Each week's customer release read against the last, with your planner's calls on top.

Monday brings a truck plant's schedule, an appliance buyer's spreadsheet with weeks across the top, an HVAC customer's PDF and an email asking for a few hundred more by Thursday. Your planner holds each one against the last, works out what moved, checks what shipped and decides which lines mean a die change, a steel check or a phone call. Most of those hours go to finding the few lines that moved.

In the test, AI goes back through copies of release files your planner already worked and drafts a change report for each: every line that moved by part and date, the old and new quantity, whether the move falls inside that customer's firm window, any new revision, and whether the customer's cumulative count agrees with your ship history. Nothing is changed or sent. Your reviewer, the planner who knows these customers best, sets each report beside what your team actually did.

The file says what kind of number it holds, when it says anything. X12's 830 planning schedule, the file many truck plants send alongside an 862 shipping schedule, opens with two qualifiers most people never look at. One says whether the dates are shipment based, delivery based, planned, authorized, or a kanban signal. The other says whether the quantities are actual discrete, cumulative, net change or replacement. A cumulative column read as weekly demand is simply wrong, and a net change file read as a replacement wipes out the rest of the schedule. A spreadsheet or PDF rarely says which it is. So before the test your planner tells us what each customer's file means, and every report states the reading it used.

A frozen window is a term in somebody's agreement. One component maker's published logistics manual defines the frozen or firm period as the time when its order can no longer change, keeps separate periods for production release and material release, and has a field for how much change is allowed in each zone. Those numbers differ by customer and sometimes by part. One HVAC maker's published purchase terms ask for acknowledgment of each order or release within three business days, and treat conduct recognizing the order as acceptance, so a change your plant starts working on may be read as a yes. A pull-in inside the window can mean a die change on a booked press, a coil that is already spoken for and a plater who needs its time. The report marks every move inside each customer's window, in or out, with last week's figure beside it, and gives no legal reading of the terms.

Cumulative counts have a start date, and that is where they drift. X12's shipped and received segment, used in both the 830 and the 862, can report a cumulative quantity, and when it does it requires the count's start and end dates. It has separate codes for cumulative rejected material, by whether the disposition was replacement, credit or pending. One interior parts supplier's published 830 guide says its releases always carry a prior cumulative required and a cumulative received, and works the net due from those two and the buckets. Your system keeps its own count of what shipped. The two drift when a truck crosses the customer's cut-off, a ship notice never arrives, a rejection is booked on one side only, or one side resets at a new year or PO. The report sets the customer's number beside yours, shows the start date and lists the shipments in question.

Part status and revision news hide in the line. The 830 can carry a part release status, and parts of that code list read as if a stamper wrote them: die tie, mill run purchase, balance-out part with an engineering change pending, an all-time buy that is not to be taken as permission to scrap the tool, a new item from an interim engineering release, a final release for a cancelled part, cover overshipment and do not reship. An engineering change level can sit beside the part number. A spreadsheet says the same thing in a column note or not at all. The report lists every new revision, every run-out and every cancellation, and asks what you hold at the old level: coil, blanks, parts at the plater and finished stock.

Some lines need a phone call, and those go first. A change inside the firm window, a quantity that drops to zero, a cumulative difference, an email that disagrees with Monday's file, a new ship-to or dock code: each goes on one list with its reason. When an unforeseen event leaves a seller able to fill only part of its orders, section 2-615 of the Uniform Commercial Code has it allocate production and deliveries among customers in a fair and reasonable way and notify them seasonably. Whether a steel or press shortage qualifies, and which customer waits, is for your planner and your counsel. The report takes no side, and none of this is legal advice. Your reviewer checks each report against what your team did that week: every change caught, every call it listed, every line it missed.

After a yes, each new release file gets a change report as it arrives, for about 30 days.

Your planner decides every change, makes every call and updates your own system the way they do now. Nothing posts anywhere until a person approves it, and the comparison keeps running through the live month.