Developing a computer-aided environment to investigate the influences of design schedule changes on material requirement planning

Recently, the concepts of concurrent engineering have been implemented in many manufacturing areas. However, very few efforts were addressed to linking design procedures and material requirement planning (MRP). In general, an engineering change (EC) might have an influence on the material requirements as well as on the inventory and hence affect the manufacturing process. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the material status during the EC stage. This concept has formed a new area for concurrent engineering, that is design for MRP (DFMRP). In this paper, a computer-aided environment that integrates a product data management (PDM) module and an MRP module, to support DFMRP has been proposed. The major function of this environment is to investigate the influence of EC schedule changes on MRP. In other words, this environment provides the information about the influence on MRP when the starting time or finishing time of certain EC tasks have been altered. A process model was developed to describe the relations between EC and production management tasks. In addition, an integration module was developed to extract the the related information from PDM and MRP, and to analyse the possible influence on MRP based on the process model. The analysed results can be used as reference information for project management in PDM.