Differences between ERP and NRP - Sensorica/valuenetwork GitHub Wiki

This is a sketch for people who are familiar with ERP and MRP systems. If you have comments, please put them in the issues and we will respond.

Organization

This is the probably the biggest difference. An ERP system, like the name Enterprise Resource Planning says, is for one Enterprise. The ERP system for an enterprise will include records for its direct customers and direct suppliers, and its employees, internal departments, projects. etc.

An NRP system, like the name Network Resource Planning says, is for networks. The network is composed of Agents, who can be individual people or organizations of any kind. They can be a traditional company, an informal group, another network, a project with team members from many different organizations, etc. The same agent can be both a supplier and a customer to other agents: sometimes both a supplier and a customer to the same other agent.

The agents can have traditional business relationships like employee, manager, etc. Or they can have any other relationships. Some we have seen include harvester, steward, custodian, and exchange firm.

So you could map the organization of an ERP system into an NRP system just as it is, or you could expand your horizons. For example, your whole supply chain could be part of the same system.

Products and Inventory Items

Resource Types in NRP include the stuff that is often called Product Master or Item Master in ERP systems. But Resource Types include a lot more: labor skills, designs, and money, for example.

NRP will keep an inventory of designs. Or cash in a bank account.

The advantages of such a unification include the combined MRP and CRP (explained below) and the automatic generation of accounting reports. We find some disadvantages in our code (besides confusing people sometimes). Those disadvantages would be fixed if we did more subclassing, which we don't do, because we are using a relational database and it's ugly. We will do so in maybe version 2.0.

Mapping from an ERP system is pretty easy here: the Product or Item Masters become Resource Types, and the Inventory Items become Resources. (But probably some other things, too, depending on the ERP system's model.)

Bills of Material and Routings

BOMs and Routings are combined in NRP into an Input-Process-Output structure called a Recipe. This type of structure emerged in manufacturing systems in the 1990s, also called a Routed Bill, Bill of Manufacturing or Supply Chain Bill.

Mapping from an ERP system will work fairly cleanly if your BOM components are attached to Routing steps. Otherwise, you could attach all the components to the first step. But the output of one routing step which is the input to the next step is usually not defined in ERP systems, except for those who handle food processing or similar domains, where those items are sometimes called Stream Resources.

We also offer Workflow Recipes that transform the same resource through multiple processes. Those could be used for the Stream Resource.

MRP

NRP uses a pretty standard Material Requirements Planning algorithm, but includes all resources in the plan, not just materials. And it's not a batch job, like it is in some ERP systems: we run the MRP explosion for every order, and if the order gets changed, we re-explode the changes. So the resource plan is always up to date.

(Ooops - see issue #329 - we just removed that feature temporarily. It will be back.)

CRP

NRP does Capacity Requirements Planning at the same time as Material Requirements Planning, but we don't do much with it yet. No resource leveling or anything like that. Eventually we will do finite capacity scheduling if anybody needs it.

Accounting

Most ERP systems do Double Entry Accounting. What that means is that every Economic Event (often called a Transaction in ERP) generates at least two Journal Entries into at least two different General Ledger accounts. Those Journal Entries interpret the Event from the viewpoint of one party, The Enterprise.

Parties, companies, enterprises, etc. in ERP are Economic Agents in NRP (nodes in the network). So are people and informal organizations and whole networks that have an identity.

NRP records raw Economic Events, just as they happened, and records explicitly which Agents were involved in each Event. So we can automatically generate all of the usual accounting reports, along with some new ones, from the viewpoint of any of the Agents in a network. We call it Multi-Agent, or Multi-Party, accounting.

Chart of Accounts

ERP systems and other business software that does accounting usually require you to design a Chart of Accounts. NRP doesn't. It can generate a standard Chart of Accounts automatically.

This feature has pluses and minuses. You don't need to know accounting or to design a Chart of Accounts. On the other hand, if you want to design your own Chart of Accounts, this NRP software does not support it at this time. Maybe later if somebody desperately needs it. Or, how about a pull request?