ERP Company

ERP is the final product of the natural progression that occurred as MRP, or Manufacturing Requirements Planning, evolved. ERP is the acronym for enterprise resource planning –a system of gathering data from a business’ operational functions and integrating them into one database that can then be used by all the departments within that business. MRP, and then later MRPII, had related just to the management of demand, ordering, and the supply chain along with coordinating time phasing into the planning. The rest of a business’ departments were forced to use separate software applications, each department keeping its own data. The great advantage represented by ERP software was its ability to integrate finance, human resources, customer relations, and other departments into the planning.

An ERP Company is a company that sells enterprise resource planning software systems. In the twenty-first century, a myriad of such companies exist in the marketplace. The very first ERP company, however, was SAP (Systems Analysis and Program Development). SAP was incorporated in 1972. It embodied the work of five IBM engineers who had spent considerable time trying to unravel the vast number of software, systems, and technologies that were at work within the same business in order to create one single system that could manage everything.

A second ERP company emerged about five years later, in 1977, when Jack Thompson, Dan Gregory, and Ed McVaney founded JD Edwards to sell their ERP solution, which ran on IBM hardware. JD Edwards’ product was marketed to smaller businesses, those that did not necessarily meet the Fortune 1000 criteria. Oracle Corporation was also founded in 1977. It was founded by Larry Ellison. In 1978, Baan was founded with an emphasis on financial and administrative solutions. And, by 1979, Oracle had offered the first commercial SQL relational database management system.

Ten years later, many more ERP companies had come forward. One of these was PeopleSoft, which introduced a Human Resources Management System in 1988.

The next two decades witnessed tremendous growth in the ERP market. In fact, market size grew from millions of dollars to billions of dollars annually. The original ERP Company, SAP, released an extremely successful ERP software solution called R3. R3 generated an immense profit for the company. At the same time, JD Edwards, Oracle, and Baan were experiencing noticeable annual growth rates, and the ERP market showed no signs of weakening.

This rosy picture was not to remain untarnished, however. In the late 1990s, ERP started to get a lot of bad press as customers began to publicly complain about the expense and the complex implementation process. In order to bounce back from these assaults, ERP companies have had to create less expensive, simpler products for smaller sized businesses.

Written by :

Amy Cruz