In discrete manufacturing environments, the planning of certain products and resources can depend on the planned and/or actual output of the upstream bottleneck resources. This occurs in circumstances when a certain produced item is pushed trough a series of steps in the supply chain after its initial production.
Example is the treatment of a casted item which must be further processed until a certain finishing level.

An alternative solution frequently proposed in this case is to incorporate the subsequent production steps into a single route. This has however drawbacks
- Identification of the stock inbetween the production steps is not possible
- Maintenance of over- and under production which should be reflected in the next steps is insufficiently performed
- deviating production results are not covered (e.g. a different product quality is produced which requires different consecutive processing steps)
- switching between internal and external operations (e.g. due to capacity reasons) is not possible when production has already been started in the first operation
- transfers orders are not incorporated in this process
- Only a single production output can be assigned (e.g. finishing in different colors according to customer demand may be requested).


The idea consists of foreseeing a push planning logic (defined on item coverage level) which evaluates the (manual) planning of a specific product level (bottleneck) and which firms the planned orders of the next product levels (generated by master planning as usual) depending on this bottleneck planning. As well an initial planning (firming) as an update of the firm orders should be taken into account.

This idea will reduce the planning effort after a bottleneck resource and increase the consistency of the planning after deviating production results.