Benefits of Using MRP II System in Manufacturing

Well, I suppose it’s better to talk about the reason we felt that we wanted to put an MRP II system in to start with. It started about 4 years ago I suppose we first started grappling with the problem of how to become more efficient and more effective in the future. I suppose that there were two driving forces.
The first one was the need to contain costs and to make better use of the resources that we had.
There was a shortfall in capacity. We have enough people, we have enough management resources and we give out warehouse space. It was actually the manufacturing capacity that was defective. So there were options there. We could either build a new plant which could have cost us about £200 million, or, we could not take the business, or, we could better optimise the utilisation of our existing capacity. It was apparent that we would not be able to justify huge sums of capital for additional equipment in the future when we still had some of our existing resource unutilised.
The problem was to make better use of our existing resources to free up that spare time so that we could bring in new business, and, to make better use of the people who weren’t fully utilised. We needed something that was going to help us to plan our resources more effectively and when we looked at MRP II that seemed as though it was going to do just that. MRP II was going to ensure that we only manufactured that which we needed, it was going to reduce our inventory, it’s got potential for planning our materials right the way through the whole of the manufacturing process. It was also going to enable us to plan the utilisation of our people much better. The