San Ramon, CA – September 26, 2001 – As a result of partnering with its build-to-order, discrete manufacturing, and maintenance organization customers, Relevant Business Systems has enhanced its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Business Planning module by providing all of the functions required to prepare forecasts for products, create master production schedules (MPS), and evaluate the impact of the MPS on company resources, using rough-cut capacity planning.

“The MPS assimilates forecasted and firm demand to develop a time-phased production plan for supplying master scheduled items,” explains Patrick Garrehy, Relevant Business Systems' President and CEO. “It takes into account projected on-hand inventory, firm customer orders and the production plan to create the work orders and purchase requisitions needed to manufacture the master scheduled items. Several MPS runs may be executed and saved without impacting the rest of the database, allowing users to consider alternatives, review what-if impacts and select the most appropriate production plan.”

According to Garrehy, Relevant Business Planning also provides a sophisticated resource requirements planning tool. Manufacturing resources, such as parts, labor, machine time, cash flow, and maintenance hours, can be identified and entered into the system. To check capacity constraints, Relevant compares this resource plan with the production plan to illustrate the projected load that a given MPS will place on the organization. If this rough cut indicates that resources do not exist to meet the MPS being tested, the user may fine-tune the MPS to bring the available resources into balance with production demands.

Individual forecasts may cover up to a five-year period, using monthly increments. Furthermore, production planning can incorporate multiple forecasts, such as marketing and sales, spares and statistical trends, to streamline the process of moving from department forecasts to an overall production forecast.

For increased flexibility, demand forecasts can be entered manually or developed by the system based on the statistical analysis of a part’s usage history. Manual forecasts need to be entered only once per forecasting cycle and can be incorporated into a single higher level forecast, such as individual salesperson forecasts aggregated into a regional forecast. When developed statistically, the user can specify whether the forecast anticipates actual demand level by period or a set monthly rate. In either case, the user defines a review horizon and time increment.