MARS is an acronym for Material and Assembly Requirements Scheduling. MARS integrates exclusively with QuickBooks.
MARS enhances QuickBooks with a lite MRP reporting capability that supports your manufacturing, purchasing and scheduling needs. The reports tell you how much you need to buy and when, in an easy-to-read, time-phased columnar format.
MARS challenges the assumption that every manufacturing business must have complicated manufacturing software. MARS is easy to use!
MARS provides the following five reports that interact with each other using drillthrough functionality:
7 or 13-Column Time-Phased Report – You define the columns when you run the report, e.g. days, weeks, months, 10-day intervals, etc.. and MARS will process the product line items in your sales activity, explode through their respective bills-of-material and create a detailed, 7-column report of net purchase and assembly requirements.
Assembly Cost Roll-up – From either of the time-phased reports described above, you can click on an assembly part number and drillthrough to it’s indented bill-of-material report which features a detailed cost roll-up listing all of the part’s components, sub-assemblies and respective costs.
Inventory Levels Efficiency Report – From any page in the time-phased reports described above, you can drillthrough to a summary level efficiency report that shows a three-slice pie chart depicting the total number of inventory items with insufficient stock levels, the total with excessive stock levels and the total with sufficient stock levels.
Expected Inbound Shipments Pegging Report – From either of the time-phased reports described above, you can click on any component’s ‘expected inbound shipments’ line item and drillthrough to a pegging report listing the purchase order numbers, quantities, costs and expected delivery dates of the inbound raw material.
MARS also auto generates purchase orders that you edit and print within QuickBooks.
For production scheduling, MARS provides a seamless interface to MS Project. You can edit the production schedule in MS Project and generate lots of reports to view critical deadlines and labor capacity. After editing, simply import the tasks back into QuickBooks to create work orders.
Developed in C# and Visual Studio .NET, MARS includes a free Microsoft’s SQL Express 2005 data base for interactive data transmission using Intuit’s qbXML technology.
MARS is an ideal reporting tool for automotive, food processing, chemical processing, and other businesses driven by a repetitive, make-to-order or finish-to-order environment.
MARS distinguishes itself from other MRP solutions by using nearly all of the data it needs from information you already maintain in QuickBooks. This means you have little or no set-up and maintenance of additional data.
The core logic of MARS is an algorithm driven by customer orders, invoices and estimates:
1. MARS extracts the quantity ordered and order date for each finished part or product in a sales order, invoice or estimate, and time phases that information into the intervals you specify, either days, weeks, months, 10-day periods, etc.. The order date is used to derive a production start date.
2. It then explodes through each finished good's bill-of-material to derive gross purchase or assembly requirements for the raw material and sub-assemblies that make up the finished good (finished part or product).
3. MARS then checks the quantity-on-hand and open purchase orders of the respective raw material and components. Net Requirements are computed from requirements that exceed the sum of the quantity-on-hand plus projected purchase receipts.
There is very little setup. You will have MARS up and running in minutes.
And MARS works! To quote one customer, "Resource planning and scheduling was extremely tedious prior to MARS. With automatic PO generation and 10 weeks out planning, we've reduced a full time office job to five hours a week, with fewer errors!" - Tim Doelman, Manager, HRP Manufacturing, Boise, Idaho.
Here is another testimonial from a MARS customer: “As a tier one automotive company, we send out up to 150 purchase orders weekly. Many of those POs have 20 to 40 line items. Since our production is driven by incoming EDI customer requirements, MARS streamlines our procurement cycle by first computing raw material and component requirements, and then it creates purchase orders. It’s a huge time saver for us.” - Derrick Heard, Materials Control Manager, Q3 Industries, Columbus, Ohio.
And here is a quote from one of our first customers: “For nearly 10 years we have used MARS as a management tool for driving our supplier purchases. The application saves us lots of time and effort and keeps our inventory in sync with our production needs.” – Chet Watkins, Office Manager, National Chemical and Oil, Oak Park, Michigan.
Visit the MARS website at www.marsnetsoftware.com.