Glossary
LEXICON / TERMThe process of calculating what materials a manufacturer needs to buy or produce, and when, based on demand, existing inventory, and lead times.
MRP (Material Requirements Planning) is the calculation process that turns a production plan into a concrete materials plan — determining what to purchase or manufacture, and by when, given current demand, on-hand inventory, and supplier or production lead times.
Without MRP, materials planning falls back to manual spreadsheet math or gut-feel reordering — a real source of both stockouts (missed a shortage) and excess inventory (over-ordered against a stale estimate).
An MRP run compares a demand signal (sales orders, forecasts, or a production plan) against current stock and open supply, and produces recommended purchase, manufacture, transfer, or expedite actions for each affected item.
A production plan for 500 finished units explodes against the bill of materials to determine exactly how many of each component are needed, nets that against on-hand and on-order stock, and recommends a purchase or production action for the shortfall.
Vercentlabs' material and capacity planning runs produce recommended purchase, manufacture, transfer, or expedite actions — stated honestly as a real, current limitation, these runs are triggered manually today; there is no automatic scheduler running MRP on a cadence yet.
Open Plan to Production runbook →Lexicon cross-reference
Reference index
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30-minute working session