ManuPlan

New Product Development, Idea to Commercialisation : Turn the new product conversation into a governed pipeline. A structured brief captures what a food developer actually needs — product type, flavour profile, texture, usage and storage temperature, heat, bake, freeze and thaw stability, certification and labelling requirements, packaging format and barrier needs — and then moves through a stage-gated workflow from draft to commercialised. Each stage is owned by the departments entitled to it, from sales and business development through R&D, QC, production and finance to management, with the permitted actions set in a configurable approval matrix. Along the way the request carries its own formulation and trial bills of material, trial batches and samples, and expiring, single-use links that let a customer give feedback on a sample without needing an account. Commercialisation requires business development, R&D and finance all to approve; a request that will not work is killed explicitly against a recorded reason rather than quietly abandoned, so the drop rate is measurable.

Master Data & Product Catalogue : A single reference layer every module points at — finished products with batch size, safety stock and shelf life, raw materials with reorder level, minimum order quantity, pack size and lead time, packaging items, and multi-level bills of material including component substitutes and packaging BOM. Supporting configuration is maintained in-app rather than in code: warehouses, production lines, units of measure with conversion factors, markets and commercial terms, customers and vendors, and a product coding scheme that generates codes to your own convention.

Sales Orders & Customer Pricing : Capture demand against a customer master that carries channel, commercial terms and credit limit. Pricing resolves automatically through a clear hierarchy — a customer-specific price overrides an explicitly assigned pricing policy, which in turn overrides the policy covering that customer's channel — with base price, operating profit percentage and either a percentage or fixed-amount discount computed into a selling price. As an order is entered, ManuPlan flags what a supervisor would want to know: a line priced below list, a quantity under the minimum order, or a total that would push the customer past their credit limit against open orders. These surface as warnings for a human to judge, not silent blocks.

Purchasing, Approvals & Vendors : Run procurement from need to order. Purchase requests can be suggested directly from live reorder positions — every active raw material below its safety stock target, with the suggested quantity already rounded up to pack size and minimum order quantity — then converted to purchase orders against a vendor master. Approval is driven by value: an approval matrix maps amount bands per module to the role that must sign, so a routine order clears quickly while a large commitment escalates automatically. Purchase orders reference through to goods received, closing the loop between what was ordered and what arrived.

Goods Received & Auto-Replenishment : Structured inbound receiving with supplier batch and expiry tracking, purchase order reference and a Draft → Confirmed → Cancelled lifecycle, updating inventory balances the moment a receipt is confirmed. For teams that want to stay ahead of shortfalls, a single action generates receipts to bring every raw material up to a target percentage of its safety stock — 120% by default, adjustable — so the store is topped up before a line stops rather than after.

Material Issue & Return : Manage the flow from warehouse to production floor. A material issue checks real stock availability before allocating against a work order and deducts balances on confirmation, blocking the confirmation outright when stock is short rather than allowing the balance to go negative. Material returns reverse those deductions when unused material comes back, so the warehouse figure stays true. Printable issue slips are produced for every transaction, ready to sign on the floor.

Finished Goods Receipt : Book completed output off the line with batch, production date and expiry captured at the point of receipt, linked back to the production plan or work order that produced it. On confirmation the finished goods balance rises automatically — closing the loop from plan through execution to sellable stock.

Inventory Control & Stock Ledger : Real-time stock on hand across raw material, packaging, production floor and finished goods warehouses, with a Stock Overview that summarises total items, zero stock, below-safety and healthy positions and badges each item accordingly. Behind it sits the stock ledger: every goods receipt, issue, return, finished goods receipt, transfer, adjustment and count variance recorded as a movement with a running balance, filterable by item, warehouse and date range. No balance in the system exists without the movements that produced it.

Cycle Counts & Stock Adjustments : Keep inventory accurate without shutting the plant for a full stock take. Cycle counts are run blind — the system quantity and the resulting variance stay hidden from the counter until the count is completed — so the number recorded is what was actually on the shelf. Completing a count posts each variance to the ledger as its own movement. Separately, manual corrections run through a formal stock adjustment with a reason code and a confirmation step, so no balance changes without a justification attached.

