Material Requirements Planning — MRP — definition

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The MRP for Material Requirements Planning

  The Mate­r­i­al Require­ments Plan­ning or MRP is at the heart of the MRP method — Man­u­fac­tur­ing Resource Plan­ning. It allows to deter­mine the pro­posed orders from the gross require­ments in fin­ished prod­ucts deter­mined with the MPS: 

• launch­es in production
• or fore­cast­ed supplies

Indeed, it is from the bills of mate­r­i­al* and the MPS (Mas­ter Pro­duc­tion Sched­ule) or from the order book express­ing the com­mer­cial needs of each prod­uct, that we will be able to cal­cu­late the depen­dent needs of each ele­ment, sub-assem­bly, raw mate­r­i­al to be pur­chased or manufactured. 

Of course, the plan­ning hori­zon will take into account the pur­chas­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing lead times of the ele­ments to be produced. 

The MRP gen­er­al­ly applies to both “mass” and “work­shop” type productions. 

Thus, the Mate­r­i­al Require­ment Plan­ning will be used for the sched­ul­ing of any pro­duc­tion. As long as stan­dard­ized com­po­nents are used in the man­u­fac­ture of sev­er­al prod­ucts at iden­ti­cal or dif­fer­ent BOM levels. 

*It is the detailed descrip­tion of all the com­po­nents of a prod­uct and its con­di­tions of use, it is the struc­tured inven­to­ry of all the items that make up a prod­uct.

Note that, arbores­cent, the BOMs have sev­er­al lev­els and must define the links between com­po­nents. To be usable in a reli­able MRP, bill of mate­r­i­al descrip­tions must be com­plete and error-free. Indeed, any mis­take will have repercussions: 

• out of stock,
• increased pro­duc­tion costs,
• Inac­cu­rate mate­r­i­al require­ments planning…

  To learn more about MRP — Mate­r­i­al Require­ment Plan­ning, down­load the Pro­fes­sion­al The­sis — Spe­cial­ized Mas­ter “Are SOP tools inte­grat­ed with ERP?” of Thibaud Dilly 

 

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