Material Requirements Planning
The Material Requirements Planning (MRP) ‘engine’ is critical to the success of any manufacturing system implementation. MRP is a very sophisticated calculator - it determines what raw materials are needed and when they should arrive and it develops a detail-manufacturing schedule, which includes finished products and all required sub-assemblies. The Vanguard MRP system accomplishes these tasks quickly and accurately - and provides considerable flexibility and control for the planner to establish parameters and ‘tune’ the process for optimum performance.
Key benefits of MRP
- Automate the tedious material planning tasks
- Accurately plan material requirements to support the production plan
- Easily develop production schedules
- Partial or fully automated operation
- On-line visibility to sources of requirements
Key features of MRP
- MRP can be driven by the master production schedule (MRP) - or directly by customer releases and orders
- Utilizes bucketless time-phased requirements planning
- Plans item schedules for repetitive manufactured items
- Plans shop floor work orders for discrete manufactured items
- Accommodates multiple lot sizing techniques with minimum, incremental and maximum lot size control
- Includes a time fence definition to stabilize the material plan
- Accommodates firm planned orders
- Accommodates phantom items within the bill of material
- On-line multi-level bi-directional pegging for full visibility of requirements and supplies
- Available-to-promise visibility
- Planners can work by exception - automatically flag all recommendations as released when created
- Automates the execution of MRP recommendations: creates Shop Floor Control schedules and purchase orders, PO
- Paperless MRP-no reports required - no re- keying of data required - MRP plan is on-line
- Simulation runs of MRP for what-if analysis
- Accommodates engineering change notification dates as stamped on the bill of material and/or routing
- Filters eliminate recommendations with minor impact
- Net-change reporting