Book Reviews

The Executive's Guide to Successful MRP II

By Oliver Wight

Review by Steve Buchwald, CIRM

As we all know, Oliver Wight was one of the early pioneers of MRP II. As such he became internationally recognized as an innovator in helping hundreds of companies improve productivity. This book is an introduction to the essential concepts and benefits of MRP II. It is presented in a question and answer format, with the questions being based on Oliver Wight's discussions with several thousand executives.

Among the topic covered are:

• How MRP II can benefit a business
• The costs of implementation
• The requirements of a successful MRP II implementation
• Guidelines for making MRP II effective in any organization
• Managing MRP II for long-term competitive advantage

This may be hard to believe as I am about to pick on the grandfather of MRP II, but I can't recommend this book for anything else other than a very basic understanding of the static ideas of MRP II. What does this mean? It means that MRP II is a progressive science. It deals with the whole value chain. Nonetheless, this book deals with MRP II in an outdated fashion. The book was first published in 1982. Even though it has gone through two revisions since then, the last one in 1993, the book really has not addressed the changes that have occurred in MRP II. First, it treats MRP II from an internal point of view and as such misses the boat on unifying the entire value chain. Second, it spends a lot of time dealing with productivity issues but nowhere addresses the issues of constraints. Finally, it spends a lot of time dealing with the impacts of MRP II on schedule performance. However it doesn't even address the limitations of a system that uses infinite capacity as a basic logic.

I actually found the book to be quite boring. It is a very thin book and should be read quite quickly, but the first 69 pages, all the pages that are in question and answer format, seemed to go on and on and didn't give me any better basic understanding of MRP II. In fact it appeared to me as if Mr. Wight was trying to write a book to validate his existence. The real meat of the book as I saw it was in the back of the book. This is where the "excerpts from the Oliver Wight ABCD checklist" is covered. But again let me warn you that not all the information contained in this checklist is up to date.

Now I know I have just offended a whole lot of people so I am prepared to discuss this with you. As usual, I am always looking for a stimulating conversation about books. Please let me know if you have read this book and if you agree or disagree with my view. I am quite aware of the fact that this was probably a good introductory book for executives when it was first written in 1982. However, I think it has passed it's prime and a superficial facelift in 1993 doesn't bring it back.

Good reading!