Spreadsheet Application still dominates Enterprise Resource Planning and Advanced Planning Systems

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been a major advancement in production planning and control (PPC), building on material requirements planning (MRP) and manufacturing resource planning (MRP II). To improve planning solutions, advanced planning systems (APS) have been offered since the nineties. Despite these developments and recent developments in digitalization, spreadsheets still play a major role in PPC. This paper describes three cases in which different capacity planning and production scheduling decisions are supported by spreadsheets. This results in a list of issues arising from the use of spreadsheets in PPC. While the advancements in PPC research have been clear over the last twenty years, the cases do not make use of these advancements in practice and we do not foresee that all spreadsheets will be replaced by APS or other digitalization efforts over the years. Therefore, while we focus more research efforts on concepts like digitalization and Industry 4.0, we must not forget that spreadsheet applications still dominates over ERP and APS as the main support for planners in their daily work.