MRP was built for the maker. Then SAP happened.

I spent part of my career at Apple, and I watched the most capable operations company on earth get handled by its own software.

Not out-competed. Handled. By SAP, and by the small army of consultants it takes to keep SAP running. Apple has effectively unlimited money and some of the best operators alive, and it was still captive. I remember thinking: if Apple cannot get out from under this, what chance does a 12-person shop in Hamilton have? That question is most of the reason I build what I build now.

A good idea, briefly

The MRP started as one of the cleanest ideas in the history of industry. A way to tell a manufacturer exactly what to buy and build, and when, so the line never stops and the warehouse is never full of the wrong thing. It was drawn up in 1964 for a plant manager, the person actually making things. I told that story here.

For about a decade, that is all it was. Then the buyer changed, and everything followed the buyer.

When the buyer became the CIO

As the software grew, it stopped being sold to the plant manager and started being sold to the CIO and the CFO. By 1990 the analysts had a new name for material planning that had swallowed accounting, sales, engineering, and HR: Enterprise Resource Planning. In 1992, SAP shipped R/3, and the idea built for one factory floor became a platform built to run an entire multinational.

To win the biggest, most complicated companies on earth, the software had to do everything and bend to anything. Complexity was no longer a flaw to apologize for. It was the sales pitch. The more it could be configured, the bigger the deal.

Complexity needs a priesthood

Here is the thing about software that can do anything: someone has to make it do the specific thing you need. You do not use SAP. You implement it, over months or years, with an army of consultants.

An entire economy grew in that gap. The big systems integrators, Deloitte, Accenture, PwC, IBM, bill 40 to 60 percent of a typical implementation, at 150 to 350 dollars an hour. The implementation itself routinely costs two to four times the software license. An enterprise SAP rollout runs one to three million dollars and up. Your own staff need certifications just to touch it.

None of that is an accident. The complexity is the business model. And it fails constantly. Gartner, the same firm that named ERP, predicts that by 2027 more than 70 percent of new ERP projects will fall short of what they set out to do. One California county hired Deloitte to put in SAP, spent 18.6 million dollars, and ended up suing for 30. The industry's own analysts say most of these projects miss, and it remains one of the most lucrative businesses in software. Sit with that.

Somewhere in here the purpose flipped. Manufacturing software stopped serving the manufacturer and started serving SAP and the firms that implement it. The maker, the entire reason any of this exists, became the least important person in the room.

Even Apple

This is what I saw at Apple. Not a scandal, just a permanent fact of operating life: the tooling was so complex that running it was its own discipline, its own headcount, its own standing dependency on outside firms. The most operationally excellent company in the world organized a real part of its work around keeping the software fed.

If that is the deal Apple gets, the deal everyone smaller gets is worse.

The small shop inherited the philosophy, not the army

You might think none of this touches a small manufacturer. It touches them most.

The tools aimed at small shops today inherited SAP's worldview without SAP's resources. Catalog everything. Configure everything. And you, the owner, operate it. So a growing manufacturer signs up for an MRP, and within a quarter has hired someone whose entire job is feeding the system. The software sold as the thing that would save time arrived with a salary attached.

That is the tell. When a productivity tool comes with a hire, the tool failed at its one job.

Why now is finally different

For fifty years, all that complexity needed people. Someone to configure the rules. Someone to key in the data. Someone to read the plan and decide what it meant. The consultant existed to stand in the gap between the manufacturer and software too complicated to use.

That gap is exactly what AI closes. Let the software set itself up from a forwarded supplier list. Let it do the data entry, walk the bill of materials, and tell you in plain language what to order and build. When the complexity no longer needs a human translator, you no longer need the consultant, or the second hire, or the SAP guy.

Back to the maker

That is the whole idea behind TuringDock. Take the MRP back to what Orlicky meant it to be, tell me what to buy and make, and when, and deliver it the way software should work in 2026. You talk to it. It does the MRPing. No training modules, no implementation partner, no headcount whose job is the tool.

Manufacturing software forgot who it was for. We are building for the maker it left behind.