Warehouse / Inventory Software – a Core Part of MRP System

We decided to write this article because of the number of similar questions that we get from time to time. They are about as follows.

Hi,

we already have ERP software with accounting and stock management functionality.  However, we want to start to plan our production with your software, not in Excel.

Can we use your planning functionality, but keep stock data in our existing ERP? Could you integrate your software with our existing ERP?

Manufacturing resource planning systems have several main objectives, among many other additional tasks:

1. To give information when the production order will be fulfilled.
2. To answer the question: how much the product will cost
3. To give information about the workload to optimize it and to make work more effective.

For reaching those objectives MRP system needs the following data from the database:

• how many goods are in stock,
• what are their income prices;
• when they arrived, or are planned to arrive,
• which goods are used for the product and their quantities – so-called Bill of Materials (BOM),
• which goods are booked already for other production orders.

The picture is much more complex if the production process contains semi-finished goods, subassemblies. But that is usual practice when it comes to inventory management in manufacturing companies.

So we can see clearly, that even if existing ERP has stock control functionality, it suits for trading company warehouses only, not for production planning.

This is, unfortunately, a firm reason for a negative answer to the question regarding possible integration of our production planning software with general ERP software.  The existing ERP system, which was not initially made for manufacturing resources planning, does not suit to serve production planning functionality.