Project Material Requirements Planning

Project material requirements planning (project MRP) totals the demand for all the parts within a specific program, project, sub project, and activity. The calculation is based on the existing project inventory balance, project shop orders, and project purchase orders. Planning methods control the planning data you enter for a part.

Project MRP is a clone of MRP. Like MRP, project MRP calculates the demand in the entire product structure, making sure that the demand  is met on every level. The major difference is that MRP considers all non-project specific requirements, while project MRP only considers activity specific requirements.

The purpose of project MRP is to calculate the demand for the parts based on shop orders, material requisitions, project miscellaneous demands, and part structures, to ensure that the demand is met. Project MRP results in a proposal for parts that need to be manufactured and purchased, and in what quantities. It also generates suggestions on how to plan shop orders and purchase orders to best meet the demand for new shop orders and purchase requisitions.

Project MRP can be performed with netting per activity, netting per project or netting per PNG. Netting is the process of calculating net requirements for a part.  When executing project MRP, you can specify values such as site, project ID, planned netting group (PNG), and the run date. The values that you are allowed to enter depends on the type of netting you choose to perform. You may refrain from entering a value in the permitted fields or you may enter the wild card symbol (%). In the Perform Project MRP per Activity window for instance, if you do not enter a project ID or if you enter the wild card symbol (%) in the Project ID field, it indicates that all open project IDs will be considered in the calculation. Project MRP starts by calculating the lowest level on which parts exist, on the structures in which they are included. A part that is not a component of another structure, but is only a parent part, has the lowest level zero (0). Zero-level parts are usually sales parts. A part that is a component of a parent part is at level two, a component of a component is at level three, and so on. This level coding is necessary for project MRP, estimates, and accurate calculations of product families and product codes. Then before project MRP calculation takes place, existing supplies (purchase requisitions and shop proposals) that were created by project MRP in a previous run will be deleted. The project MRP process will re-generate all the necessary supplies after the calculation.

When project MRP is performed with netting per activity, it calculates requirements only by specific activities within a project. In other words, if one activity in the project has excess stock, and a second activity in the same project needs the stock, project MRP does not automatically allocate the material from the first activity to the second. If you want to automatically move stock between activities (and even between projects), you can do this using PNGs. This is accomplished by performing project MRP with netting per project or with netting per PNG. See the topic description on Planned Netting Group for more details about PNGs.

When project MRP is performed with netting per project, it calculates requirements by considering supply and demand of all the activities in the project. Therefore any excess supply belonging to an activity can be used to meet the demand arising from another activity in the same project.

Similarly, when project MRP is performed with netting per PNG, the netting process considers supply and demand of all the activities in the specified PNG. If it is a project PNG, then the process is the same as that of netting per project. If the PNG consists of activities from different projects, it will be possible to move stocks between projects. This is called multiproject material requirements planning (multiproject MRP).

Standard inventory stock is not used to fulfill activity demands during the project MRP process. However, the project and manufacturing planners can decide and set project MRP to use standard inventory true surplus (i.e., on hand quantity exceeds the sum of reserved quantity and demand quantity).

If the project site is set to use standard inventory surplus to fulfill requirements for the activity in the Project/Site window, a standard inventory supply source type will be generated in the project MRP process to transfer parts from the standard inventory to project inventory. Only the nonstandard planned parts with surplus on hand quantity are qualified for transfer.

Netting hierarchy is as follows.

1. Within the demand activity
2. Within valid project netting groups
3. Standard inventory

It is possible automatically transfer true excess standard inventory supply during the project MRP process by setting up the values in the Project/Site window.

The expiration dates of a part will be consider when moving stocks to another activity. The inventory location record with earliest expiration date of a purticular part will be used first.

Project MRP considers customer-owned inventory for the project as on-hand stock. multiproject MRP can use customer-owned inventory only in projects that have the same customer. If there are different customers within the PNG, then the customer-owned inventory should be excluded from the PNG.

Project MRP can be used to plan a single project planned part and its components. Between Project MRP execution cycles, any changes for the supply/demand situation of the part are not reflected in the project MRP results until project MRP is run again. When there are such changes, if the planner is aware that the supply/demand situation of a certain part has changed and that the current project MRP results should be recalculated, it can be done so by executing selective project MRP for the part.

The outcome is that the results for the part and its lower level assemblies and components are recalculated so that they reflect the actual changes in the supply/demand situation. The advantage is since selective project MRP only deletes and regenerates results for the affected set of parts, the project MRP results that were created for the larger set of parts remain unchanged and can be used by the planner. If the planner chooses to run selective MRP after selective PMRP and the part has standard plan subassemblies/components, selective MRP will handle the supply/demand changes for those parts.

It is possible to run selective project MRP for a selected set of parts. When project MRP is performed for a selected set of part(s), the independent demands and dependent demands which were created in the last project MRP run will be considered as the demand for the part(s). MRP logic will then delete and recalculate the supplies and explode the results into the lower structure levels.

Note: Independent demands that are coming from other higher level parts in the last project MRP run may not reflect the real demand situations due to the fact that the demand supply situation may be different from the last project MRP run. Therefore planners need to be aware about this fact and should take necessary actions in order to get correct results. For example, if there are a lot more demand supply changes which may affect the selective project MRP run, running project MRP and then running selective project MRP to plan the subset of parts is a safer approach.

Planners can perform selective project MRP for certain low levels. All parts in the given low level code will be planned by selective project MRP. Planners can take actions and replan demand and supplies based on selective project MRP results for the level. The next level can be planned by running selective project MRP for low level n..n+1 where n is the low level code for the first selective project MRP run. TNext, run selective project MRP for n..n+2 and so on. This incremental way of planning each level will enable the planner to focus more on each level and plan them in detail. After being satisfied with all the steps, the last step would be to run project MRP to balance supplies and demands for the project according to the manual planning adjustments performed during planning each level. It is not advisable to run selective project MRP for level n and then level n+1 and so on since then the upper level (n) exploded demands are not correctly visible to next level (n+1).

Note: It is advisable to perform selective project MRP for low levels without any other selection criteria. For example, even though running selective project MRP for low level code n..n+1 only for the product family PF1 will yield correct results, the results might look confusing. Therefore the planner has to be cautious when analyzing the results as well.