Page 17 - Orlicky's Material Requirements Planning

xvi Preface

uct and its conceptual framework made possible the vision of demand-driven manufac-
turing that was first developed at PeopleSoft in 2002. Chad approached another old
friend who was a senior account executive for Infor and showed him what they had
developed. His response was, “I don’t know if you have any idea how big what you have
is. I sell five different major ERP platforms and none of our MRP or SCM modules can
come close to this.”
Needless to say, both these reactions encouraged Chad. The immediate problem
became how to get the word out because these ideas were truly breakthrough concepts.
Articulating the new concepts and critical differences between the new demand-driven
approach to planning and the standard and insufficient approaches was the next big
obstacle. Carol and Chad wrote a white paper entitled, “Beyond MRP.” On a whim, they
sent it off to APICS to see if there was any interest in it. The response was almost imme-
diate. APICS asked them to condense the article for its magazine. APICS not only put it in
the magazine but also made it the cover article under the title, “Brilliant Vision”
(July–August 2008). Shortly after that, APICS sponsored a Webinar in August 2008 with
both Carol and Chad on the subject of the article. Over 200 companies signed up. Then, in
September 2008, Carol spoke on the topic at the APICS International Conference in Kansas
City, MO. The response was standing room only, with over 350 people in the room. These
responses were enough to convince the authors that they had struck a chord with the
mainstream world’s difficulty trying to plan materials in a demand-driven environment.
With this encouragement Carol and Chad began to further articulate the solution.
They described the solution with a term: actively synchronized replenishment (ASR). Chad
spoke in November 2008 at the Theory of Constraints International Certification
Organization (TOCICO) Conference in Las Vegas, NV. Chad and Carol were approached
at that conference by Dr. Jim Cox to continue writing on this topic. Dr. Cox is well known
in both the TOC and APICS worlds. He was to be the coeditor with John Schleier of a new
book to be published by McGraw-Hill that was to be called, The Theory of Constraints
Handbook. Dr. Cox asked the authors to contribute a chapter to the book. The chapter was
submitted about nine months later. Jim and John were very enthusiastic about the chap-
ter content and sent it to McGraw-Hill, telling the editor that there should be a whole
book dedicated to this. Below is what John had to say:

Wow! What a chapter. My head is spinning around networks of interconnect-
ed buffers pulling production from the market side of the supply chain
through multilevels in a shop with other buffers protecting its supply side.
This is really an exciting story about a very creative piece of work. I wrote
the first MRP system for John Deere’s Ottumwa, Iowa, plant in the late 1950s;
automated the BOMs, routings, inventory records, MRP, shop floor schedul-
ing, and the purchasing system. Then in the early 1960s I headed the devel-
opment team that built the compliment of logistics systems for the IBM
Rochester plant, later implemented at the IBM plants in Boulder and Boca
Raton, with elements in IBM European plants. I only mention this to frame