In this paper, we present a distribution planning method for a supply chain. Like a typical distribution network of manufacturing firms, we have the form of arborescence. To consider more realistic situation, we investigated that an outside supplier has limited capacity. The customer demands are given in deterministic form in finite number of discrete time periods. In this environment, we attempt to minimize the total costs, which is the sum of inventory holding and backorder costs over the distribution network during the planning horizon. To make the best of the restricted capacity, we propose the look-ahead feature. For looking ahead, we convert this problem into a single machine scheduling problem and utilize tabu search approach to solve it. Numerous simulation tests have shown that the proposed algorithm performs quite well.