The Birmingham Chapter of APICS can provide lifelong learning opportunities to the business and professional community in two ways:  a structured certification training process for CPIM and CSCP as well as through custom work shops that are designed to meet your particular supply chain/operations management needs.  You can choose from any number of topics or customize your own.  The workshops are structured to teach the tools and methods necessary to help individuals visualize and understand, while providing concrete, "how-to" training that is aimed at solving your specific problem or realize your particular opportunity.

Listed below is an example of one such workshop.  This particular workshop is directed at helping production planners, shop floor supervisors, and material handlers understand and support the concept of MRP controls in a way that is compatible with Lean manufacturing.

A sample workshop- The Role of MRP Systems in a Lean Plant?

A MRP system (Material Requirements Planning) is responsible to orchestrate the flow of material outside the boundaries of a workstation. A Pull/KANBAN is a simple manual MRP method to orchestrate the flow of material and works well when few variations in the flow are required. The need to orchestrate the flow of material outside the boundaries of a plant is best done with electronic communications. The overall cost of a product is dependent on the overall cost of the supply chain. An effective computer controlled MRP system orchestrates the supply chain and must therefore be aligned with the plant floor and manual MRP methods or it is of little value and could actually add overhead.

If you can envision that a lean plant floor looks like a level flow of water in a stream, you can see that material flows like the water flows. Dams along the stream are warehouses; rocks in the stream are buffers; curves in the stream are like transportation routes which increase lead-time, work-in-process and act like a buffer. The cost of the supply change can be calculated by looking at the length of the stream, flow rate and volume of the water in the stream. If the stream is too long a manufacturer cannot be flexible. If the volume of inventory is too great a manufacturer cannot be price competitive and profitable.

The class teaches MRP tools and methods to help individuals visualize and understand how a supply chain should look and measure its competitiveness.

Objectives/Topics

• History of MRP, MRPII and ERP
• Demonstrate how a KANBAN system works
• Demonstrate how a pull system works
• Define the material characteristics that cause Pull/KANBAN methods to fail
• Define the data elements and parameters for material flow calculations
• Material On-Hand
• Material In-transit
• Order Multiples
• Delivery Patterns
• Safety Stock measured in hours
• Scheduled Orders
• Bills of materials
• Plant layouts and the point of application
• Demonstrate the results of hourly and daily MRP calculations
• Define the role of MRP, MRPII, and ERP in a lean environment

Course Length

1 day

Class Size

10-15 participants

To schedule a workshop please contact ChuckMorris@FastMRP.com, 205-444-1185 or submit a request for information..