Page 22 - Orlicky's Material Requirements Planning

C H A P T E R 1

Overview

ORLICKY’S VISION
Joe Orlicky was truly a giant. There are very good reasons why the first edition of this
book sold over 140,000 copies. What he defined and articulated had a profound impact
on the modern global manufacturing landscape, and much of his writing remains rele-
vant, even visionary, to this day. This is more remarkable when you consider a rather lim- Downloaded by [ Singapore Polytechnic Library 176.79.113.174] at [06/05/21]. Copyright © McGraw-Hill Global Education Holdings, LLC. Not to be redistributed or modified in any way without permission.
ited set of technological concepts and tools at his disposal (the first computerized manu-
facturing requirements planning system was written in 8 kB of memory!). If you have not
read the first edition of this book, you should. The update you hold in your hands began
from Orlicky’s original work rather than from the second edition because of this amaz-
ing vision.
In 1975, in the first edition of this book, Joe Orlicky’s first written words were,
“Someone had to write this book.” This book represented the first significant and exten-
sive definition of material requirements planning (MRP). Just how new was MRP at that
time? Not really all that new. People such as Joe Orlicky, George Plossl, and Ollie Wight
had been pioneering the installation of computer-based MRP systems before 1960. 1
Additionally, APICS was founded in 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio, to support the practition-
ers at the time and to share best practices and insights.
Why was there such a lag between 1960 and 1975? Orlicky explains it: “In the field
of production and inventory management, literature does not lead, it follows. The tech-
niques of modern material requirements planning have been developed not by theoreti-
cians and researchers but by practitioners. Thus the knowledge remained, for a long time,
the property of scattered MRP system users who normally have little time or inclination
to write for the public.” In addition, many of these early-adopter companies viewed this
new technology as a competitive advantage and were reluctant to share this knowledge.

1 Joseph Orlicky, Material Requirements Planning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), Preface, p. ix.

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