Evolution of manufacturing planning and control systems: from reorder point to enterprise resources planning.

Production & Inventory Management Journal, March, 2001 by Litteral, Lewis A.

Manufacturing planning and control (MPC) systems have existed since the earliest days of the industrial revolution [30]. To gain a historical perspective, it is useful to look at the evolution of these systems. Five major stages were involved: (1) reorder point (ROP) systems, (2) materials requirement planning (MRP) systems, (3) manufacturing resource planning (MRP-II) systems, (4) MRP-II with manufacturing execution systems (MES), and (5) enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) with MES [19, 22, 23, 27, 33].

When examined in detail, each stage represents the next logical step ...