How does synchronous manufacturing differ from MRP with respect to scheduling?

Synchronous manufacturing is an approach to manufacturing that considers an organization's resources and operations as a crucial part of an interconnected network and controls them such that the system's overall performance can be optimized.

Materials requirements planning (MRP) helps determine therequired parts, components, and materialsfor manufacturing a product.

When MRP and synchronous manufacturing are taken into consideration, it has been found that both of these aspects are important to operations management. However, both differ a lot in terms of scheduling.

When MRP is considered, it has been found to usea backward planning schedule to plan material requirements from the master production schedule. It is a technique of working backward in time from the target completion date. At the same time, a forward scheduling approach is used in the synchronous manufacturing strategy to allocate resources among different workgroups. It seeks to work ahead of schedule to achieve efficient resource usage and waste minimization.