The future of MRPII is Lean

I have been working with a manufacturing client (T/O $12M, light industrial, MTO) that has been running an ageing MRPII platform - MK if you are interested. Originally they implemented the full breadth of capabilities from MPS to SFC. Over the years they have found that the return on effort of running all these features is not justifiable and they have progressively simplified the system's use. Over the past month we have been helping them evaluate a replacement strategy for this system which is now end of life and this week we had a eureka moment. Money is tight and the group this business belongs to uses an ERP solution targetted at the enterprise asset manageemnt space, not manufacturing. I had raised the possibility that one approach was to fairly radically simplify the production management process and only use the corporate system for sales orders and inventory. This week the light bulb went one in the MD's head and he asked me to elaborate on this idea. I outlined Lean manufacturing and described the experiences I had with seeing lean in action at Toyota and implementing it in Australia. He is getting the boards sign off and we will be organising training in Lean for the team. Our plan is to implement a full lean philosophy in the plant and slowly decommision the MRPII system. When we are back to just using Sales Orders and Inventory then we plan to swap to the corporate ERP system. My feeling is that, not only will they save much of the replacement and reimplementation costs of a new MRPII system BUT they will get a much better business in the prcoess. The more I see small manufacturers like this the more I think that MRPII is a bad fit for most of them and the more I like Lean as an approach. Lean can use technology - of course - but it puts people and process ahead of it. So the future for these types of companies may be an Accounting system with Lean rather than MRPII. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.