Page 394 - Orlicky's Material Requirements Planning

CHAPTER 21 Historical Context 373

ning have been developed not by theoreticians and researchers but by practi-
tioners. Thus the knowledge remained, for a long time, the property of scat-
tered MRP system users who normally have little time or inclination to write
for the public. The lag of literature became painfully evident to me when, in
early 1973, I undertook to prepare a study guide for a publicly administered
examination on material requirements planning. I chaired the committee of
APICS in charge of developing this examination, under the guidance of
Educational Testing Service of Princeton, and in preparing the study guide I
wanted to list all written material pertaining to the subject.
I found that the entire MRP literature consisted of twenty-six items
good, bad, and indifferent—all of which were either articles, excerpts, special
reports, or trade-press “testimonials.” Tutorial material on MRP basics was
lacking entirely. The job of “getting it all together” remained to be done.
Someone had to write a book on “MRP from A to Z,” and I concluded I
may have to be the one. So I wrote this book.
In the text, I am quoting from, paraphrasing, and otherwise making free
use of my own past writings on the subject. A section of Chapter 1 includes
some of the material originally published in the Proceedings of the 13th
International Conference of APICS, 1970, under the title, “Requirements
Planning Systems: Cinderella’s Bright Prospects for the Future.” A good por-
tion of this material, including slightly disguised illustrations, surfaced, with-
out attribution, in a 1973 publication. Just so the unwary reader won’t reach
the wrong conclusion as to who is cribbing from whom, I felt obliged to reaf-
firm my authorship in a footnote on page 21.
Chapter 5 is largely based on my paper, “Net Change Material
Requirements Planning,” published in the IBM Systems Journal, vol. 12, no. 1,
1973.
Some of the material in Chapter 9 is adapted from a section called “The
Problem of Data” in my book The Successful Computer System, McGraw-Hill,
1969.
Chapter 11 parallels, in part, the chapter called “Master Production
Schedule Planning” in the Communications Oriented Production Information and
Control System (COPICS), IBM Corporation, 1972, which I helped to write.
Chapter 10 includes most of the material in the article, “Structuring the
Bill of Material for MRP,” published in Production and Inventory Management,
vol. 13, no. 4, 1972, which I wrote in collaboration with George W. Plossl and
Oliver W. Wight.
Finally, Chapter 12 is based on the keynote address I delivered at the
15th International Conference of APICS on October 12, 1972, in Toronto.
November, 1974
Joseph Orlicky
Stamford, Connecticut