Effective Planning of Materials Management

Production is one of the most basic and important functions of human activity. It creates the wealth of nations and is central to many business strategies. Planning and co-ordination is vital, as production can be a high cost operation within the business. Do companies suffer from material and component shortages? Do these prevent you from achieving your high customer service objectives? Do you have to constantly re-plan production? Is the output from your MRP system too nervous? Do your planners and buyers fail to process all the action messages before the next MRP run? Is there a general lack of understanding of where the messages and the plans have come from, and how to react? MRP helps you to address all these issues. If your company answers “yes” to some, or all, of these questions, then this workshop is for you.

MRP evolved in the late 1960’s out of dissatisfaction with traditional planning methods, and of the beginning of access to commercial computers. The early pioneers got the logic just about right – an early example of right first time? – and the heart of the calculation has not changed. Huge systems to handle Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP, and Supply Chain Management have evolved over the succeeding years, but the essential logic of the MRP calculation is still there, somewhere at the heart of all these systems. MRP ‘touches’ many people in the organisation – sales and marketing, finance, planning, materials management, purchasing, production, engineering, stores, supply chain and more – so a wide range of people need to understand MRP.

This workshop is intended to provide the delegate with a thorough understanding of Material Requirements Planning, MRP, and where it fits in today’s organisations.

Workshop Objectives, learning outcomes

• To fully understand what MRP is
• To see where MRP sits in integrated systems, such as Manufacturing Resource Planning, MRPII, ERP, Supply Chain Management, and other techniques, such as Advanced Planning and Scheduling, APS
• To appreciate the inputs to, the logic of, and the outputs from MRP
• To understand how to set up and use MRP in practice
• To realise all the potential impacts of MRP upon the business
• To recognise the importance of MRP in the 21st century