Data Model Patterns

9. Material Requirements Planning

Chapter Four presented models of the manufacturing process, showing how to record the definitions of products and their structures, as well as the manufacturing activities and their consumption of resources. This chapter extends that model to describe one kind of process for planning manufacturing: Material Requirements Planning, or MRP.

MRP is, in effect, a simulation of one aspect of a plant’s operations—albeit a relatively simple one. As such, it provides a unique challenge to the data modeler, who must now represent the forecasted, simulated world, in addition to the current real one.

During the second half of the 1970s, the manufacturing world discovered that the computer could dramatically improve the coordination ...