Manufacturing and MRP Module in ERP Services

It answers one question: what do I need, how much, and by when. The run takes demand from confirmed sales orders and forecast, nets off stock on hand and supply already confirmed on open purchase and production orders, explodes each bill of material down through its levels, offsets every requirement backwards by the lead time of the item, and writes out proposed purchase orders and production orders with dates. That is the whole job. It is arithmetic done consistently across thousands of parts, which is exactly what a spreadsheet stops doing well at around a hundred.

Above roughly 98 percent at line level, and that is not a soft target. At 95 percent accuracy a ten line BOM is wrong about four times in ten, so planners stop trusting the suggestions within a fortnight and go back to their own lists. Most failed manufacturing implementations fail on BOM accuracy, not on software. Budget the project as a data cleaning exercise with a system at the end of it: pull every BOM, walk it against a physical build, fix the quantities, the units of measure and the scrap factors, and only then switch the planning run on.

No. Standard MRP schedules against infinite capacity. It assumes the work centre can absorb whatever it is given and simply offsets by the lead time you entered. That is why a plan can look perfectly clean and still be undeliverable, and why plans lose credibility with the people running the machines. If you need true finite scheduling that respects machine hours, shift patterns, tooling and sequence dependent setup, that is a separate capability sitting above the MRP run. We will tell you which one you actually need rather than pretending the standard run does it.

Yes, but they are genuinely different operating models, not settings you flip. Make to stock plans against forecast and holds finished goods, so the data burden sits on forecast quality and reorder policy. Make to order plans against the confirmed order, holds components rather than finished goods, and lives or dies on component lead times. Engineer to order creates a new BOM and routing for every job, often while production has already started, so it needs revision control and project style cost tracking far more than it needs a planning run.

An operation on the routing is flagged as external. The system issues the required components to the supplier against a subcontract order, and that stock stays on your books but sits in a separate location so it is visible and countable rather than lost. When the processed item comes back you receive it against the same order, and the service charge on the supplier invoice is added to the item cost along with the components consumed. The two things that go wrong are unreconciled material sitting at the supplier for months and scrap at the supplier that nobody records.

You set a standard cost per item from the BOM and routing: material, labour and overhead. When the work order closes, the system compares actual consumption to that standard and posts the difference. Most cost problems are data problems: an out of date standard, an unmaintained scrap factor, or operation times estimated once in 2019 and never checked.