ERP System

Anatomy of an ERP solution

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are very much like the anatomy of a human being.  First off, if you aren’t familiar with ERP solutions they are software solutions that organizations implement to handle all aspects of business operations.  All aspects of business operations can include anything from financials, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain, data warehousing, and so on.  The brain of an ERP solution is the data warehouse.  The data warehouse handles all your metadata, otherwise known as data about data, just as the brain receives and sends information about all parts of the human body.  At the heart of an Enterprise Resource Planning solution is your core functionality.  Your core functionality is your business processes that are important to keep your organization going much as the human heart keeps us human beings breathing?  You core functionality will depend on what type of business you run.  For example, a manufacturing organization might have a supply chain module as their core functionality.  Modules are organized groupings of functionality within an ERP solution.

Now that we have the heart and brain of your organization accounted for, let’s move on to the arms and legs.  The arms and legs might represent the financial module within an ERP solution.  Without properly monitoring your finances, you are on the road to financial doom.  Finances mobilize us to prosper much like our legs and arms mobilize us to accomplish tasks.  Our spinal cord and skeletal structure is much like the backbone of an ERP solution.  The backbone of an ERP solution includes things like the database, architecture of the system, integration of the system, upgrades, installations, and backups.

Now that we can walk the walk with our financial module, we need to talk the talk by training our employees.  Training is a key aspect for any ERP solution.  Your ERP solution is as good as the employees you hire to operate the solution.  If your employees don’t know how to use the functionality provided by the ERP solution, why have an ERP solution?  So many companies don’t use their Enterprise Resource Planning solutions to its full potential because they don’t bother to properly train their employees.

The guts, blood, and other materials that make up the human body are like the remaining functionality provided by the ERP solution.  It’s all needed to make the human body function properly.  Similarly the entire ERP solution is needed so that we may run our organizations properly.

Written by :

kristine H