The history of industrial information systems is a quest for perfect alignment between customer demand, material availability and factory capacity. To understand how a modern solution such as AVIA works, it helps to revisit the theoretical building blocks: MRP, MRP II and ERP.
MRP (Material Requirements Planning)
Born in the 1970s, MRP answered a simple question: which raw materials do we need, in what quantity, and when, to build the ordered products? Based on the Master Production Schedule (MPS) and multi-level bills of materials (BOM), MRP generates purchasing and manufacturing suggestions and guarantees there is no supply shortage by accounting for supplier lead times.
MRP II (Manufacturing Resource Planning)
MRP II, the natural evolution that appeared in the 1980s, added the vital constraint of capacity to the equation. Buying screws at the right time is pointless if the shop floor is jammed. MRP II therefore introduced:
- Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) for executive arbitration.
- Load-versus-capacity calculation against man-hour and machine calendars.
- Consideration of cash flow and forecast accounting.
The rise of the ERP
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) finally brought the walls down. By absorbing the MRP II engine and connecting it to CRM (sales), HR and accounting — and now managing dynamic finite-capacity scheduling — everything is linked. With AVIA ERP, the traditional theory moves on: thanks to AI, load-smoothing algorithms anticipate bottlenecks with a foresight that classic MRP II could never achieve in a turbulent environment.