Production Planning & Delivery Schedules : Plan output by day across multiple production lines for the month ahead, with ManuPlan using bill of materials data to calculate the raw material requirement of the plan automatically — so a shortfall is visible while there is still time to buy, not on the morning of the run. Delivery schedules keep the commitment side in view alongside the plan, and plans convert directly into work orders so scheduling intent becomes operational instruction without re-keying.

Work Orders : The document that drives the day. Created directly or generated from a plan, each work order explodes its bill of materials to state exactly which materials and quantities the batch needs, follows a Draft → Confirmed → Cancelled lifecycle, prints as a floor-ready sheet, and links forward to the material issues that fed it and the finished goods receipt that closed it — a complete trace from plan to output.

Reporting & Analytics : Operational reporting built on the same ledger the transactions write to, so the report and the balance can never disagree. The Stock Movement report reads across every item for any date range, filtered by item type and paginated for long periods; the Material Issued report shows what actually went to production over a period, filtered by date range, warehouse and document status — the consumption view planners and cost controllers ask for. Inventory reporting breaks stock out by raw material, finished goods and packaging with status badges for zero-stock, below-safety and healthy positions, backed by the full Stock Ledger and its running balance, filterable by item, warehouse and date. On the planning side, a plan's bill of materials summary turns a month's schedule into its total raw material requirement in a single view. An at-a-glance dashboard opens on the numbers that decide the day — materials tracked, items below safety stock, depleted items, finished goods holding stock — alongside low-stock alerts, recent activity, recent goods received and one-click actions straight into the documents those numbers imply. Reports and floor documents alike carry clean print layouts, ready to file or sign.

Built-In Assistant & Knowledge Base : An optional assistant, enabled per deployment, that answers questions in plain language from inside the application — both about how the system works and about your own operational data. Administrators upload the reference material that grounds it, and answers are drawn from that knowledge base together with read-only lookups against your records. It is advisory by design: it reads and explains, it does not post transactions or change data, so the accountability model is unchanged.

Security, Roles & Audit : Access is controlled module by module and action by action across every functional area, and security roles are built and edited in the application rather than requested from IT. Each role additionally controls menu visibility, so a user's sidebar shows only what their job requires, and the same rules are enforced on the server so a hidden screen is a blocked request, not merely an invisible link. Sign-in uses short-lived access tokens with refresh rotation, document numbering is configured per record type, and a full audit log records user actions across the system for operational and compliance review.

Development and Production in One System : Most PPIC products begin at the point a product already exists. ManuPlan starts a step earlier, at the customer request, and carries the same record through formulation, trials, approval and commercialisation into routine manufacture — so the specification that was approved is the specification that gets made.

Built for Food Manufacturing : Batch and expiry tracking, shelf life, storage and stability requirements, certification and labelling needs, and recipe-driven planning are first-class concepts rather than custom fields bolted onto a generic warehouse product.

End-to-End Control : New product development, sales, purchasing, receiving, issue and return, production planning, work orders, finished goods and reporting sit in one platform on one set of masters — so there are no gaps between modules for a number to get lost in.

Approvals Built In, Not Bolted On : Purchasing escalates by value through a matrix the business configures itself, and new product gates are owned by named departments. Authority limits and separation of duties are enforced by the platform rather than by convention or email.

Every Number Can Be Explained : Stock sits on a movement ledger with a running balance, adjustments carry reason codes, cycle-count variances post as their own entries, and every user action is written to an audit log. Any figure on screen can be traced back to the transactions that made it.

Ahead of the Shortfall : Safety stock and reorder levels per material, plan-driven requirement calculation, low-stock alerting, and one-click replenishment that respects pack size and minimum order quantity mean material shortages are handled as planning decisions rather than production stoppages.

Compliance-First : Formal document lifecycles, batch and expiry traceability from receipt through production to finished goods, reason-coded corrections, printable sign-off documents for the transactions the floor actually signs, and a complete audit trail come as standard — no separate compliance tooling required.

Modern, Cloud-Ready Foundation : A production-ready platform built on current NestJS and Next.js technology over SQL Server, containerised for cloud deployment with health checks and graceful shutdown — engineered for the reliability, security and maintainability that manufacturing operations depend on.