Page 395 - Orlicky's Material Requirements Planning

374 PART 4 Looking Backward and Forward

George Plossl in his update of Orlicky’s classic work begins with more of this his-
torical timeline. Understanding the history best sets the stage to understand the direction
for the future.

In 1966, Joe Orlicky, Oliver Wight, and I met in an American Production and
Inventory Control Society (APICS) conference. We found that we had all
been working on material requirements planning (MRP) programs, Joe at J.
I. Case Company and IBM, Oliver and I at The Stanley Works. We continued
to meet and compare notes on MRP and other topics. In the early 1970s we
organized the APICS MRP crusade, using the resources of the Society and
the knowledge and experiences of a few “Crusaders” to spread the word on
MRP among APICS members and others interested. All but a few APICS
chapters participated.
This crusade showed clearly the need for more professional literature
and teaching aids on this powerful but new technique. Oliver’s and my book,
Production and Inventory Control: Principles and Techniques, published in 1967,
was the first to include coverage of MRP—all of 16 pages’ worth! Users of
MRP were too busy trying to make it work to take time to write about it.

The purpose of this third revision of this book is to contribute to business literature
a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of a subject of relatively recent origin yet of
first importance to the field of manufacturing operations management—effectively plan-
ning material in an increasingly complex and demand-driven world. This approach, its
underlying philosophy, and the methods involved represent a sharp break with past the-
ory and practice. The subject, broadly viewed, marks the coming of age of the field of pro-
duction and inventory control and a new way of life in the management of a manufac-
turing business.
The commercial availability of computers in the mid-1950s ushered in a new era of
business information processing with a profound impact of the new technology on the con-
duct of operations. George Plossl in the second edition discusses the impact of the comput-
er. The hardware and software became available commercially in the early 1960s and were
capable of handling data in volumes and at speeds previously scarcely imaginable; these lift-
ed data-processing constraints that had handicapped inventory management. They made
obsolete the older methods and techniques devised to live with these limitations.
In the early days, the most significant benefits were not achieved by the pioneering
manufacturing firms that chose to improve, refine, and speed up existing procedures
with computers but by those who undertook fundamental changes to their planning and
control systems. However, abandoning familiar techniques, even those which had proven
unsatisfactory, and substituting new, radically different approaches such as MRP-based
systems required new knowledge not possessed by many people at that time. The first
edition of this book provided an authoritative source of information on MRP to help
develop the needed knowledge.