Materials Requirement Planning - MRP

You own a factory that makes chocolate chip cookies. Every day, when your employees arrive for their shifts, you have to have all the materials in place. You need enough sugar, vanilla, salt, brown sugar, chocolate chips, etc. for them to run the machines and make the cookies. Otherwise, if you don't have enough raw materials, the workers will just spend the day standing around, looking at their phones. Maybe at pictures of cookies.

The formal process of ensuring that workers have the materials they need is called material requirements planning. MRP is a method companies use to plan and schedule the delivery of the right materials, while still limiting unnecessary expenses, like spoilage.

In the old days, MRP involved a hurried guy with a clipboard. Nowadays, companies use specifically-designed software to optimize the process.