MRP has been a mainstay of manufacturing systems for 40 years. MRP evolved from simple inventory planning systems
to become the heart of the MRPII systems which eventually became ERP. While the applications surrounding it have become broader, more sophisticated and web-based, MRP continues
to operate in the loneliness of the Saturday night batch window quietly exploding bills of materials and logging exceptions for hours.
During this same 40 years, manufacturing business processes have seen countless changes and improvements including JIT, TQM, Six Sigma, Flow Manufacturing, Lean Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management. Although much logic has been added
to MRP
to deal with
new manufacturing processes, it has not been able
to keep up with the real-time pace of today's supply chain. As a result, planners have devised ingenious ways
to trick MRP
to handle
new processes but often need
to dump the output into spreadsheets of their own design in the hope of wrestling thousands of exceptions
to ground.
Oracle's
new Rapid Planning application is just what companies still running MRP have been waiting for! The newest member of the Value Chain Planning product line, Rapid Planning is designed
to empower planners with comprehensive supply planning that runs online in minutes, not hours. It enables a planner simulate the incremental impact of a
new order or re-run an entire plan in a separate sandbox. Rapid Planning does a complete multi-level bill of material explosion like MRP but plans orders considering material and capacity constraints. Considering material and capacity constraints in planning can help you quickly reduce inventory and improve on-time shipments.
Rapid Planning is an APS application that leverages years of Oracle development experience and customer feedback. Rather than rely exclusively on black-box heuristics, Rapid Planning is designed
to give planners the computing power
to use their industry experience and business knowledge
to improve MRP. For example, Rapid Planning has a powerful worksheet user interface with built-in query capability that allows the planner
to locate the orders she is interested in and use a mass update function
to make quick work of large changes. The planner can save these queries and unique user interface
to personalize their planning environment.
Most importantly, Rapid Planning is designed
to do supply planning in today's dynamic supply chain environment. It can be used
to supplement MRP or replace MRP entirely. It generates plans that provide order-by-order details with aggregate key performance indicators that enable planners
to quickly assess the overall business impact of a plan.
To find out more about how Rapid Planning can help improve your MRP, please contact me at
[email protected] or your Oracle Account Manager.
