A Framework for the Development of a Manufacturing Resources Planning System

Many Small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs), because of the limited scope and size of their operations consider investment in proprietary Enterprise Systems unattractive. Meanwhile In-house development approach has been identified as a way deepening the adoption of these productivity enhancement systems among SMEs in developing economies. This paper presents a framework for developing Manufacturing Resources Planning software adaptable for SMEs in Nigeria and other developing economies. After the critical study and analysis of manufacturing systems, algorithms were developed for generating the material requirement plans for four different lot-sizing techniques. Subsystems for determining Labour and machine capacity requirements and costs, subsystems for material and running costs were integrated into the MRP algorithms. User friendly software of the resulting system was developed using visual basic. The system components were tested using a small-scale process and a middle-scale process to ensure proper functionality. The software which comes with various graphical reporting tools like tables and bar charts was shown to be flexible and accurate, suitable for small and medium enterprises.