Material Requirement Planning

Material Requirements Planning (MRP) combines a sales forecast and sales orders with bill of material and inventory data to calculate what materials are required, and when they are required, to satisfy customer requirements.

The process determines material requirements, including all components in a bill of material, using the date of the forecast or sales order for the finished product. The process considers inventory on-hand and on-order balances, minimum balances, supplier and manufacturing lead times, and the like.

Time phased MRP

• All processing is date specific.
• Supplier and manufacturing lead times are considered when calculating order requirement and inventory availability dates.

Four demand generation options

Use these options as input to the MRP process to generate demand:

• Forecast only.
• Sales orders consume forecast.
• Sales orders plus forecast.
• Sales orders only.

Multiple versions of MRP or Forecast

You can process What if scenarios by combining different forecast file names with different MRP file names.

Demand time fence

• This represents the time in which Greentree Desktop only considers sales orders, regardless of the demand generation option.
• This is useful when running MRP near the end of a month when all sales orders for that month have been entered. By entering a month end date, the process only considers sales orders.

Critical Items

• You can flag inventory items, including manufacturing components, as critical items.
• You can use critical items to restrict the number of items included in calculations, so that potential supply problems can be quickly highlighted.
• A critical item can be any inventory item, but would include items with a long lead time, a high value, or one that is particularly critical to the manufacturing process.

Planned orders

• You can generate factory and purchase orders based on system calculated planned orders, generated using the MRP process.
• You can combine orders.
• Generated orders do not depend on supplier or re-order details being set up.

Action messages

Action messages are system generated to notify requirements to expedite, de-expedite or cancel existing orders.

Kitsets

Kitset parent and component items are included in the MRP process.

Forecast

The Manufacturing Forecasting sub module generates the forecasts used as input to the MRP process.

Exclusions

These functions are not included in the MRP sub module:

• MRP by warehouse.
• Capacity planning.
• Factory Calendar.
• SO-PO and SO-FO linking are not considered in the process, for example, a sales order linked to a purchase order will not prevent the purchase order from being rescheduled if there is a requirement from another sales order or forecast.

• MRP Glossary of Terms
• MRP Kitset Information
• Maintain Critical Items
• Manufacturing Module Control
• Forecasting