
Episode #4
Dumb and Dutiful: Why MRP Does Exactly What You Told It - Jenn Claridge, Part 1
Jenn Claridge has been at Sabre Limited since 2008, and the support call she gets most often opens with the same words: MRP is broken. She wrote a blog and recorded a video answering it. The short version is that the software did what it was told. In this first of three conversations, Jenn walks Jeff Brickler and Scott Brickler through how she got here (a soccer park, an Infor Visual migration, a filing cabinet and an Excel sheet) and what 18 years of manufacturing implementations taught her about Business Central's planning engine. It is, in her words, dumb and dutiful. It produces a different result only when a person gave it a different input. The practical half is what to do with that. Turn less on and pilot the combinations training sessions skip: dates in the past, negative inventory in a location, a fixed reorder policy with no reorder point, a maximum order quantity set below the minimum. Then treat the item card as the engine, and let Copilot find the silly things in your data before MRP does. What you'll take from it The two complaints behind almost every "MRP is broken" call: too much noise, and suggestions that look wrong because a planning parameter was never understood Why people, process, and technology are three different failure modes, and which one is actually the easy part The set-less, pilot-more approach to planning parameters, and why lot accumulation periods and dampeners exist Where AI helps with data cleanliness and where it doesn't replace a person looking at the data About the guest Jenn Claridge is Vice President of Operations at Sabre Limited, a Business Central partner in Cambridge, Ontario focused on manufacturers. She came up through production, inventory control, and reporting at a manufacturer before joining Sabre in 2008. Sabre Limited: sabrelimited.com Jenn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennclaridge/ Scott Brickler is CEO of CADTALK, which moves engineering data from CAD into the ERP so the bill of material MRP depends on is accurate before planning ever runs. Part 1 of 3. Next: the manufacturers who do this well, and why an ERP is a forever project. Then: the manufacturing knowledge gap and why lingo is the first-phase problem.

