Manufacturing by Paul Templin
Industrial Engineer’s quarterly column about manufacturing (August 2011)
A thankless task
Planning is a thankless task. Sure, the advent of material requirements planning (MRP) almost 50 years ago simplified things. Take your bill of materials (BOM), your quantity per, your material lead times and minimum order quantities. Multiply by your demand signal to determine order timing and size. As manufacturing consumes raw material, you decrement your on-hand balances of supplies, run MRP again and launch new orders of raw material.
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