Material Requirements Planning (MRP)

Forecasts can be calculated or entered manually. These forecasts can be dependent and consumed by sales orders, or they can be independent. Input forecasts as one-time, weekly, monthly, or yearly.

Review and execute the complete material plan through MRP screens that show all activity, orders, requirements, balances, and recommendations for an inventory item.

Manage production plans, procurement, and transfers across warehouse locations. MRP suggests planned production orders that drive requirements throughout your organization to supply warehouses down to your vendors.

Queue, Finish, and Move Time: Improve material requirements planning by defining finish, move, and queue times for operations that require cooling, drying, movement to upstream operations (such as outsourced manufacturing services), and other expected non-production times.

Define planning buckets to consolidate demand into single purchase orders. Planned period sizes are defined by item class, stock item, or item and warehouse combination. Further, a system-wide setting can be defined for planned orders beyond the initial planning horizon for longer-term planning.

Set a grace period for the number of days after receipt where a supply transaction is considered to meet the requested date for item demand.

Access MRP exception messages for recommendations to defer, delete, expedite, or place on hold actual or firmed production, purchasing, kit assembly, or transfer orders based on refreshed data in the system. Exception messages further aid planners with information such as available transfers, notifications for orders without scheduled shipment dates, transfers without replenishing warehouses, and circular transfers.

Specify the demand time fence to control which data the system uses for inventory planning. The demand time fence is the time from the inventory planning date during which the forecast is no longer included in the total demand and projected available inventory calculations. During this time, the system considers only customer orders for inventory planning. Beyond this time, the greater value of dependent forecasts and actual demand drives planning.

Balance supply and demand for planned inbound and outbound transfer orders across warehouse locations.

As forecasted demand, blanket sales order lines for future dates are included in MRP planning. Blanket release child sales orders are processed as normal sales order demand.

MRP uses safety stock and reorder point levels to determine quantities for manufacturing planned orders. Further, users can set minimum and maximum order quantities for suggested orders to match production batch sizes or preferred supplier order quantities. Lot sizes are used to smooth demand quantities by defined multiples. For example, a lot size of 5 and demand for 37 units would result in a planned order for 40 (rounded up from 37 in a multiple of 5).

MRP respects vendor lead times defined in inventory for purchased items. Users can set additional lead time when the product may need to be quarantined and inspected before it is moved to an on-hand location for manufacturing. Lead times are also defined for manufactured items and warehouse transfers.

Benchmark previous MRP generations to evaluate past MRP performance to understand if generation times varied due to larger date ranges, setup issues, or other factors.

Generate suggested kit assemblies based on forecasts or actual sales order demand. MRP will suggest planned purchase orders and warehouse transfer orders for kit components required for stock or non-stock kit assemblies.

Optimize MRP generation with ‘planning horizons’ capabilities that enable organizations to define time-constrained data for inclusion in supply and demand calculations.

Configure MRP to include or exclude sales order returns from return merchandise authorization (RMAs) as supply for inventory planning calculations.