From Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Concepts and the Associated Software Packages (PICS and COPICS of IBM to ERP‐Labeled Packages)

Materials requirement planning (MRP I) is a planning tool for deriving a supply schedule from a manufacturing scheduling and product structures describing what for materials have to be supplied to fulfill the manufacturing schedule under consideration. MRP I reduces the inventory levels of supplies by planning their deliveries when they are required (just-in-time) to meet the committed due dates for delivering finished products to the sales department. Manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) is an enhancement of MRP I. The Enterprise resource planning (ERP) concept is a holistic approach for planning all the enterprise resources required to meet the market demand. The MRP I and MRP II concepts were developed before software programs were written. In fact, the software packages called production and inventory control system (PICS) and customer-oriented PICS (COPICS) brought in the market place by IBM are the software implementation of the two concepts.