Picture a plastics injection workshop outside Bursa. Orders are climbing, delivery dates keep slipping, and the owner has the same argument with the production supervisor every morning: ‘Why can’t we keep up?’ The answer is almost always a guess. ‘That press is slow.’ ‘The material arrived late.’ ‘That operator is not pulling his weight.’ But which one is the real problem? Buying a new machine without knowing the answer might mean spending money on something the factory does not actually need.
MRP II — short for Manufacturing Resource Planning — addresses exactly this situation. The software records how much work each machine and each work centre carries at any given time. Which job order is being processed where, when it is scheduled to finish, which machine is running at full load, which one has spare capacity. Think of it like a school timetable: every classroom has a schedule showing which hours are full and which are free. MRP II applies the same logic to the factory floor.
The capacity planning module is the heart of this. The program compares incoming orders against available machine hours and tells you something like: ‘To meet this month’s orders, work centre number three needs to run at one hundred and ten percent — but work centre number five is only at sixty percent.’ The problem is not everywhere; it is at one specific point. That point is called a bottleneck. Finding the bottleneck is the first step toward avoiding an unnecessary capital purchase.
A production manager armed with this data walks into the owner’s office with a very different kind of conversation. ‘Before we buy another press, let’s try adding a second shift on work centre three. According to the capacity figures, that would raise monthly output by around thirty percent and cover the current order backlog.’ This kind of proposal rests on numbers the software produced, not on a feeling. The owner is no longer deciding in the dark. The figures are on the table.
Scenario planning is one of the most practical features this type of software offers. You can test different situations directly in the program. Ask ‘What happens if that customer sends twenty percent more orders next month?’ and the software shows you which machine hits its limit first and when. Or ask ‘If we buy a new press, how many months before it pays for itself?’ and the program uses the current workload distribution to give you a realistic utilisation estimate. These projections are not perfect, but they are far more solid than intuition alone.
In practice, there are real difficulties. To make the software work, every job order, every machine stoppage, and every shift change has to be entered into the system consistently. If the data is not entered, the program runs on empty. In many Turkish factories this discipline is not yet established. Operators write things down on paper, the accounts department keeps its own records, the production supervisor keeps his own. Bringing all of this into a single system takes time and requires a real change in daily habits. On top of that, setting up and configuring this kind of software almost always requires support from an authorised reseller or a consultant — it is not something you take out of the box and run the next morning.
For a small or mid-sized business owner thinking about buying new equipment or restructuring shifts, the key question is this: what are you basing the decision on? If the answer is experience or instinct, MRP II software is a way to back that experience with numbers. But the groundwork has to come first — the flow of data from the shop floor into the program has to be reliable, and every machine’s workload has to be recorded regularly. A factory that does this walks into an investment meeting with a much stronger case.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on June 7, 2004 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.