8. Attention: tasks and the alert bar

MRP is only useful if it tells you things before they hurt. The task list is how it does that, and the dashboard is where it lives; the most urgent task also rides at the top of every page.

Where tasks come from

Every night (and whenever a planner presses Refresh tasks) the generators look at stock, purchasing and production and write down what needs a human:

• a part below its reorder point once what is on order is subtracted — link to replenishment
• a sent order past its expected date with lines outstanding — link to the order
• a finished good below its reorder point that cannot be built from stock, naming the missing component — link to its BOM
• a work order waiting at a step because a component is short at the order's location — link to the order

Integrations push their own — "Printer 2: clear the bed" — through the API.

Every message is meant to be specific about the action, and every link goes to the page that does it, prefilled where possible. A task that says "look at the widget page" and shows you nothing is a bug; report it.

Snooze and done

Regeneration never duplicates a task and never un-snoozes one, so snooze — the × on the bar, the clock on the dashboard — is the right response to "I know": a week's silence, then it comes back if the condition still holds, or resolves itself if it doesn't. Done resolves it by hand, which for a generated task only makes sense when you know the generator will agree tomorrow.

Alert fatigue is real. If the list is long and you have stopped reading it, the fix is usually reorder points: parts flagged that you genuinely buy ad hoc should have their minimum set to zero.

Next: integrations.