Master Planning and Scheduling, 4th Edition

18The Proven Path to a Successful Master Planning and Scheduling Implementation (Phase 1): Executives Lead MPS Behavior and ProcessEvaluation and Planning

If you always do what you've always done, you will always get what you've always gotten.

From the Original Implementation Plan to the Current Proven Path

Over the past 75 years, thousands of companies have taken steps in the direction of greater effectiveness, quality, and customer service. Perhaps at no time since the early years of the Industrial Revolution has the impulse toward self‐improvement been so widespread. In North America and Europe, the motive for that impulse is not difficult to understand: Intense competition from foreign competitors—primarily Asian corporations—threatens both the profitability and the survival of companies in a wide range of industries.

An important set of tools used by companies in their drive toward improvement in manufacturing has been manufacturing resource planning (MRPII), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and integrated, time‐phased, demand‐driven supply chain management (SCM). Thousands of companies in a variety of industries have turned to these highly effective processes and increasingly advanced software tools as a means of improving customer service, shortening delivery times, increasing productivity, and reducing inventory costs. Of these companies, hundreds (possibly greater than a thousand) have reached the coveted status of Class A in Operational and/or Business Excellence. ...