Planning software is absolutely necessary–it’s just like budgeting and projections. Budgeting for variable expenses is never exactly accurate, but it gives a plan for available expenditures if revenues are at projections. It’s much different for production and delivery to customer requirements. If two budgeted variable and equal items come in, one at 15% over and one at 15% under, the budgeting accuracy looks great–100%. On delivery, if we deliver 15% of orders at or ahead of time, and then deliver 15% of orders late, we have an unacceptable 85% on-time delivery rate. Still, an overall plan is necessary to have a common plan and goals for everyone.

The problem we have is that people are attempting to use planning systems as tools they were not designed to be. In order to try and emulate lean principles we have instituted numerous methods to make planning systems become execution systems. They are designed to take top-down requirements, explode them, aggregate them and time-phase them to arrive at daily/weekly/monthly schedules. That’s great except for all the unforseen events that take place–that’s where an execution tool comes in.

I believe that you will see a way to perform excellent planning with your ERP/MRP systems and then use an execution tool to ensure execution to plan.

Lloyd Payton
Chief Executive Officer at Systems Plus, Inc.