Our clients include companies such as Shell, Toyota and Unilever, as well as many smaller manufacturing concerns. They all have ERP or older MRPII systems, and have felt that the functionality of their systems need to be extended to give them the kind of responsive scheduling they are looking for. Spreadsheet based scheduling applications have been interfaced to SAP, Baan and many other ERP systems.

The neatest way to interface your spreadsheet system with your host ERP/MRP system is with an ODBC driver (Open Data Base Connectivity). Although, often the only way to get data out of an older legacy system is via an ASCII file. Your IT people are often the guardians of this technology, so you may need their help. The minimum data you will need to feed a scheduling system is a list of manufacturing orders or sales orders. More comprehensive systems may also require:

• Sales forecasts
• Inventory
• Routings
• Bill of materials
• Purchase orders

Many clients want to upload the dates generated by the scheduling system, so that the host system can do the MRP 1 calculations, and recommend purchase orders for materials etc. Getting the spreadsheet system to write the data, to be uploaded, to a file is no problem, but uploading into the host system may require a program to be written.