Key takeaways
See our guide to how this relates to maintenance scheduling.
An MPS answers three questions for a planning horizon: what will we make, how much, and when. Unlike the higher-level business or sales plan, which talks in product families and revenue, the MPS commits to specific finished products on specific dates. It is the hinge the plant turns on: sales promises, material orders, and shop-floor schedules all derive from it.
These three layers are often confused:
For the planning layers below the MPS, see ERP versus MRP.
An MPS is a plan; the floor is reality, and the two only stay aligned if actual production and downtime feed back into the schedule. A line that runs at 70% of the capacity the MPS assumed will miss its dates, and the planner needs to see that fast, not at month-end.
A realistic capacity input, grounded in measured OEE rather than a nameplate rate, is the difference between an MPS that holds and one that is fiction by Wednesday. The pillar on OEE for manufacturing covers how that capacity is measured, and production monitoring covers the live feedback.
The MPS itself lives in your ERP or planning tool, not in Fabrico .
Where Fabrico helps is the reality check: it measures the actual capacity and downtime of each line, so the capacity numbers feeding your MPS are demonstrated rather than assumed, and a slipping line is visible while there is still time to re-plan.
Fabrico is built and hosted in the EU with data residency in mind and is ISO 27001 certified. To see the live capacity picture your schedule should be built on, book a demo .
The MPS commits to which specific finished products are built and when. MRP takes that schedule and calculates the materials and components needed to support it, and when to order them. The MPS is the input; MRP is the explosion of it.
Detailed enough to commit to specific products in specific time buckets, often weekly, but not so granular that it becomes the shop-floor schedule. It is the bridge between aggregate planning and execution, not the execution itself.
Because the capacity input should be the demonstrated rate, not the nameplate rate. If the MPS assumes a line runs faster than it actually does, the schedule is unrealistic from the start and the dates will slip.
It is typically reviewed weekly, but the feedback that keeps it honest should be continuous. Actual output and downtime need to flow back quickly so the planner can re-plan before a slip becomes a missed customer date.
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