Materials Requirement Planning with the Use of Activity Based Costing

One of the rationalization areas is the material supply process. New tasks of material supply are: integration of supply with the operation of the entire system, especially at the product design stage, effective use of material resources, reduction of the level of supply costs from the point of view of production costs. In the conditions of unit and small batch production the materials requirement needs to be carefully planned and optimized due to the use of many different kinds, types and sizes of materials and dynamic changes of demand over time. In this situation there are needed tools enabling the measurement of production costs for particular tasks on the basis of currently realized processes. One of these tools is activity based costing which is a groundwork for decision making process in the material supply area. Basing on activity based costing, a model of materials requirements planning was developed, which considers minimizing the number of different kinds and sizes of materials by using alternative materials and, consequently, lowering production costs.

Implementation of Transactional Planning Systems for the Plastics Industry

Transactional systems are an alternative process improvement for any industrial sector; however, due to the rapid growth of the plastics industry worldwide, this industry requires the automation of production with agile systems. This document presents a procedure to implement transactional tools of the Master Production Schedule (MPS) and Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) for the automation and control of the operations area processes in an organization. These processes are part of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools that use connections to mobile devices and are often compatible with different customer support systems, allowing the integration of all business units to interact with the manufacturing control and purchasing. The method used in the research have a quantitative cut in which 15 companies were studied in the plastics sector in Mexico and was divided in three phases, these focused on the revision of the business processes and the analysis of the substantive processes of the organization that allowed the subsequent establishment of proposals for improvement. In the final proposal of implementation of the tool tansaccional included: the functional analysis of the systems, the planning and their evaluation.

Operations Management

The emergence of Operations Management (OM) in the early 1960s is described, showing how it was based on the adoption of mathematical models from operational research during the Second World War. Subsequent major developments such as Materials Requirements Planning, Japanese manufacturing, manufacturing strategy, and supply chain management, and their effect on the OM discipline are outlined. These often attempted to reconcile the reductive analytical approach of early OM with the consideration of larger systems. The adoption of empirical research methods and theory from outside OM during the 1990s is examined, as well as the ever-present tension between practical relevance and academic rigour. Finally, the chapter reflects on ‘where the management is’ in operations management. It suggests that the managerial substance of OM is in exercising judgement on issues not susceptible to modelling, generating alternative courses of action, managing change, and judging how and when to use models, given the specific context of the operation.

Using SAP for ERP Applications and Design

In order to become globally competitive in today’s dynamic business environment, organi-zations have to come closer to customers and deliver value added services and products in the shortest possible time. The primary business process through which this is achieved is the sales and distribution process. However, the sales and distribution process is just one part of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This chapter will focus on the sales and distribution (SD) process of SAP’s ERP system. This chapter will assist in learning about the basic functions that make up this process and how it affects the other modules in the ERP system. This chapter will also look at the Purchasing process and the materials requirements planning (MRP) process and how all the three processes are linked together to form one complete business process.