At a minimum, each student will be expected to post an original and thoughtful response to the DB question and contribute to the weekly dialogue by responding to at least two other posts from students. The first contribution must be posted before midnight (Central Time) on Wednesday of each week. Two additional responses are required after Wednesday of each week. Students are highly encouraged to engage on the Discussion Board early and often, as that is the primary way the university tracks class attendance and participation.

The purpose of the Discussion Board is to allow students to learn through sharing ideas and experiences as they relate to course content and the DB question. Because it is not possible to engage in two-way dialogue after a conversation has ended, no posts to the DB will be accepted after the end of each unit.

The materials manager is very familiar with older material requirements planning (MRP) systems, as well as more integrated manufacturing resource planning (MRPII) systems. In fact, he is quite proud of the way the MRPII system works; his entire team has worked hard and has achieved schedule accuracy of over 98% and inventory accuracy of over 97%. He is also proud that as a result of this kind of change to the more modern MRPII systems, the firm’s inventory turnover has improved from 2.1 to 4.2; quite an achievement in his eyes and the CEO’s.

He asked you to meet with his own materials management team to discuss the following specific points:

• Your understanding of the pros and cons of MRPII systems, citing at least two Web sources.
• How could any new system be better than an MRPII system?

In your own words, please post a response to the Discussion Board and comment on at least 2 other postings. You will be graded on the quality of your postings.

 Response to the classmmate

Unit 3 DB – MRPII

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MGMT-14B-01

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 This week’s discussion board covers the topic of MRPII systems, the pro`s and con`s of the MRPII, and discuss how a new system could improve on the MRPII and perform better. The MRPII system, or Manufacturing Resources Planning, is the second generation of the MRP, or Material Requirement Planning. MRP was developed to help the manufacturing and production segments of a company plan ahead and order materials as they were needed according to the production schedule. This was accomplished through software, which would take each item produced by a manufacture and breaking down the item by the materials needed to produce the item, known as the BOM, or bill of materials. When products are placed on the schedule, the MRP system would alert the purchasing department, and materials would be brought in to manufacture the item. This improved lead-times for manufacturing, as well as reducing cost due to the inventory reduction of raw materials this method allows for. When MRPII was introduced it expanded the realm of the MRP system. Where the MRP system concentrated on the supply chain of the operation, MRPII expanded to include much of the manufacturing side of the operation (Taylor, 2014). MRPII includes such improvements as production planning and machine capacity for better scheduling in the sense that products could be scheduled where they would have the highest efficiency and production rate. MRPII also includes demand forecasting, production history, and quality tracking, as well as adding special instructions when needed for specific customer specifications. MRPII also allowed for labor tracking or special labor needs for an item, such as extra packers, or operators, allowing supervision to plan its labor needs ahead of time. MRPII also expanded into warehousing and inventories which allowed for a more persise inventory count, which insured real-time material needs were meet. Of course there are negitives gto the MRP and MRPII systems, the first problem with this system, as any software based system is the data input. The data must be accurate and up to date or the system will not perform as needed. This is particularly important when bill of materials are created. A bad bill of material will cause the system to create a demand for the parts needed to manufacture a scheduled item. Inventory control is another weak point in the system. If inventory counts are not correct, wround amounts of product will be scheduled, or raw materials will not be available (Rondeau, 2001).

 The next, best, new system which has been introduced to the manufacturing environment is ERP, or enterprise resource planning, has been expanded to include not only the supply chain and manufacturing segment, but every element within a company, this includes sales models, to help project future customer orders, accounting tools to track cost of goods, sales cost, and payroll. Furthermore, included are shipping are warehousing tools to track cost and delivery times, which can be incorporated into production lead times to give customers a more precise delivery time (SAP, 2014). Of course as with any technology, a new and improved system comes out almost daily, as the first ERP systems were expensive and require in house hardware, such as servers and computer memory storage, along with the expense of an IT department, newer system of ERP has been introduced, these are cloud based systems, which require less hardware, and less IT personal, in short, less expense (Rouse, 2014).          

References:

Rondeau P. (2001) Evolution of Manufacturing Planning and Control systems. Retrieved from: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1041&context=cob_papers

Rouse M. (2014) Cloud ERP Retrieved from: http://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-ERP

SAP (Oct 2014) Enterprise Resourse Planning. Retrieved from: http://www.sap.com/pc/bp/erp.html

Taylor E. (2014) MRP vs MRPII Retrieved from: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/mrp-vs-mrpii-15365.html

McGee Carpet and Trim installs carpets in commercial offices. Andrea McGee has been very concerned with the amount of time it took to complete several recent jobs. Some of her workers are very unreliable. A list of activities and their optimistic completion time, the most likely completion time, and the pessimistic completion time (all in days) for a new contract are provided in a given table. Following are the activities that are required to install the carpets in the offices: Activity 1 (Measure office room dimensions), Activity 2 (Estimate cost), Activity 3 (Material Requisition), Activity 4 (Workforce Requisition), Activity 5 (Special Tool Requisition), Activity 6 (Installation), Activity 7 (Inspection and customer acceptance). Activity 2 starts immediately after Activity 1. Activity 3, Activity 4, and Activity 5 start concurrently after Activity 2. Activity 6 does not start until after Activity 3, Activity 4, and Activity 5 are completed. The carpet installation project is complete after Activity 7 is completed. If OT = Optimistic Time, MT = Most Likely Time, and PT = Pessimistic Time, use Program Evaluation Review Estimate (PERT) to compute the statistical time for each activity in the table shown below.

Activity   
OT   
MT  
 PT

Act. 1         4      6       14

Act. 2         5      12     16

Act. 3         7      15     16

Act. 4        13      16     23

Act. 5        17      20     35

Act. 6        20      32     50

Act. 7         5        6      13

Define project management and the necessary requirements.
Analyze implications of changes in project scheduling.
Evaluate application of project management techniques in terms of the firm’s business operational goals and requirements.
Please submit your assignment in an APA formatted paper.
Submitting your assignment in APA format means, at a minimum, you will need the
following:

TITLE PAGE. Remember the Running head: AND TITLE IN ALL CAPITALS

ABSTRACT. A summary of your paper…not an introduction. Begin writing in third person voice.

BODY. The body of your paper begins on the page following the title page and abstract page and must be double-spaced (be careful not to triple- or quadruple-space between paragraphs). The type face should be 

(2 pages)