Material requirements planning that accounts for what is already on its way.
Early accessMRP Software in Northamptonshire
MRP Software built and supported in the UK, serving Northamptonshire including Northampton, Kettering and Wellingborough. Configured around how you actually work, not the other way round.
- Part of CubeERP
- Northamptonshire
- 01234 672 617
Across Northamptonshire we see the same problem in different clothes: information that exists, but not in one place, and not in a form anyone can act on.
MRP Software is how you stop paying for that twice.
Material requirements planning is arithmetic that nobody can do reliably by hand once there is more than one level in the bill of materials. Take demand from sales orders, forecasts and minimum stock levels; explode it through the BOM; net it against free stock, work in progress and confirmed inbound deliveries; offset by lead time; and you have a list of what to buy and what to make, and when. CubeERP does that on demand or on a schedule, and shows its working - every suggestion can be traced back to the order or the rule that caused it, which is the difference between an MRP run people follow and one they override out of habit.
- Nightly
Plan refreshed while nobody is in
- Traceable
Every suggestion back to its cause
- Measured
Lead times from actual deliveries
What it does
Inside MRP software
The parts of CubeERP that make up MRP. Everything here shares one database, so nothing needs re-keying between them.
Multi-level explosion
Demand exploded through every level of the bill of materials, including phantoms, alternates and by-products, with lead-time offsetting at each level.
Netted against everything
Free stock, allocated stock, work in progress, confirmed purchase orders and goods in transit all taken into account - so MRP does not order what is already on a lorry.
Suggestions you can audit
Every recommendation shows what drove it: which order, which minimum level, which forecast line. Planners accept, amend or reject with the reasoning in front of them.
Lead times that are real
Supplier lead times measured from actual delivery performance rather than from what was agreed on paper, with safety time by item where volatility warrants it.
Exceptions first
Reschedule-in, reschedule-out, cancel and expedite messages ranked by impact, so a planner starts with the twelve things that matter rather than a thousand-line report.
What-if before you commit
Run a scenario against a possible order or a changed forecast and see the buy and make consequences before you promise a date to a customer.
In practice
Problems this actually solves
Anonymised, but not invented. These are the situations businesses describe to us before they change anything.
Planning in a spreadsheet with 40 tabs
The situation
A manufacturer planned in a spreadsheet that had grown for a decade. It was accurate when its owner was in, opaque to everybody else, and took a full day each week to refresh.
What changed
MRP runs nightly and produces an exception list rather than a rebuild. Planning is now a two-hour review, and two people can do it.
Buying what was already inbound
The situation
Purchasing worked from stock levels alone. Items on order but not yet delivered were invisible, so the same component was routinely ordered twice in a busy week.
What changed
Inbound purchase orders and work in progress are netted off before a suggestion is raised. Duplicate ordering stopped, and stock value fell without service levels moving.
Lead times taken on trust
The situation
Planning used the lead times suppliers quoted. Several suppliers were consistently a fortnight slower than they claimed, which was absorbed by expediting and air freight nobody costed.
What changed
Measured lead times replaced quoted ones. Planning became reliable, expediting fell sharply, and two suppliers were replaced on the basis of evidence rather than impression.
Local coverage
MRP across Northamptonshire
Our Northamptonshire coverage includes Northampton, Kettering, Wellingborough, Corby, Daventry and Towcester, and the NN postcode districts. If you are in Northamptonshire and not on that list, we almost certainly still cover you, so ask.
Postcode districts
- NN
Areas we cover
Northampton, Kettering, Wellingborough, Corby, Daventry, Towcester, Rushden and Brackley.
Getting to you
Roughly10miles from our Olney office
Discovery, training and go-live are done on site as standard - not because it looks good on a proposal, but because most of what a system needs to know is learned in the building.
How it happens
What implementation actually involves
The same process wherever you are, and for Northamptonshire it is done in person.
- 1
Discovery
A structured session mapping how you work now - the systems, the spreadsheets and the bits held together by one person’s memory. We come back with what the platform covers as standard, what needs configuration, and what needs building.
- 2
Configuration
Your sites, warehouses, price lists, approval limits, document templates, workflows and permissions set up to match the business - not a demo tenant with your logo dropped on it.
- 3
Data migration
Customers, suppliers, parts, bills of materials, price lists, open orders and stock balances brought across and reconciled. We migrate, you check the numbers against the old system, and only then do we cut over.
- 4
Training & rollout
Role-based training so the order desk learns the order desk and the warehouse learns the warehouse, with a pilot group first where it makes sense. Documentation and short screen recordings left behind for new starters.
- 5
Ongoing support
UK support from the people who built the platform, with a named contact, agreed response times, and a product roadmap you can influence.
You might call it something else
MRP goes by a lot of names - if you are searching for any of these, this is the page you wanted.
Questions
The things people ask first
Nightly for most businesses, with an on-demand run when something significant changes - a large order, a supplier failure, a design change. Continuous re-planning tends to produce noise rather than insight.
MRP plans materials. MRP II adds capacity - people, machines and work centres - so the plan is achievable as well as arithmetically correct. CubeERP does both; the capacity side is covered under production planning.
Yes. Forecasts can be loaded by item and period and consumed by actual orders as they arrive, so you are not double-counting demand once a forecast turns into a real order.
Yes - minimum order quantities, order multiples, economic order quantities, price-break optimisation and supplier-specific rules are all applied to the suggestion before a planner sees it.
Then MRP will be wrong, and it is better to know that before you start. Cleaning BOMs is normally the largest piece of work in a manufacturing implementation, and we plan for it explicitly rather than discovering it at go-live.
Related
Other things we can put right
Also available in Northamptonshire.
Manufacturing Software
Bills of materials, works orders, routings, shop-floor booking and real job costing - for businesses that make things to order.
Read moreProduction Planning Software
Schedule works orders against real capacity - people, machines and shifts - and see the effect of a rush job before you accept it.
Read morePurchase Order Software
Requisitions, approval limits, purchase orders raised from real demand, goods-in booking and three-way matching.
Read moreStock Control Software
Multi-location stock with bin locations, barcode scanning, batch and serial traceability, and figures that are right first time.
Read more
Part of a bigger system
MRP is one part of CubeERP. You can start here and switch the rest on later - it is the same system, not a separate purchase bolted on.
Working in Northamptonshire?
MRP for your Northamptonshire business
Tell us what your current system does badly. We will tell you whether CubeERP fixes it, and what it would take.