What Is a Gross Requirement in Manufacturing Planning?

A gross requirement is the total demand for an item in a period before any netting against on-hand inventory or scheduled receipts. It is the raw amount you need regardless of what you already have, like a recipe calling for 12 eggs before you check the fridge. Gross requirements come from sales orders and forecasts, and they cascade down through the bill of materials into the components that go into each end item.

This entry is part of the EDGEBIC by User Solutions glossary series; for the broader vocabulary of planning, see the manufacturing glossary.

How Gross Requirements Work

Gross requirement is the first number in the material planning arithmetic. It answers a simple question: how much of this item does the demand call for, before considering supply? For an end item, that demand is independent, arriving from customer orders and forecasts. For a component, the demand is dependent, derived from the end items it feeds.

The link between the two is the bill of materials. When an end item's gross requirement is known, it explodes into demand for every part and subassembly beneath it. A gross requirement of 500 finished assemblies becomes a gross requirement for the housings, brackets, fasteners, and raw stock those assemblies consume, level by level down the structure. At each level, the total pull before netting is that item's gross requirement.

Crucially, gross requirement ignores what you already have. That is deliberate. It is the honest statement of total demand, and only the next step, netting, brings supply into the picture. Confusing the two leads to over-building, because you would schedule the full demand even for items sitting on the shelf.

A Concrete Example

Suppose demand for a bracket comes to 500 units next month: that is the gross requirement. It does not matter yet that the stockroom holds 80 brackets or that a purchase order for 120 more is already on its way. Gross requirement records the full 500.

Netting then does the subtraction. On-hand of 80 plus scheduled receipts of 120 covers 200 of the demand, leaving a net requirement of 300. That 300 is what actually needs to be produced or purchased. Gross of 500, net of 300: the gap between them is exactly the supply you already have.

How EDGEBIC Uses It

In EDGEBIC, gross requirement is where demand netting begins. Demand for an end item, whether from a sales order or a forecast, represents the gross pull. Before that pull turns into new production, EDGEBIC nets it against available inventory so the schedule reflects the shortfall rather than the raw total.

That netting is the consume-from-stock behavior. When a job is planned, EDGEBIC draws down existing inventory first, so demand that can be satisfied from stock does not create redundant work. The scheduled quantity reflects the net requirement, the portion genuinely short, not the gross requirement that ignored the shelf. EDGEBIC also computes and stores the net figure so you can report on gross versus net at a glance.

Keeping gross and net distinct matters because they answer different questions. Gross tells you the total the market is asking for; net tells you how much of that you still have to make. Planning capacity against net keeps the schedule honest and stops you from consuming machine hours on units you already own. See how the subtraction works in consume-from-stock netting and its counterpart in what a net requirement is.

Related Reading

Gross requirement is the raw demand; its netted counterpart is net requirement, and the mechanism that subtracts supply is consume-from-stock netting. For the generic entry, see the gross requirements glossary.