What Is Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP-II)?

Manufacturing resource planning, or MRP-II, extends basic material requirements planning with capacity checks, financial rollup, and closed-loop feedback from the shop floor. Where MRP-I only calculates what materials are needed and when, MRP-II also asks whether the machine hours exist, whether the cash exists to pay suppliers, and whether the sales forecast agrees, then feeds shop floor actuals back into the plan. It is the step from a materials calculation to a coordinated, capacity-aware production plan.

This entry defines MRP-II and shows how it behaves inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of planning terms, see the manufacturing glossary, and for the capacity calculation at its core, read what is capacity requirements planning.

How it works

Start with MRP-I, the material half. Given a demand like "100 bicycles by Friday," it works backward through the bill of materials, nets against what is already in stock and on order, and time-offsets the result to suggest that you make or buy 200 tyres by Wednesday. It is pure material arithmetic, and it assumes infinite capacity: it never asks whether the wheel-building line has the hours to do the work.

MRP-II adds the questions MRP-I skips. Do we actually have the machine hours to build those wheels in that window? Do we have the cash to pay the tyre supplier? Does the sales forecast that drove the demand still hold? And critically, it closes the loop: as the shop floor reports what really happened, that feedback flows back into the plan, which is recomputed so the remaining work reflects reality instead of the original assumptions.

The single most important addition is finite capacity. MRP-I hands you order due dates that ignore the machines; MRP-II, through capacity requirements planning and finite scheduling, places the work into real available hours and tells you whether the dates are achievable. That is the difference between a plan that looks feasible on paper and one that the floor can actually run.

A concrete example

An MRP-I run for a bicycle order calculates that 200 tyres are needed by Wednesday and 100 frames by Thursday, and it schedules all the wheel-building for Wednesday because the material math allows it. On paper the plan is complete and the due dates line up.

The floor tells a different story. The wheel-building line has one shift, and Wednesday's suggested load is two shifts of work. MRP-II catches this at the capacity check: it places the wheel-building into the line's real hours, sees the overload, and pushes part of the work to Thursday with an honest revised date. When the line then runs an hour slow on the day, the closed loop feeds that actual back, and the plan updates the downstream steps rather than pretending the original Wednesday finish still holds. The plan stays connected to reality from calculation through execution.

How EDGEBIC uses it

EDGEBIC provides the capacity-checked, closed-loop half of manufacturing resource planning: the finite scheduling and shop floor feedback that turn a material plan into a runnable one. It takes the demand and routings, places every operation into work centers within their real, finite capacity, and produces a schedule with achievable dates rather than the infinite-capacity due dates a bare material calculation returns. Capacity requirements are computed against the same shift and instance definitions the scheduler uses, so the load view and the schedule agree.

The loop closes through actuals. As the floor logs real starts, finishes, hours, and scrap, EDGEBIC preserves the completed work and reschedules the remainder from the current state, so the plan continuously reflects what has happened. Cost rollup uses each work center's rate to attach a financial figure to the plan. Because EDGEBIC is a scheduling and planning specialist rather than a full ERP, it works alongside whatever transactional system holds your orders, inventory, and financials, exchanging data through flexible Excel, CSV, and database import and export masks. You keep the ERP for material netting and financials and add the finite, closed-loop capacity layer that distinguishes MRP-II from MRP-I.

To follow the capacity calculation in detail, continue with what is capacity requirements planning. For the committed build plan that feeds it, read what is a master production schedule. And for the finite engine that makes the capacity check real, see what is advanced planning and scheduling.