Material Requirements Planning, management homework help

In 4-5 sentences, respond to the following:

Material Requirements Planning is a system used to ensure that the components of a company’s product are readily available for assembly at the times when the product needs to be assembled to meet demand. For example, tone woods used in the production of guitars. There must be wood available for the guitar when the customer places the order, or else there is a potential sale lost, but it also seeks to not have too much of the wood available because of the cost of inventory. It could be used for services too, for example having enough masseuses to provide massages during a time when a lot of people want a massage.

Capacity Requirements Planning is a system used to find a balance between too much and too little inventory, and after the balance is identified, the planner fine tunes the requirements to be in tune with the balance. With information provided by the planner (planned order, routing, and open orders) a plan is produced by the CRP and the best course of action as determined by the system is chosen by the planner. This can be used for services, for example identifying the best number of masseuses to be on shift at a certain time, along with how many tables need to be prepped and available.

Enterprise Resource Planning is a inter-department communication enabling system. For example if a phone-based salesman is on the phone with a customer who is inquiring about the availability of a product is asked if a product is in stock but the warehouse is in another state, if there is a system the salesman can check to see if the product is in stock, it will increase the likelihood of the sale. It can be used in the service industry too, for example if an instrument is in need of a tune-up, and the system allows to check the availability of a luthier.