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So you're looking to improve the financial performance of your company. You've looked around and heard a lot about MRP software. You have also heard about ERP software. MRP is specific to materials and ERP is system wide. Can you get more than just MRP software without going enterprise wide? The answer could be MRP II software. MRP II software adds some of the missing functionality in an ERP system, without the cost or need to reorganize the entire company. Probably the main building block of any MRP system is the Bill of Material. Like the venerable spreadsheet, the Bill of Material contains all of the material needed for the job including raw material, components and sub assemblies. Also entered into the MRP software are job constraints such as time to make each part or each step, as well as an order quantity. This allows the MRP software to plan for the job, but missing is the ability to plan capacity. You know what it takes to make it, but without planning you could schedule more that you could make. There are two important outputs from MRP; a material order, and a shop routing. These are retained in MRP II. In MRP, The material order is run at intervals and will show when to buy material for this job, along with other material for jobs in the system; allowing planned material buys, which prevent cash form being utilized before it is actually needed. This can happen daily with a few mouse clicks or even self-launching macro. So how does that compare to the MRP II world? The MRP would still have bills of materials and still produce routers, but these would be integrated into a balanced schedule. The need to run MRP reports, and then schedule equipment is eliminated.As for the router, these would not be significantly changed; routers can be formatted as simple as a sequential order of operations, combined with a material list, to a detailed step-by-step narrative, including comments to support manufacture and quality assurance. Then, when each step is completed, information is reported back to the system. This allows the job and due date to be tracked, and any shortages trigger actions to notify the customer or begin work to replace the shortage. Comparing this to the spreadsheet current spreadsheets world; a job is put out on the floor with a (spreadsheet) router. The router is followed and the manufacturing process goes along. At each step, a daily log is completed, and brought to a production meeting. In many cases a data entry operator then takes the information and updates each job. Along with this is an exceptions log for fallout from the process. Time, delay and opportunity for error abound, not to mention all of the labor to back up the process. All of these affect the ability to schedule machines, a feature that is well handled by MRP II software. Increasingly, businesses seem to go one-way or the other, either MRP software or ERP software. There remains however the exception in between, MRP II. David Kraft specializes in articles aimed at helping companies select new software. For more information about MRP software you can visit his site where he helps businesses choose between the numerous MRP and ERP software packages on the market.
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