The development and application of an interactive material requirements planning model

Abstract

This thesis describes the development of the material requirements planning package called MARPLA, supplies information on the operation of the package and provides a set of practical exercises to be solved using the package in order to demonstrate the application of the material requirements planning technique in manufacturing inventories.The package is programmed in BASIC language and is designed to be used on a Hewlett-Packard Access 2000 machine, occupying about 304 records of storage. MARPLA is a fully interactive package which does not require computing knowledge for its use. MARPLA allows the user to generate time-phased net requirements and to develop a planned batch schedule for all component items of one or multiple end-products. In addition to this, the package performs the following functions: (1) Explosion of the bill of material for the end-products.(2) Calculation of gross requirements of each component per unit of end-product.(3) Analysis of inventory costs if inventory cost data are supplied to the package.(4) Re-generation of the overall requirements plan moving forward period-by-period in the planning horizon. MARPLA has been designed mainly as a teaching aid for those students wishing to examine with some depth the planning and controlling functions of a material requirements planning system. In addition to the educational role of the package, the following applications can be considered:(1) as a research tool to investigate decision making techniques concerning the use of safety stock, safety time and the selection of batching rules.(2) as a practical instrument to be used by companies contemplating the installation of an MRP system that wish to carry out preliminary analyses of the applicability of material requirements planning to control their inventories.