What is ERP exactly?

When I started working with ERP Software, I quickly came to the realisation that not too many people understood what ERP actually was.  I was not that surprised by this discovery as I too didn’t quite fully understand what ERP meant.  Being part of the IT industry for over 20 years, this software was not part of my portfolio until now.

So, what is it?  Well I guess the first place to start is to breakdown the acronym to its constituent parts. Enterprise Resource Planning, I agree, this doesn’t help much either.  Let us try again,

Enterprise – there are two definitions for this word in the dictionary, one being a rather large project and the other meaning a company, however it is commonly understood to be a ‘rather large company’

Resource – a stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively, this to me is the key word

Planning – self-explanatory but for this blog’s sake – the goals and objectives that need to be achieved to meet the required outcome

So now that we have defined what each acronym means, let me go even further. It is typically a suite of fully integrated software applications which each have the responsibility to record, unify, interpret, collect, store and manage the company’s data from all of its’ business activities.

Now we are getting somewhere!

Up until a few years ago, ERP was thought to be a bastion for only large corporations, but as with most things IT related, you will find that within a few short years, the functionality trickles down to meet the needs of any sized company.  In fact, each and every company to reach its full potential should or lets rather say ‘must’ implement a business management solution in order to be really successful which we now understand is referred to as an ERP implementation.