Supercharged Supply Chains

CHAPTER 17Technology Enhancements: What You Need and Not Just Following a Market Trend

This chapter provides a few examples of enhancements made to current planning system technology and future enhancements. These are only a select few, but they provide a starting point. From the day this book is published, this information will be outdated given today's rate of technological change.

FIGURE 17.1 Business Excellence Planning

All described enhancements are applicable to Business Excellence Planning, Figure 17.1. Will the model change? Probably, but, as technology improvements come along, the basics will always remain.

Data Accuracy

Historically, Materials Requirements Planning (MRP I) and Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) solutions have been very high touch, requiring workers to manually enter information regarding inventory, bills of material, routings, work orders, and shipments. Workers had to enter almost everything they did to provide accurate information to the planning and execution systems to assure that a valid plan (accurate and achievable) was in place. As described in previous chapters, those plans provide operational direction to meet customer requirements in the most economical way possible and at the same time provide visibility to cross‐functional leaders. The manual entry of this data can create latency and accuracy issues in the MRP system. If the ...