MARS is an acronym for Material and Assembly Requirements Scheduling.
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, and only uses data from QuickBooks!
MARS provides the following five reports that interact with each other using drill-through 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 processes the product line items in your sales activity, explodes through their respective bills-of-material and create detailed, time-phased columnar reports of net purchase and assembly requirements.
Assembly Cost Roll-up – From the reports described above, you can click on an assembly part number and drill-through to view its indented bill-of-material report which features a detailed cost roll-up listing all of the part’s components, sub-assemblies and related costs.
Inventory Levels Efficiency Report – From any page in the time-phased reports described above, you can drill-through 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 drill-through 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 as work orders.
Developed in C# and .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 manufacturing and inventory control operations driven by a made-to-order or made-to-stock environment.
MARS distinguishes itself from other solutions by relying solely on data in QuickBooks. This means you have little or no set-up and maintenance of additional data.
Here is how MARS creates MRP reports for made-to-order operations:
1. MARS extracts quantity and order date information from the items in sales orders, invoices or estimates, and time phases that information into time-periods you specify, e.g. days, weeks, months, etc..
2. MARS then explodes through each finished goods' bill-of-material to derive gross purchase or assembly requirements for raw material and components that make up the finished goods.
3. MARS then checks the quantities-on-hand and open purchase orders of the respective raw material and components. Net Requirements are computed from requirements exceeding the sum of quantities-on-hand plus projected purchase receipts.
For made-to-stock operations, MARS creates MRP reports and production scheduling from pre-set inventory levels and historical sales data.
Inventory items with quantities-on-hand below inventory re-order points that have historical sales data within a user-specified look-back period are included in the MRP report. MARS projects future requirements using moving averages from historical sales data.
There is very little setup. You will have MARS up and running in minutes.
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, Mgr, HRP Manufacturing, Boise, Idaho.
Another testimonial: “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 Mgr, Q3 Industries, Columbus, Ohio.
And still another testimonial: “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