An interactive user interface for material requirements planning - HP's MRP Action Manager software - includes related article on how project was managed - Technical

Hewlett-Packard Journal, August, 1992 by Alvina Y. Nishimoto, William J. Gray, Barbara J. Williams

For planners and buyers in the manufacturing business environment, HP MRP Action Manager is an online, interactive tool that automates many of the traditional paper-intensive activities of material requirements planning.

HP MRP Action Manager for NewWave is an enhancement to HP Materials Management (HP MM) software. HP MM provides an online materials management tool for production planners and buyers.1 The HP MRP Action Manager operates within the HP NewWave environment2 to provide an easy-to-use, interactive user interface between a personal computer and the HP 3000 computer.

In a typical manufacturing environment, planners and buyers receive MRP (materials requirements planning) reports after running a regularly scheduled MRP program. These reports, called action reports, show suggested actions for work orders and purchase orders to meet future demand for inventory. The suggested actions include changes to pull in and push out dates,* cancellation of existing orders, and suggestions for new orders.

Planners and buyers typically have to wade through mountains of paper reports to determine the suggestions they would like to act on. Then, they make any changes on paper and manually enter these changes into an MRP package such as HP MM.

HP MRP Action Manager software automates this process by providing the following features:

* Dynamic selection control. Each planner or buyer reviews the entire action report or a subset of the action report, filtering the information displayed by selecting some combination of MRP actions (pull in, push out, etc.), part numbers, user-defined items, product line, and vendor. This feature eliminates the unnecessary printing of MRP reports, resulting in reduced printing costs and increased time savings. Fig. 1 shows the Action Manager window for selecting MRP information. The selections shown in the window indicate that the user is selecting parts for controller 79 that have the ABC code A in product line 1. Fig. 2 shows the window for selecting a specific action to be performed on orders. This window appears when the Specific Actions... command is selected from the selection window shown in Fig. 1.

* Online review and approval of MRP actions. Planners and buyers can approve MRP actions with or without changes, cancel MRP actions, or hold MRP actions for later review.

* Online recalculation of projected inventory. Recalculation of projected inventory occurs when order quantities and dates change. This interactive "what-if" analysis immediately shows the planner the impact of changes on inventory levels. If the impact is not desirable, the planner can reset the changed selections to the original values suggested by MRP Action Manager.

* Automated order additions and changes. Order additions and changes are transferred to HP MM for automatic update through the batch interface. This feature eliminates the need to reenter the data manually through HP MM online data-entry screens.

* Direct part or order find. Using wildcard searches and selection windows, planners identify and quickly display specific parts or orders (Fig. 3).

* Online order pegging. By using online pegging, the planner can examine the upward and downward links in a bill of material, level by level, to find out where the demand is coming from that creates a requirement for an order, or to see the impact a supply order has on lower-level components.

* Workspace comments. The planner can create comments in the MRP action workspace reports to annotate the decision-making process.

* Optimized system resources. HP MRP Action Manager uses a cooperative client/server interaction between PCs and the HP 3000 computer for optimum use of system resources.

* Ease of use. Action Manager has a graphical user interface that takes advantage of the flexible features of the HP NewWave environment and provides online help with browsing and searching capabilities (see Fig. 4). With HP MRP Action Manager, the planner can analyze MRP data and execute MRP suggestions more quickly and effectively than by using the traditional printed reports and manually entering data into HP MM. The process a planner would use with the HP MRP Action Manager might involve:

* Selecting subsets of MRP output from the NewWave interface on the PC

* Analyzing suggested changes and new orders

* Taking advantage of NewWave's cut and paste functionality to incorporate portions of the MRP report into memos and spreadsheets

* Forwarding necessary order changes and additions to HP MM for automatic processing.

Action Manager Architecture

The architecture of the HP MRP Action Manager is based on a client/server model. The client (a PC running NewWave) communicates over the network with the server (an HP 3000 running the MPE/iX operating system). This architecture is shown in Fig. 5.

PC Architecture.

Operating in the New Wave environment allows Action Manager to provide a user with all of the benefits of the NewWave user interface. A planner or buyer can easily perform the tasks necessary to complete an MRP job and get access to other NewWave applications such as NewWave mail and object storage.