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?