Materials Requirements Planning systems appeared without significant provenance. Their theoretical and practical antecedents can be traced to Frederick W. Taylor’s Shop Management that described a production planning and control system comprised of functional foremen and clerks. This system failed for it was too complex, unwieldy and expensive. Nevertheless, some elements survived- for although the whole was unmanageable a few individual functions survived as independent sub-systems. These continued in use; with Taylor’s planning office remaining an ideal and well known theoretical construct. The planning office imposed unbearable information processing demands on contemporary manual systems. But from the mid-1930s accounting machines started providing more capable information technologies that first allowed these individual elements to be implemented as stand-alone applications. Later they were then integrated into more full systems. Taylor’s planning office provided the sub-system pieces and the conceptual framework for their subsequent recombination and extension. This paper traces the evolution of production planning and control systems from Taylor’s planning office to materials requirements planning systems. Not only are the linkages between production management thinking in the different periods unappreciated; but so too are the technological relationships between the information technologies used
