What affects the design for a Manufacturing Planning & Control (MPC) system?

In my consultancy/professional services approach to these "system design" requests, I usually try to reach the status of "happy marriage" between customer needs/requirements ... and ... embedded/available functionality/performance in the most popular systems from well-known and trusted vendors in their field.

So, I would suggest to start with the customer side where the target system will be implemented and used.  Work on the requirements  (lots of work by the way) and reflect these requirements into a technical paper which describes the architecture, platform and specifications of the target system as if you are going to issue an RFP for this system.

Then go to the vendor side, and examine what kind of capabilities they have in their systems and match these capabilities to the requirements from previous stage.  You may find gaps and overlaps between what is available and what you want.

You may need to ask the vendors additional questions, and you may need to go back to the end-users and key stakeholders to cross-check and verify that what they want is already met by what is available. You may need to cut corners here and there, and you may need to compromize certain things to get other things ... and so on so forth.  In complex situations, you may need to issue an RFI to selected.qualified vendors to get all the details that you need.

While you are doing this, there are several things to pay attention to ...including

1. Understand the underlying mission-critical processes and value-add processes at the customer side
2. Document and sign-off the requirements with the stakeholders (protect yourself from never-ending changes and wishful thinking)
3. Understand and document internal/external dependencies at all levels specially (business, technical and political)
4. Pay attention to other external systems/databases that your target system needs to talk to through API's and common message formats
5. Put all considerations into account, not only the functional ones, but also things related to safety, security, perfotmance, regulatory controls, ... etc

Hopefully this will answer your question

Agree with Mr. Mohammed Thiab

100%

Agree with Mr,: Mohammed thiab ,s answer

I agree with the answer added by: Mohammed Thiab

I think UI

The requirements placed on the design of an MPC system will vary with the:

·         Nature of the production process,

·         Customer expectations, and

·         The needs of management.

In addition, MPC requirements are not static and MPC technology has changed over time.