Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) is software that works out which raw materials and parts a factory needs to make its products, how many of each, and on what date they have to arrive. It takes your production plan, checks what you already have in stock, and tells you exactly what to order and when. The goal is simple: never run out, but never overstock either.
Think of it like a recipe planner for a restaurant that knows it will serve 200 meals on Friday. It looks at every dish on the menu, multiplies the ingredients, subtracts what is already in the fridge, and hands you a shopping list with delivery dates. An MRP system does the same for screws, steel, circuit boards or fabric, across hundreds of products at once. Most MRP tools today are delivered as part of a larger ERP system, or sit close to the factory floor alongside a Manufacturing Execution System that tracks what is actually being built.
The math behind it is unforgiving. Get the lead times or stock counts wrong and the whole plan slips, which is why clean data matters more than the software itself. A single supplier quoting six weeks instead of four can throw off a build date for a product that ships three layers down the chain.
There is a limit, though. Classic MRP assumes infinite machine capacity, so it can hand you a plan no shop floor could actually run. That gap is why many teams pair it with capacity scheduling or move to MRP II, which factors in labour and machine hours.
At TopDevs we help manufacturers connect their MRP to the rest of their stack, so order data, stock levels and supplier feeds stay in sync instead of living in disconnected spreadsheets.
