Friday, February 15, 2008

Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP)

Today's blog will briefly introduce the topic of Manufacturing Resource Planning. More detailed discussions will be included in future blogs.


MRP is defined by APICS (The Association for Operations Management, formerly known as the American Production and Inventory Control Society) as a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company.

Ideally, the plan should address operational planning in terms of units (how many do we need) and financial planning in terms of dollars (how much will it cost). To do this it needs to answer questions such as:

  • Are there enough resources (labor, machines, machine-hours, and cash) to meet the material requirements plan?
  • Is there enough capacity, both overall and at each individual Work Center?

The ultimate output of this production plan will be the finished goods that are needed. In order to get to that state, a schedule of requirements for the subassemblies, the component parts, and the raw materials needed to produce those finished goods, and to produce them according to a specific time frame, is needed.

MRP’s major benefits should be:

  • an increase in productivity;
  • the removal of inefficiencies, or at least a major reduction in them;
  • and an increase in customer responsiveness and service.

Simply put, MRP systems ask four questions:

  • What is needed?
  • Wow much is needed?
  • When is it needed?
  • How can I best use my resouces to meet the answers to the previous 3 questions?

MRP can be a semi stand-alone system, or it can be part of the larger ERP, and is directly connected to Master Production Scheduling (MPS) and Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP).

This page has a little more information about MRP: things to look for in an MRP system, other systems that tie in with an MRP system, and lots of other links.


Have a great weekend. See you all next week.

Hal Hamer