The main difference between Material Requirement Planning and ASCP is that MRP doesn’t look at the constraints (material or resource) when planning the material supply. It assumes infinite capacity and plans the supply on the same day as the shipment date of the assembly. To prepare an achievable production schedule, planners have to do Capacity Requirement Planning (CRP). CRP presents the load chart of the machines including available hours and required hours, but the production schedule is still far from complete. So now a third tool is required to realign the planned production jobs on each machine and finally come up with an achievable production schedule.
The challenge does not end here. Although we have an achievable production schedule, but is it going to be cost effective? Are we building the product in the right sequence so we do not have to carry excess inventory? Are we minimizing the change-overs? Do we have means to decide which supplier to source the material from so as to have least impact on the production/shipping schedule still keeping the cost low? How do I tell MRP that every vendor has a different work schedule and our calendar does not match with theirs? The list goes on. MRP does not have answers to these questions.
ASCP comes with answers to all the above questions and more. Sounds too good to be true. So the clients begin lining up to buy the product. They invite consulting firms to implement the product and wait for the grand returns. Since they are eager to get the results, they implement ASCP with its functionality enabled, enforce capacity constraints (ECC), Optimization turned on, vendor constraints enabled, dynamic safety stock calculation, and automatic release of supply orders from the planning workbench, online planner and so on.
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