Wednesday, April 11, 2007

ERP --- Enterprise Resourse Planning

ERP - Short for enterprise resource planning, a business management system that integrates all facets of the business, including planning, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. As the ERP methodology has become more popular, software applications have emerged to help business managers implement ERP in many different business activities such as inventory control, order tracking, customer service, finance, human resource and so on.

In other words we can consider ERP to be a set of activities supported by mulit-mode application software or other business to manage important parts of business such as product planning, purchasing materials, maintaining inventories, interacting with suppliers and customers, tracking orders etc... . It also includes other aspects of business such as finance management or human resource management.

The term ERP originally implied systems designed to plan the use of enterprise-wide resources. Although the acronym ERP originated in the manufacturing environment, today's use of the term ERP systems has much broader scope. ERP systems typically attempt to cover all basic functions of an organization, regardless of the organization's business or charter. Business, non-profit organizations, non governmental organizations, governments, and other large entities utilize ERP systems.

Some organizations - typically those with sufficient in-house IT skills to integrate multiple software products - choose to only implement portions of an ERP system and develop an external interface to other ERP or stand-alone systems for their other application needs. For instance, the Peoplesoft HRMS and Financials systems may be perceived to be better than SAP's HRMS solution. And likewise, some may perceive SAP's manufacturing and CRM systems as better than PeopleSoft's equivalents. In this case these organizations may justify the purchase of an ERP system, but choose to purchase the PeopleSoft HRMS and Financials modules from Oracle, and their remaining applications from SAP.

No comments: