Page 401 - Orlicky's Material Requirements Planning

380 PART 4 Looking Backward and Forward

Commercially available MRP II systems became more available through a variety of
vendors. No longer was it necessary for companies to develop their own systems.
Software companies catering to the needs of different industries and platforms provided
a wide variety of software products off the shelf. At the same time, the APICS education
and certification program provided industry with professionals capable of using these
systems. Still, these systems that were so advanced at the time still were no guarantee of
bottom-line success. Simply getting the software implemented and running was not suf-
ficient to ensure bottom-line results.
In the 1990s, as technology began to move to Internet architecture, enterprise
resource planning (ERP) was the next evolution. ERP brought all the resources of an
enterprise under the control of a centralized integrated system and database. ERP is
defined as:

Framework for organizing, defining, and standardizing the business processes neces-
sary to effectively plan and control an organization so the organization can use its inter-
nal knowledge to seek external advantage. 5
Companies continued to invest in technology, pursuing the Holy Grail of integrat-
ed planning, and yet significant bottom-line results were not achieved. The underlying
driver was that if only a company could deliver on time, there was more than sufficient
market to be addressed. In the mid-1990s, advanced planning and scheduling (APS) sys-
tems leveraged the visibility of the company’s resources in ERP and promised to keep all
scarce resources busy all the time. The APICS Dictionary defines an APS as:

Techniques that deal with analysis and planning of logistics and manufacturing during
short-, intermediate-, and long-term time periods. APS describes any computer pro-
gram that uses advanced mathematical algorithms or logic to perform optimization or
simulation on finite capacity scheduling, sourcing, capital planning, resource planning,
forecasting, demand management, and others. These techniques simultaneously con-
sider a range of constraints and business rules to provide real-time planning and
scheduling, decision support, available-to-promise, and capable-to-promise capabili-
ties. APS often generates and evaluates multiple scenarios. Management then selects
one scenario to use as the “official plan.” The five main components of APS systems
are (1) demand planning, (2) production planning, (3) production scheduling, (4) dis-
tribution planning, and (5) transportation planning. 6
Once again, the implementation of these complex systems was rarely a significant
bottom-line success. This is not to say that the software didn’t get implemented or didn’t
run. The reality was that the improved bottom-line results promised in the business case
were the exception rather than the rule. The merits of a system or approach must be mea-
sured by the results it achieves.

5 APICS Dictionary, 12th ed. New York: Blackstone, 2008, p. 45.
6 APICS Dictionary, 12th ed. New York: Blackstone, 2008, p. 4.