Globalization has left many manufacturing and service-oriented companies with the option of pursuing worlds best practices or perish. Many companies now realize the need for the development of world class systems and methodologies, as well as acquiring the “productivity tool” that will let them be in a commercial position to offer competitive manufacturing resource planning that assures customers of quality goods and services and compliance with international quality requirements on different industry fields.

In the competitive business environment of the twenty first century many companies have decided to use a popular tool that has evolved over the past few decades. ERP, the descendant of MRPII offers the “answer” to the economic and productivity troubles of manufacturing and service enterprises. The ERP system has recently become very popular as an enterprise management software tool, and there are many useful products in the software market to fulfill this need today.

The purpose of this series of articles is to contribute a review and analysis of the following questions:

1. What is MRPII/ERP software solutions position on this environment?

2. Do we completely understand what this system is designed to?

3. Is really what we are looking for?

4. Is our company prepared to start using it?.

During my experience as consultant, I have noticed that information speed and the need for quick response times does not allow time to analyze the real concept of this methodology and their close relationship with old and new methodologies such as Quality programs, Administration and the more recent concepts of: Hoshin Kanri, JIT, Kanban, Lean Manufacturing, QS, ISO, etc. as well as the technology advances. As a consequence, acquired MRPII/ERP solutions are many times misunderstood and underutilized, with the respective cost consequence.

In order to relate MRPII / ERP methodology and software logic with current business practices, is important to review three important concepts in productivity terms:

1. The basic Administration Cycle: Planning, Organization, Performance and Control.

2. Hoshin Kanri – The newest strategy policy management came from Japan, which assures high productivity levels.

3. Interaction of above points with ERP methodology.

Administration Cycle:

To administer any form of enterprise, above four steps are needed at their own levels: top management, medium management and operative areas. Manufacturing companies and MRPII environments are not the exception.

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