Material Requirements Planning for a Manufactured Housing Facility

Abstract

To design an efficient and effective inventory control system for the manufactured housing (MH) industry, it is necessary to accelerate the flow of information and products across the supply chain. To achieve this goal, the system needs three ingredients: generators of quick information flow, generators of quick material flow, and facilitators of both information flow and material flow. This paper proposes a material requirements planning (MRP) system that uses a database approach to manage the large amount of information involved in the material-requirements estimation process for the MH industry. A prototype MRP database and a Visual Basic interface have been developed by using information collected through the research. The proposed MRP system was tested using data provided by a manufactured housing facility to demonstrate its functionality and application to any MH facility. This proposed MRP system can be used to develop better planning strategies and to respond quickly to unexpected changes in demand for the MH industry.