Examining dampening effects for alternative dampening procedures to cope with system nervousness

As Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems become popular for corporate planning, one of ERP's major modules – material requirements planning (MRP) – should be carefully examined to evaluate the linkage between MRP and other operational modules. System nervousness, or scheduling instability, has been considered an important operational problem associated with MRP systems. System nervousness has serious impacts on the performance of MRP systems. These negative effects may trickle down to the other operational subsystems in ERP which, in turn, deteriorate the overall ERP system performance. Dampening procedures, considered a screening process to weed out unnecessary reschedules, have been suggested to deal with this schedule instability problem. The purpose of this paper is to examine the dampening effects of three dampening procedures to reduce system nervousness under various operating environments by a simulation experiment. The results show that a high dampening effect by a certain dampening procedure does not translate to a better system performance. The cost-based dampening procedure performs rather well in most operating environments tested in this study. However, the performance of these dampening procedures is very situation-specific, so MRP users need to examine their operating environments in order to select an appropriate dampening procedure to cope with system nervousness.