing demand — deciding what needs acting on before you build a basket
- Raising orders — turning your basket into purchase orders and work orders
- Bill of materials — the parts list behind a made item
- Production — how making your own goods works
Need help? Contact support at support@bizconnekt.com