Seiban

Traditional logic assumes that all inventory is available to satisfy any customer requirement and does not allow for the separation or allocation of specific materials, parts, or in-process work for customer-specific use. The ability to maintain separate customer identification within the general population of parts and orders has traditionally been used in Contract and Project manufacturing environments. However, in today’s customer-oriented world, this identification approach is very useful in providing clear identification and availability of materials for specific customer demand-even in Assemble-to-Order, Make-to-Stock, or Repetitive manufacturing environments.

Separation of inventories is not uncommon in Japan where a Seiban (meaning “a manufacturing number”) is often assigned to customer-related inventory, work orders, and purchase orders. CrescentOne and Fujitsu have developed a unique implementation of Seiban-enabled MRP called PRP that allows the separation of product or customer-specific activities from the general MRP population.