DDMRP And Lean Manufacturing

By Bill Leedale

Anyone in manufacturing, supply chain management or logistics has been exposed to the growing buzz around demand-driven materials requirements planning (DDMRP), as popularized by the Demand Driven Institute.

According to the Demand Driven Institute, DDMRP is:

...“a formal multi-echelon planning and execution method to protect and promote the flow of relevant information through the establishment and management of strategically placed decoupling point stock buffers. DDMRP combines some of the still-relevant aspects of Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and Distribution Requirements Planning (DDRP) with the pull and visibility emphases found in Lean and the Theory of Constraints and the variability reduction emphasis of Six Sigma.”

That is an accurate but somewhat informationally dense description, so let’s unpack it by outlining how DDMRP relates to lean manufacturing concepts manufacturers already understand. How does DDMRP relate to lean? And how can enterprise software like enterprise resource planning (ERP), which evolved to facilitate the lean environment, support organizations intent on adopting DDMRP?