Main > frePPLe Tutorial > What is frePPLe? And what is frePPLe NOT?
FrePPLe is a lightweight open source framework that easily and quickly delivers a solution for production planning problems.
The primary focus is on discrete manufacturing industry.
The keywords from the above mission statement are clarified a bit further:
- Production Planning:
The term production planning refers to a number of planning processes used in manufacturing industries. The processes all deal with balancing demand and supply, and/or using the available capacity, time and material as efficient as possible.
The subprocesses vary widely in their focus and usage: business area (such procument, distribution, production, ...), time horizon (short term/execution, mid term/tactical, or long term/strategic), etc...
FrePPLe is a solid framework for each of these processes, enabling the development of specialised applications to address your specific problem.
contains a number of links to external sites with more background information. - Open Source:
The "Open Source Model" is a very pragmatic way of evolving software in a rapidly changing environment. It leverages the collective wisdom, experiences, expertise and requirements to obtain a high quality product. - Framework:
A one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work. Different business processes, different industries and different technical infrastructure all require a different solution.
FrePPLe is designed to be modular, extensible and customizable. Customizing is possible at three levels: 1) scripting, 2) user interface and 3) core library.
A section further on in this tutorial will clarify how this is done. - Lightweight:
FrePPLe is before all intended to simple, light and generic. For small and medium size companies it should be the next step when a planning process grows beyond the complexity a simple spreadsheet can cope with.
The input data model the different aspects of your manufacturing environment.
FrePPLe will run some planning algorithms on the data to generate plans as output that answer the following questions:
- Demand plan: How has the demand been satisfied? What demand will be planned late or short?
- Capacity plan: How are the resources loaded?
- Manufacturing plan: What operations are planned in our plants?
- Purchasing plan: What and when do we need to order from our material suppliers?
- Inventory plan: How much inventory will be available?
- Problems: Highlights exception conditions in the plans, such as capacity overloads, late orders, material shortages, etc...

FrePPLe is an advanced planning system (see also the wikpedia page on APS), and it's NOT...
- ... an ERP system.
An ERP system tracks all activities to keep an accurate representation of the current situation. This usually implies a heavy focus on transactions and accounting.
FrePPLe doesn't track actuals. It only plans for the future, taking the current situation (as provided by the ERP or other systems) as an input. - ... a generic solver for any mathematical problem.
The modeling and solving capabilities are geared specifically towards production planning issues. Using frePPLe outside of this domain is not advisable, if not impossible.