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Knowing how much stock to hold at any given moment — and which purchases or Work Orders to launch — is one of the most demanding problems in manufacturing operations. Get it wrong in either direction and you either disappoint customers or drain working capital. Bold’s Planning & Purchasing module applies Material Requirements Planning (MRP) logic to give your team a clear, data-driven action list every morning, replacing parallel spreadsheets and gut-feel decisions with a single source of truth.

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What MRP does

MRP answers two deceptively simple questions: what do I need to buy? and what do I need to manufacture? To answer them it cross-references:
  • Your sales forecasts and confirmed customer orders
  • Current stock levels and open purchase orders already in flight
  • Bills of materials (BOMs) for every finished product
  • Supplier lead times so every material arrives exactly when it is needed
  • Your rules — minimum stock levels, optimal batch sizes, and coverage days
From this it derives a net requirement per material and places each requirement on the calendar at the right moment, producing a filtered list of recommended actions your team can execute with a single click.
MRP is not a replacement for your ERP — it is a specialist layer on top of it. Bold integrates with SAP, Sage, Navision, and other major ERPs so both systems always share the same data. See ERP Connectivity for details.

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Key capabilities

Purchasing Assistant

Receive a prioritised replenishment list every morning. Confirm recommended purchase orders and Work Order launches with a single click.

Demand Forecasting

Automatic per-SKU sales forecasts using advanced mathematical models. Adjust manually for campaigns, contracts, or product launches.

Dynamic Order Allocation

Real-time recalculation of which materials go to each Work Order and which finished stock is reserved for each sales order.

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MRP vs. ERP: what is the difference?

An ERP manages the administrative, financial, commercial, and logistical information of your business in a cross-functional way. MRP specialises in one specific question: what to buy and what to manufacture to meet demand. In practice, MRP is one of the key modules of an industrial ERP, but many manufacturing SMEs need it without running a full ERP. Bold lets you start with MRP today and connect it to your existing ERP through the public API whenever you are ready.

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How MRP and MES work together

MRP plans — it decides what will be purchased and manufactured over the coming weeks or months. The MES (Manufacturing Execution System) executes — it controls what is happening on the shop floor in real time: Work Orders, operator times, downtime, and quality checks. They are two complementary layers: MRP sets the plan, MES puts it into practice.
Bold integrates both modules in a single cloud platform, so planning and execution share the same data. A work order launched from MRP appears instantly in the production module for your team to pick up. See Production (MES) for details.

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How MRP integrates with WMS

When your warehouse team receives a delivery or issues materials to a Work Order, those movements are recorded in Bold’s WMS (Warehouse Management System) in real time. MRP always reads actual consumed stock rather than a theoretical figure, so your replenishment proposals are based on what is really available on the shelf — not what was there at the last overnight sync.

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Who needs an MRP system?

Any manufacturer with multiple materials per product, varying supplier lead times, and fluctuating demand benefits from MRP. If you currently plan by instinct or in spreadsheets, and rush orders or delays slip through every week, MRP brings order and reduces errors from the very first month.

Set up the Purchasing Assistant

Configure your rules and start receiving daily replenishment proposals.

Review your Demand Forecasts

Understand how Bold builds forecasts and how to adjust them for your market.