ERP 2028 Part 3: The Demise Of The Production Planner?

By Colin Elkins, Global Industry Director for Process Manufacturing, IFS

Imagine going forward in time 10 years. How will the technologies evolving today change the way we work? What will enterprise resource planning (ERP) in 2028 look like?

Production planning for most process manufacturing companies has always been one of the most difficult problems for ERP solutions to solve. There has been much effort over the years to provide functionality to assist planners in making optimum decisions: material requirement planning (MRP), MRPII, theory of constraints (TOC), Kanban and Lean to name a few, and now the latest innovation: demand-driven material requirement planning (DDMRP). But when one solution seems to provide an answer to the planning conundrum, markets, consumers or customers change the rules, the planning horizons shrink and supply chain complexity increases. You may have noticed I used the word “assist” since the planner in the factory of today still provides most of the decision making. Planning is very complex and requires consideration of many independent, yet loosely connected, influences as those who read the blog “A day in the life of Kenny the production planner“ will already have realized.

So, what for the future? Now that we have the ‘digital string’ to connect all aspects involved in the planning process and the possibility for artificial intelligence (AI) to make decisions for us, will the human planner be a thing of the past?

The following is the last in a series of visionary anecdotal stories set in 2028. This is the story of Kenny, Head of Planning at SPS.