​  Family is very important in life and is very important in a bill of materials.  The family as we’ve suggested in a bill of materials is best defined as a parent-child relationship.  There are two primary members of this relationship.  The parent and the child.  In a bill of materials the parent is best defined as an upper-level item or assembly that contains child items that are used to build the item or assembly.  Child items in our parent child relationship are the lower-level components that you will need to build the parent item.

  An input is a product, service, information, data, labor material or any other type of resource which is added to a process step usually by a supplier. 

  The term yokoten refers to the sharing, learning and teaching of best practices laterally throughout an organization.  Yokoten is often referred to as "horizontal deployment" because practice of this principle requires various levels of an organization to share, innovate spread knowledge and or improve on kaizen in a cross functional manner.  A very important aspect of this critical principle is that individuals have an opportunity to exercise Genchi Genbutsu and gain consensus on improvements.  At times yokoten can include benchmarking, comparing and even borrowing from other improvements, but, in the truest sense yokoten should allow people to develop and grow as a result of sharing, learning and teaching.  

  Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a type of software that businesses use to manage everyday activities. These can range from accounting, procurement, project management, risk management, inventory, planning, human resources, customer relationship management, supply chain and compliance.  ERP is used to support planning and control of information throughout an organization so that they can use internal knowledge to achieve external advantage.

  One piece flow is the concept behind the just-in-time system.  An environment that operates in a One-piece flow fashion is when items or services are processed in one piece at a time. 

  MRP was first introduced in the late 1950’s early 1960s, depending on what source you look at.  Material Requirements Planning (MRP) was the wave of the future.  A company by the name of J.I. Case, a manufacturer of tractor and construction machinery, worked with IBM to develop what is widely accepted as the first MRP system.