What is Enterprise resource planning (ERP)?

Companies have a multitude of resources: capital, personnel, materials, operating resources, and so on. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems process organizational production data to plan, control, and manage these resources at the enterprise level. In terms of software architecture, ERP ranks above PDA (which is limited to optimizing the profitability of manufacturing processes).

Core functions of ERP in manufacturing companies include material requirements planning, finance and accounting, controlling, human resources, and master data management. The development of ERP systems began in the 1980s. The big names in ERP are SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor, Sage, and Oracle. However, there are also numerous other providers on the German-speaking and international market. The decision as to which ERP solution to use – and to what extent – is based on various factors: economic sector and industry, company size (e.g., number of users, number of locations), required range of functions, required technology (e.g., programming languages, operating systems).