Resource planning

UAM-CUSE

Management Information Systems

MRP (Manufacturing resource planning)

Mr. Guillermo Jacob
Emmanuelle Chavarria

MRP and MRPII: History and evolution

Material requirements planning (MRP) and manufacturing resource planning (MRPII) are predecessors of enterprise resource planning (ERP), a business information integration system. The development of these manufacturingcoordination and integration methods and tools made today’s ERP systems possible. Both MRP and MRPII are still widely used, independently and as modules of more The vision for MRP and MRPII was to centralize comprehensive ERP systems, but the original vision of integrated information systems as we know them today began with the development of MRP and MRPII in manufacturing.

and integrate businessinformation in a way that would facilitate decision making for production line managers and increase the efficiency of the production line overall. In the 1980s, manufacturers developed systems for calculating the resource requirements of a production run based on sales forecasts. In order to calculate the raw materials needed to produce products and to schedule the purchase of those materials alongwith the machine and labor time needed, production managers recognized that they would need to use computer and software technology to manage the information. Originally, manufacturing operations built custom software programs that ran on mainframes.
Material requirements planning (MRP) was an early iteration of the integrated information systems vision. MRP information systems helped managersdetermine the quantity and timing of raw materials purchases. Information systems that would assist managers with other parts of the manufacturing process, MRPII, followed. While MRP was primarily concerned with materials, MRPII was concerned with the integration of all aspects of the manufacturing process, including materials, finance and human relations.

Like today’s ERP systems, MRPII wasdesigned to integrate a lot of information by way of a centralized database. However, the hardware, software, and relational database technology of the 1980s was not advanced enough to provide the speed and capacity to run these systems in real-time, (2) and the cost of these systems was prohibitive for most businesses. Nonetheless, the vision had been established, and shifts in the underlyingbusiness processes along with rapid advances in technology led to the more affordable enterprise and application integration systems that big businesses and many medium and smaller businesses use today (Monk and Wagner).

Manufacturing Resource Planning

Manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) is defined by APICS as a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company.Ideally, it addresses operational planning in units, financial planning in dollars, and has a simulation capability to answer "what-if" questions and extension of closed-loop MRP. The earliest form of manufacturing resource planning was known as material requirements planning (MRP). This system was vastly improved upon until it no longer resembled the original version. The newer version was sofundamentally different from MRP, that a new term seemed appropriate. Oliver Wight coined the acronym MRP II for manufacturing resource planning.
In order to best understand MRP II, one must have a basic understanding of MRP, so we will begin with a look at MRP and then expand into MRP II.
MRP and MRPII
Material requirements planning (MRP) is a computer-based, time-phased system for planning andcontrolling the production and inventory function of a firm from the purchase of materials to the shipment of finished goods. All MRP systems are computer based since the detail involved and the inherent burden of computation make manual use prohibitive. MRP is time phased because it not only determines what and how much needs to be made or purchased, but also when.
Material requirements planning...