So we are trying to implement, and I'm running into some circular reasoning with scheduling based on orders (so I must not be understanding something). We are currently shipping about 30 days out. So when an order comes in, we want to set the expected ship date on the order to be 30 days from the day the order is placed. Then the system should be able to use that date for making the work orders we need to fulfill the order, so I don't have any supply planned yet. My implementation consultant is telling me that I the orders expected ship date is calculated by an available to promise, but we are building to order. I need the sales orders to give me a schedule, but I'm told I need a schedule to tell me when I can ship orders... Is there a way to flip the logic here?

my company that i started with recently works the same way, i will share some of my ideas/hurdle after call, i have in two minutes

We don't want to have a calculated or manual demand plan though. We just want to use actual orders to drive it.

Demand Planning will do the trick since you are entering Expected Ship Dates...

That's what I have, but if the line item on the sales order doesn't have an expected ship date, it uses the sales order created date. Not the sales order expected ship by date.

you dont need to use the available to promise feature...if you use demand plan...

Doesn't the demand plan try to forecast ahead of what we have in the system?

Unfortunately that's the downside of the Entered and Planned Orders and because you dont have enough data it's either you manually determine the supply plan outside netsuite and import it or another way is creating a search with some form of logic where say in your case we have SO date + 30 days that information we display in the search so you would know when and how much quantity for that item to purchase and then group it by item