For food & drink producers
Supply planning software that also does the buying
Supply planning software turns your demand into a plan your suppliers can actually deliver. Leio does that continuously on top of your ERP — netting requirements against stock and open orders, applying lead times and minimums, then raising and chasing the purchase orders the plan needs.
What supply planning software does
Supply planning software answers one question repeatedly: given what we intend to sell and make, what has to be ordered, and by when? It nets gross requirements against stock and everything already on order, applies the constraints that make an order real — lead time, minimum order quantity, pallet or tanker multiples, shelf life — and produces dated, buyable quantities.
That is the whole job in one sentence, and it is why supply chain planning systems are usually sold as something far grander than they are. The difficulty was never the arithmetic. It is that the inputs move daily and live in four places, so the answer is stale before anyone acts on it.
Supply planning vs demand planning
Demand planning forecasts what customers will buy. Supply planning decides how to meet it. The forecast is a question about the market; the supply plan is a question about your suppliers, your stock and your lead times — and it is the half that generates work every single day. A wrong forecast costs you margin. An unbought ingredient stops the line. We wrote a longer comparison insupply planning vs demand planning.
The four things a supply plan has to get right
- Net requirements. Gross demand minus stock minus confirmed incoming, per item, per date. Get the dates wrong and everything downstream is fiction.
- Cover. How much buffer each item carries, and why. Safety stock is a decision about variability, not a number someone typed in 2019 — seethe safety stock formula.
- Constraints. Lead time, minimum order quantity, order multiples, shelf life. A requirement of 620 kg against a 1,000 kg minimum is not a 620 kg order.
- Execution. The order sent, confirmed, chased and reconciled against the date it was promised for. Plans that stop before this are advice.
A worked example
An ingredient runs at 500 kg a week. The supplier quotes a three-week lead time, and you hold 400 kg of safety stock to absorb the weeks when both usage and delivery drift. The reorder point is therefore 500 × 3 + 400 = 1,900 kg: below that, an order placed today only just covers the wait.
Now the supplier confirms an order for the Friday of week 4 rather than week 3. The reorder point has not changed, but the cover has: one week of the buffer is now spoken for before the delivery lands. Multiply that by 300 purchased items and you have the reason planners work weekends. The calculation is trivial; keeping it current across every item, every time a supplier replies, is not.
Three ways producers do this
| Spreadsheet | Enterprise suite | Leio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first answer | Already there | Months of setup | Connect ERP and mailbox |
| Who runs it | One person | A planning team | Runs itself, planner approves |
| Refresh | Weekly, by hand | Nightly batch | Continuous |
| Supplier email | Read by a human | Outside the system | Read and applied |
| Sends the order | No | Sometimes | Yes, on approval |
| Built for | Whoever built it | Large manufacturers | Food & drink producers |
What Leio adds
Leio is a supply planning agent rather than a planning suite. It keeps the plan live and then does the work the plan implies, which is where the hours actually go.
- One live plan across ERP and inbox
- Stock and open orders from Dynamics 365, Cin7, Unleashed, Xero or QuickBooks; confirmations and delays from Gmail or Outlook. Both feed the same plan.
- Orders drafted against the constraints
- Quantities that respect minimums and multiples, dates that respect the lead time the supplier actually keeps rather than the one in the master data.
- Chasing, done
- Unconfirmed orders get followed up. Replies get read. The plan moves when the answer does.
- Exceptions, not dashboards
- You get told when cover breaks for something scheduled — with the batch it threatens and the dates that caused it. The planner decides what to do.
"A system like this, for the lack of better phrase is idiot proof"
Nick
Supply Chain Director
Supply planning software FAQs
What is supply planning software?
Supply planning software turns demand into a supply plan: what to buy or make, in what quantity, from which supplier, arriving by when. It nets requirements against stock and open orders, applies constraints such as lead times and minimum order quantities, and produces the orders that keep production covered.
How is supply planning different from demand planning?
Demand planning forecasts what customers will buy. Supply planning works out how to meet that forecast — the materials, the timing and the orders. Demand planning is a question about the market; supply planning is a question about your suppliers, your stock and your lead times.
Do supply chain planning systems replace an ERP?
No. The ERP holds stock, suppliers, purchase orders and costs, and stays the system of record. A supply planning system reads that data, decides what should happen next, and writes the resulting orders back. Replacing an ERP to fix planning is an expensive way to solve the wrong problem.
We already run MRP in our ERP. Why add anything?
An MRP run is a calculation, executed on demand, against whatever master data was last maintained. It produces a list. It does not send the orders, read the supplier replies that change the answer, or tell you when a confirmed date stops covering the batch it was bought for. Most of a planner's week is spent in that gap.
How much data do we need before this works?
Stock, suppliers, lead times, open purchase orders and recipes or bills of materials — the data your ERP already holds. Lead times and minimum order quantities are usually the stale ones, and Leio surfaces where its own assumption disagrees with what suppliers actually do rather than quietly planning on a wrong number.
Is this only for food and drink manufacturers?
That is what it is built for. Short shelf life, batch recipes, supplier minimums and retailer commitments shape every decision in the product. Manufacturers outside food use it, but the defaults assume a producer with perishable inputs.
Related: food manufacturing software, purchase order automation, and on the blog, what supply chain planning is and the planning process step by step.
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