Decide once, for the month ahead.

Material requirements planning is arithmetic: once everybody agrees what demand will be, working out what to order and when is mechanical. The hard part happens before that, in the argument about what demand will be — and that argument is usually held in three private spreadsheets belonging to sales, buying and the factory. Vantage Point's planning module puts it in one place, as a demand plan by product and branch that all three work from.

It also keeps score. The forecast scorecard reports forecast value added: whether each human adjustment to the statistical forecast actually made it better, per planner and per period. That is an uncomfortable number and a useful one, because a business that cannot tell whether its forecasting is any good cannot improve it. Buffer levels are sized from demand variability and lead time rather than from a figure typed in years ago and never revisited.

From the agreed plan, the buying plan says what to order and when given what is already on order and on the shelf, and the build plan and factory timetable lay out what the factory will make against the capacity it actually has. Scenarios let you test a decision — a large order, a lost supplier, a price move — before committing to it, and the monthly meeting screen records what was agreed, so the plan has a history rather than just a current state.