Integrated material resource planning/scheduling in a time-compressed world

Summary form only given. Advanced systems are based on a model of the factory that schedules (and continually reschedules) the use of material, machines and people resources to demands and orders placed on the factory. Rule-based systems are used to route orders to processes in the factory, to select material based on current inventory levels and processing alternative, and to select workstations and staff pools for the processes. The integrated materials resources planning is tied to actual factory capacities. This integration insures that the material is available when it can be needed and when it can be used. The advantage over other systems is that standard MRP2 approaches sometimes require raw material to be purchased too early based on standard lead-times; in other cases the standard MRP2 systems can result in later delivery of products