Material requirements planning

You know, I touched on the introduction there.

You've been in the ERP world for 40 years and starting back when it was called MRP2.

So just take us on that journey, which began at McDonnell Douglas.

Absolutely.

Well, back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, there wasn't ERP, right? In the 50s and 60s, MRP was coined before things were written into software.

MRP is material requirements planning, and it became the first platform, the predecessor to ERP.

So I started out as a Fortran programmer, kind of backed my way into some business software called AskManMan, MRP2.

learned how to modify it using my Fortran skills, wound up in aerospace.

ERP software stands for Enterprise Resource Planning.

The ERP category began in the 70s, really is a category called MRP, and that was called material resource planning.

And I'm backing up to the beginning because it explains how we got to where we are today with the whole category of ERP systems.

Now, MRP systems, material resource planning, those were built for manufacturers because manufacturers at the time didn't really have a good technology to help them plan the raw materials and their production, their financials, all the things that make a manufacturer work.

So you have this category called MRP.

Over time, though, the category grew and evolved from just a manufacturing-focused thing to something that had multiple modules that did a bunch of different things like finance and accounting and procurement, all the things you see listed on the slide here.

And essentially how ERP systems work is they are designed to bring together an entire organization on one single platform that has a series of modules.

And when you create an assembly, you could then extract that bill of materials from the CAD model and do things with it.

So the thing that you primarily want to do with it is transfer it into MRP.

So in the way that we got excited today about integration with ERP, that was the game back then.

Pull a bomb out, put it into MRP.

Now, that was already happening in 1990s.

I actually went to Coopers & Lybrand for a few years, now part of PwC.

So it was a very complex piece of equipment.

Anyway, so they were an early Sherpa customer.

Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of dating myself, but I, I think when I reflect on it, this is probably the third sort of extinction-level event in the industry that's happened to force change and evolution.

Um, I started my career in the early 2000s when planning software was, was just getting started, and from then it was sort of growing on MRP, um, getting to S&OP processes and, and really trying to just figure out how to get an end-to-end solution going.

I think about 10, 15 years ago, something like that, uh, there was a move to SaaS-based platforms, um, really d- driven around simulations and IBP processes that changed the game for the last generation.

And then right now, just in the probably the last six months, maybe less than that, we've seen a whole lot of change with these AI tools coming in where, um, you know, it's kind of getting through some of the hype and understanding what really is gonna emerge from the, from the ooze, so to speak, and the evolution of it.