enterprise resource planning

[rookie1010]

Hello

can you guys tell me what enterprise resource planning is?

 

[Markbnj]

It's one of those big catchword marketing phrases that attempt to make easily identifiable a large set of often proprietary business practices .

I bet that didn't help.

Basically it refers to the business processes associated with predicting and planning for enterprise resource needs. Supply chain management is one sub-discipline within ERP. If you have very efficient supply chain management then you always have the materials you need as inputs to your business activities right when you need them, at the lowest possible cost. We used to call this "just in time" inventory management. The converse is, if you have poor supply chain management, you end up with warehouses full of stuff that you have to pay for, that you can't immediately turn into saleable product because your processes aren't ready to consume it all.

 

[rookie1010]

thanks for the reply and demystifying ERP

i guess ERP streamlines your supply chain?

 

[Markbnj]

I think ERP is broader in scope than supply chain management, because there are potentially "resources" that the company needs that don't count as "supplies" in this scenario because they are not inputs to the primary business activity. It's all a bunch of mumbo jumbo anyway. Business practices aren't standardized, because if they were nobody would have a competitive advantage. So ERP packages have to be customized for each implementer, to a greater or lesser extent. Then when they roll out new versions you often have to roll forward all the previous customizations. It is a fiendishly efficient plan for extracting millions of predictable and annually renewable dollars from large companies. The shine is pretty much off of these large and unwieldy packages. The new focus is creating service-oriented architectures that expose business transactions in standard XML messaging formats. This allows different areas of the business to adopt the software that suits them, and expose the right pieces of it to other parts of the business and external partners.

Of course, that might turn out to be mumbo jumbo too. Never can tell.

 

[everman]

Look for information in the area of operations management. Lots of big systems out there for that kind of stuff.

 

[rookie1010]

thanks dudes for more insight