MRP Software Systems
There are a whole raft of different ERP and MRP software systems available on the market. While they all have different strengths and weaknesses and target different markets they are all follow the same underlying MRP logic. MRP systems have been around for as long as there have been computers powerful enough to do the MRP calculations in a sufficiently compressed timescale. MRP ‘runs’ for small and medium-sized manufacturers of products having fairly complex BOMs / bills have shrunk from needing to be done over a weekend to nowadays MRP runs taking under an hour.
MRP stands for material requirements planning and started life as a inventory control software system, MRP is effectively a big calculator that determines how much to buy of what items and at when. In working out a manufacturer's purchasing schedule the MRPP system takes into account, on-hand quantity (OHQ), current and future demand for the item across all the different levels of the BOMs of products being manufactured and also any outstanding orders for the part i.e. purchase orders that have not been received yet. MRP extended to MRP II when manufacturing resources were taken into account during the planning stage (i.e. finite capacity was assumed rather than infinite capacity) and MRP II has since been further extended, to ERP, to cover all aspects of a business rather than just particular functions of manufacturing companies.
