Fast, faster, MRP Live

In material requirements planning, time-optimized and transparent processes are a critical success factor, especially in economically turbulent times. Innovative MRP solutions based on the real-time platform Hana are convincing here with a performance gain.

In addition, they make many business processes possible in the first place. 27 minutes instead of 22 hours for a material requirements planning: These figures were recently delivered by a test scenario of the specialized solution provider Consilio IT-Solutions, a company founded by former SAP and KPMG managers.

Hana is proving to be a powerful efficiency lever, offering multiple increases in run speed with compressed storage, networking, and real-time analytics: the availability of materials and their inventory ranges can be viewed in real time.

This holds a lot of potential, especially in the right applications, as the field test demonstrates. Hana-based MRP solutions can enormously accelerate complex material requirements planning runs and capacity planning.

Field test

Background of the practical test: Many companies suffer from a too slow material requirements planning throughput, because the technical possibilities of classical databases do not allow a faster data processing.

Limitations often have to be accepted in material requirements planning, especially if new concepts such as restriction-based and optimizing methods are to compensate for the shortcomings of the MRP.

The data volume increases and the runtimes of the programs become even longer. For the practical test, an ECC 6.0 system with Hana DB was set up, the so-called MRP Live, and a realistic company scenario was created with three plants, over 300,000 materials with up to 17 scheduling levels.

The comparison data was provided by a classic ECC with a MaxDB and identical master data. The planning run had to resolve 80,000 planned independent requirements for finished products and - over a period of twelve months - 300 sales orders for configurable materials.

The products were scheduled partly according to plan and partly according to consumption.

"To be able to represent the Hana effect as well as possible, we started with small data volumes and gradually increased the volumes"

says David Reibnegger, project manager at Consilio.

He summarizes:

"The classic MRP based on MaxDB with parallelization took 22 hours to plan the requirements and generated 10 million planned orders - with 52 million dependent requirements and seven million purchase requisitions, including stock transfer requisitions. Meanwhile, MRP Live with Hana DB processed the same volume of movement data in a runtime of just 27 minutes."

The test showed that the Hana DB and the newly developed Hana MRP show their strengths with increasing data volume. The more data, the greater the time-optimizing effect.

In-memory production planning

The runtime gain opens up completely new possibilities for supply chain planning with the Hana-based MRP Live. For example, companies with highly complex products, a large number of orders or industries with short-term fluctuations in demand can plan more efficiently with MRP Live.

This enables companies to respond quickly and flexibly at any time to new customer requirements or exceptional situations in production planning and control.

Even if MRP Live is not yet fully developed and functionalities such as the lead time scheduling of planned orders or long-term planning are still under development, the costs for an MRP solution based on Hana will be amortized quickly because, especially in the supply chain, time is de facto just another word for money. The following already applies here: Fast, faster, MRP Live.