Citation
Burcher, P.G. (1999), "Beyond Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII): Advanced Models and Methods for Production Planning", Integrated Manufacturing Systems, Vol. 10 No. 3, pp. 57-58. https://doi.org/10.1108/ims.1999.10.3.57.2
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This book is an attempt to compile some state‐of‐the‐art work in the field of production planning research. It consists of 15 articles written by 36 authors from ten countries and covers many aspects related to MRPII. The list of authors includes management scientists, industrial engineers and operations researchers from academia as well as practitioners. The editors hope that this makes the book of value to a broad audience although my view would be that it is likely to be read mostly by academic researchers. The contents are organised into five chapters covering master production scheduling, material requirements planning, lot sizing, sequencing and scheduling and production control.
The master scheduling chapter consists of two articles, the first of which is a useful summary of material and capacity dominated master scheduling and business profiles. The second discusses a very specific example of a knowledge‐based system for MPS selection in jewellery manufacturing. The MRP chapter also consists of two articles, the first on cover‐time planning which is claimed to be a less complex alternative to MRP but it is very difficult to see how it is different. The second article, which is difficult to follow at times, outlines a history of product configurators leading up to rule‐based bills of material. The lot sizing chapter is made up of four articles, the first three of which are very mathematical. The first two deal with different examples of capacitated lot sizing while the third covers cash flow‐oriented lot sizing and has an interesting discussion of the “real” costs of set‐up and holding taking machines, personnel and overheads as “sunk” costs. The fourth article in this chapter is an excellent, very detailed review of multi‐level lot sizing research with 153 references quoted. The sequencing and scheduling chapter has four articles entitled “A branch and bound algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem”, “A prioritized re‐insertion approach to production rescheduling”, “Maintaining robust schedules by fuzzy reasoning”, which has a good explanation and an example in a steel‐making plant and “Objectives for order ‐‐ sequencing in automobile production” containing the mathematically detailed testing of heuristics for assembly line order sequencing. The final chapter, “Production control”, has three chapters, the first of which deals with the use of control theory for automatic production control through the use of a funnel model and logistic operating curve. The second article, “An interactive MRPII scheduling system”, essentially deals with a finite capacity scheduling system added on to a MRPII system. The final article, “MRPII based production management using intelligent decision making”, outlines the addition of knowledge‐based systems, decision support systems and simulation to MRPII with a case example of a yoghurt manufacturing plant.
Overall this book can be seen as offering several different views on up to date research which tries to take MRPII systems a stage further.