Production planning: MRP software for small manufacturers

From sales order to production order

In a manufacturing business the work starts with a sales order, but it doesn’t end with the delivery note. In between lies the question of what has to be built, from which material, on which machine and by when. Production planning and control software and MRP software for material requirements planning answer exactly that question.

The basis is bills of materials and routings. The bill of materials says which parts and raw materials a product consists of, the routing in which steps and at which work centres it is made. A sales order thus becomes a production order, and the material requirement becomes a purchase order to the supplier. Better systems take the capacity of machines and staff into account and compare planned and actual costs at the end.

What small manufacturers really need

For a business with ten or twenty people that makes things in small batches or to customer specification, full detailed scheduling is often too much. Orders change, priorities shift, and the plan in the system lags behind the workshop. More important are usually a clean bill of materials, an overview of open orders and delivery dates, and knowing which material is missing.

Many inventory systems for small companies offer exactly that, bills of materials and simple production orders, without capacity planning. Standalone cloud MRP programs target businesses that need more planning but don’t want a large ERP project. When comparing, it is worth looking at how the sales order gets into planning and whether the bill of materials and item master are shared with the inventory system.

The bottleneck before planning

The best plan starts with a complete order. In small manufacturing businesses orders often arrive by e-mail, as a PDF from the customer’s purchasing system or as a photo of a sketch with dimensions. Before planning can start, someone has to read the order, match the lines and clear up open points, and that is often the foreman, between two jobs.

Onshop takes over this step. It turns the order in your mailbox into a draft order with customer and lines, shows for each line the passage in the e-mail or attachment and marks what is not clear. If details such as quantity or version are missing, Onshop prepares a question for the customer, and the answer completes the same draft. Onshop does not plan production. You export the confirmed order as CSV into your system; a direct integration is planned. More on Order management for small-batch manufacturers and workshops.