forecasts orders have to be u201c protected u201d from the existing sales orders at the plant locations this is realized by creating dummy forecast orders order type u201c fa u201d which are immediately consumed by the existing sales orders thereby preventing a consumption of the sourced forecast orders in one embodiment after the dummy forecast orders have been created and the open forecast has been calculated these values are provided to an optimizer within the snp module 203 which at 304 attempts to source the open forecast in the most efficient manner possible given the current material and resource constraints the snp optimizer is a well known component of the snp module 203 of apo an exemplary allocation of the open forecast is illustrated in fig5 a which shows 20 units of the open forecast sourced from plant p 1 and 40 units of the open forecast sourced from p 2 as indicated in the table in fig5 b this results in a total allocation i e sourced forecast sales orders of 30 from plant p 1 and 70 from plant p 2 in one embodiment of the invention the snp module 203 does not create the forecast orders directly rather it creates u201c transportation orders u201d representing the forecast orders which would normally be processed by the tpns module 204 the forecast sourcing module 200 then intervenes and converts the transportation orders into forecast orders with descriptive characteristics the descriptive characteristics provide a means to identify the customer location associated with.