The origin of material requirements planning in Frederick W. Taylor’s planning office

Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems appeared without significant provenance. Their theoretical and practical antecedents can be traced to Frederick W. Taylor’s Shop Management that described a production planning and control system comprised of functional foremen and clerks. This system failed for it was too complex, unwieldy and expensive. Nevertheless, some elements survived -- for although the whole was unmanageable, a few individual functions survived as independent sub-systems. These continued in use; with Taylor’s planning office (PO) remaining an ideal and well-known theoretical construct. The PO imposed unbearable information processing demands on contemporary manual systems. But from the mid-1930s, accounting machines started providing more capable information technologies that first allowed these individual elements to be implemented as stand-alone applications. Later they were then integrated into more full systems. Taylor’s PO provided the sub-system pieces and the conceptual framework for their subsequent recombination and extension. This paper traces the evolution of production planning and control systems from Taylor’s PO to MRP systems. Not only are the linkages between production management thinking in the different periods unappreciated, but so too are the technological relationships between the information technologies used.