The Six Demand Sources Behind Every Job in EDGEBIC

Every manufacturing order in EDGEBIC carries a demand source, a tag that records why the order exists. EDGEBIC by User Solutions uses six values: Customer, SalesOrder, Replenishment, Forecast, Manual, and Mps. The tag is the audit trail that lets any job be traced back to the demand that created it, and it is the reason an orphan job with no parent sales order still has a clear reason to exist. This post walks the six sources, explains what each means, and clears up the common confusion between an orphan job and a job with no demand.

Knowing the demand source of a job answers questions a schedule alone cannot: did this order come from a customer commitment, a stock-out projection, or a planner typing it in by hand? That answer changes how you treat the job. For the wider planning layer, see the inventory and planning pillar; for how demand sources fit the generic planning vocabulary, see what a demand source is in production planning.

Why Jobs Carry a Source at All

A manufacturing order is a decision to spend capacity and material. Weeks later, when someone asks why the shop is building 445 castings this Tuesday, the honest answer has to come from somewhere. The demand source is that somewhere. It is a small tag on the order, but it turns an anonymous job into a traceable decision.

The tag also makes the order book queryable by origin. You can list every replenishment order still open, every MPS-firmed build, or every hand-entered job, without inspecting each one. That is what lets a planner audit the plan: separate the jobs the system suggested from the jobs a human created, and confirm each is intended.

The Six Sources

The two that planners meet most often in a mature planning setup are Replenishment and Mps, because those are the tags on build-to-stock orders that the planning layer creates for you. The others cover customer-driven and hand-entered jobs.

Replenishment Versus MPS: Same Shape, Different Origin

Replenishment and Mps orders are worth comparing directly because they look identical on the shop floor and are easy to confuse. Both are build-to-stock orders. Both enter the finite-capacity scheduler exactly the same way. Both post a receipt into the inventory ledger when they complete. The difference is entirely in where the planner created them and what date logic applied.

A Replenishment order is firmed from the inventory calendar. When the projected balance for a make-to-stock product falls below its reorder trigger, the calendar shows a suggested quantity, and firming that suggestion creates the order. Its job number carries a REPL prefix.

An Mps order is firmed from the master production schedule grid. A planner commits a build quantity in a bucket, then firms it, and the order is created with a start date offset backward from the due date by the product's lead time. Its job number carries an MPS prefix.

If you see a REPL job and an MPS job for the same product, they are not automatically duplicates. They came from different paths and may cover different buckets. Check their quantities and due dates before assuming an overlap. The two firming paths are covered in how a forecast becomes a replenishment suggestion and from sales order to MPS to schedule.

Orphan Jobs: No Parent Order, Not No Demand

Here is the distinction that trips up planners: an orphan job is not a job with no demand source. An orphan job is a manufacturing order with no link to a parent sales order. Its sales-order link is simply empty. It can still carry a perfectly clear demand source.

That is the normal state for build-ahead stock. A Replenishment order builds ahead of specific customer orders, so it has no parent sales order and shows up as an orphan, yet its demand source clearly says Replenishment. The same is true of an Mps build and of many Manual jobs. EDGEBIC collects these unassigned jobs under an unassigned folder in the sales-order group view, precisely so a planner can see which jobs are not tied to a customer order.

So there are two independent facts about every job: whether it has a parent sales order, and what its demand source is. A build-to-stock replenishment order is an orphan (no parent) but has a strong demand source. A make-to-order job that should be linked to a customer order but is not is an orphan that probably does need attention. Reading the demand source tells you which case you are in. To find and work these jobs, see how to find orphan jobs with no demand.

A Worked Look at the Order Book

Imagine a product with three open jobs and read them by source.

All three are legitimate. The first is tied to a customer and will not appear in the unassigned folder. The second and third are orphans by design, build-ahead stock with no single customer, and both sit in the unassigned folder with clear demand sources. A planner scanning this book knows immediately why each job exists and whether each is expected.

Auditing the Plan by Source

The demand source turns the order book into something you can audit rather than merely list. A useful review is to group open jobs by source and sanity-check each group against what you expect. The SalesOrder and Customer groups should reconcile against the confirmed order book: every customer-tied job should trace to a real commitment. The Replenishment and Mps groups should reconcile against the planning layer: each build-to-stock job should correspond to a projected shortfall or a committed master-schedule quantity. The Manual group deserves the closest look, because a hand-entered job has no automatic demand behind it and exists purely because a planner decided it should.

This grouping also surfaces drift. If the Manual group is large, the shop may be working around the planning layer rather than through it, which is worth understanding. If Replenishment and Mps jobs both appear for the same product and cover overlapping buckets, that is a candidate for consolidation. The tag does not fix these situations by itself, but it makes them visible in a single grouped view instead of requiring each job to be opened and inspected.

Because the source is stamped at creation and never changes, the audit is stable over time. A job created as a replenishment build stays tagged Replenishment for its whole life, so a historical review months later still answers why the shop built it, long after the projected balance that triggered it has been overtaken by events.

Why the Tag Pays Off

The demand source is a small field with a large payoff in traceability. It lets you audit the plan by separating system-created builds from human-created ones. It lets you distinguish two identical-looking build-to-stock orders by their planning path. And it lets you read the unassigned folder correctly, treating a replenishment orphan as normal and a make-to-order orphan as a candidate to link.

None of this requires extra work from the planner, because the tag is stamped when each order is created. The value is purely in reading it later, when a job needs explaining. A schedule tells you what the shop is building; the demand source tells you why.

One habit ties it together. When a job puzzles you, read its demand source before you read anything else. The source answers the first and most useful question, which is why the job exists at all, and it frames every follow-up. A SalesOrder job sends you to the customer order. A Replenishment job sends you to the projected balance that dipped. An Mps job sends you to the committed master-schedule bucket. A Manual job sends you to the planner who created it. Starting from the source turns a confusing job into a short, definite trail rather than a guess.

To see how these different sources feed the same balance, read reading projected available balance across the horizon, and for the platform overview visit EDGEBIC.