Lol. You’re not the first one battling management.
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Agreed.
MRP is indeed planning. It’s in the name of course. Kanban is signaling. They are not mutually exclusive. MRP is like waterfall and Kanban is Agile. They each have a place in the process. At Toyota, they don’t present a sales order at the end of assembly and wait for all the signals to go back to purchasing. They don’t call it MRP, they had another pillar for mixing orders with forecasts to smooth out the schedule and to make sure that they are making not too many or too few components at every step of the process. Ah yes, Heijunka. I had to look it up.
The goal of course of lean is to eliminate waste within the process. If one can eliminate the need to do extra data entry, that’s eliminating waste. Why create a job if you don’t need one?
Like you, I love this stuff. When we old f__s learned this, it wasn’t in the college curriculums yet. ERP was still called MRP II. We only had APICS to learn this, which is still one of the best professional organizations I’ve belonged to. Supply Chain Management wasn’t even a term until the early 80s and didn’t enter schools until the mid to late 90s I believe.
My first exposure to an MRP system (written in COBOL) was in 1985, nearly 15 years before a company called Epicor existed. 
At the time, we couldn’t research JIT and MRP, we were living it. Since it was something I learned in my 20s, I embraced it. People over 40, not so much. 
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Kanban and MRP are NOT mutually exclusive.
- MRP will create “plans” that will cause PO Suggestions for unfirm jobs
- Kanban will create a job for the quantity, backflush material and labor for the job, receive the finished product, and closes the job, all in one step.
ALSO a Kanban completion will REDUCE any unfirm jobs that MRP created.
So, you can have the best of both worlds… MRP planning (for materials) and kanban completions.
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There we go Tim, it was cool cause the presenter and you were probably in the room, touched on how they complement each other in some ways and other ways step on each other’s toes. it was cool.
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This will do that when you do the job? Or does another MRP run have to happen?
STORY TIME: I had a customer once who used Kanban… at first i thought they were crazy, but then after seeing what they did, I realized they were genious.
- they made bricks
- They would “forecast” how many of each type of brick they would sell per month. This drove demands for bricks and materials (cement, colorant, sand, etc).
- once per week, the Planner (aka the president of the division) would look at all the suggested jobs, and would decide what bricks to run and how many hours to run the brick machine for each brick. ie… Make Brick X1 for 3 hours, Brick X2 for 2.5 hours, Brick X3 for 2 hours.
- after the three hours, the person running the machine would count the number of brick made during the 3 hours and would enter the kanban job for that quantity.
Done… no jobs to maintain, no travelers to print, no materials to issue, no quantity to receive.
as soon as you do the kanban completion, the unfirm job is reduced (or even deleted)… no additional work is necessary. All demands are adjusted too.
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I did NOT know that. That changes some things then.
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It happens when you complete the KB job. I recall seeing this behavior and it stood out to me at the time but I kind of forgot about it during this discussion.
Yes, my suggestion is that if you want MRP to do your planning for kanban parts, you can also create a BPM that would stop you from FIRMING any job that is for a kanban part (because otherwise there is nothing keeping you from firming it).
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And we’ve come full circle… haha. I mentioned that somewhere in this post that I was doing that - I believe because of your suggestion in a previous post.
So did I get my answer right about the difference between Kanban bin vs. Kanban Warehouse replenishment? 
This is what I was trying to drum up from the deep chambers of insights memories over the years… Thank you @timshuwy haha
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if I told you about this, I have no recollection… as someone told me 15 years ago… i have probably forgotten more about the software than most people know. (not sure if that is a compliment or an insult). hahaha
I did want to add something that should be considered in case anyone else finds this thread later. From the standpoint of leaving MRP enabled, you need to be able to tell if the MRP job is for a Kanban controlled demand… I can tell if a job is being produced in a warehouse with Kanban replenishment but I don’t think I can tell if the KB replenishment is set on the Bin level. Is there any tie from job demand to the bin level?
the Kanban bin seems to be more useful if you have more than 1 location in a warehouse that will be kanbanned and need to keep them each managed separately. The Kanban warehouse is a simpler means if you only have 1 location or only care about the entire warehouse quantity as a whole.