Overview

Manufacturing firms use a variety of software tools to improve the quality and speed with which strategic, tactical, and operational decisions are made. In this paper we first review the environment that lead to the development of "implosion technology" within IBM. We include a small illustrative example of the implosion problem, including a mathematical formulation. We then discuss the development and deployment of software tools for solving the implosion problem. A general mathematical formulation of the implosion problem is included in a separate section.

In the 1980's and early 1990's one of the most common computer-supported activities in manufacturing firms was material requirement planning. The APICS dictionary defined material requirement planning (MRP) as "a set of techniques that use bill of material, inventory data, and the master production schedule to calculate requirements for material." MRP was included in the larger process "Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II)," which was defined by APICS as "a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company." In addition to MRP, MRP II provided other linked functions, including business planning, sales and operations, production planning, capacity requirements planning, and the execution support system for capacity and material. More commonly, MRP II (later ERP, for Enterprise Resource Planning) was used as a catch-all term to classify software tools that include MRP and some collection of planning, resource management, and accounting applications.

APICS also prescribed that "the master...