Enterprise Resource Planning while always being touted with its generic name of enterprise solution , an integration across the processes and so the practices in any organization at the different layers and levels of the people and positions with the sole purpose of using them at their optimal level of effectiveness and efficiency never falls short of questions and queries it raises since its wee hours of rolling out in mid nineties of last century. The big priest of IT evolution Gartner , the erstwhile IT consultant firm has first choose it or rather coined it not with any finite explanation but with some articulation which spreads and stretches this single data defined softwares platform beyond any single organization boundary ie to the enterprise level. Although genesis of the solution can be located to first manufacturing then material resource planning and ultimately enterprise resource planning or ERP just expanding its(the softwares) access and action areas with the advent of computing technology specially power of processing and potential of memory , the nomenclature of ERP never followed any strict rule of lexicography. The word ERP at its initial stage got loosely coined and simply stuck in the world of integrated solution or enterprise solution , and then kept on defining and redefining its meaning over the years to morph itself to be the transformative tool for any organization.
In fact “Enterprise” by definition never abides by any intra company connotation rather it encompasses the whole supply chain ie in one side suppliers , sub- suppliers and in other end it is customers to next level consumers .So it is like a whole microcosm of integration. And here lies the utmost challenge in the this technical solution which sometimes being called packaged software , sometimes software suites, sometimes just ERP or enterprise resource planning .
Once the word “enterprise” denotes its breadth, the next two words try to explore some depth of it while putting it in force in any organization. If we see the genesis of management as a theory we will certainly appreciate that any management subject basically educates us for resource optimization , its mobilization and allocation according to the priority and across the departments and desks dealing with different processes normally called as business processes. So prioritizing the resource allocation is very much paramount to running any industry optimally. And here comes the two syllables “Resource Planning “ which outline the relocation and engages this scarce resources for maximum value addition. And while reallocating it we certainly put the human resources as the best or most valuable of all resources available (man, machine, money etc.) in any organization. Genesis of ERP was very much related with relocating this most valuable resources ie its employees or the human brain in the best possible assignment which could include designing , architecture , or orchestrating the org strategy , execution planning or feed back system rather than non value adding transactional work at the lower end of the company like keeping ledger of materials with its repository , replenishment in store or counting payroll in office with calculating incentives or increment in commensuration with payment etc or even keeping score card of customers of their preference of product of style of payments thus documenting and deciphering huge data manually.
While reallocation of scarcest resource ie talent was initiator of the integration of process along the organization in a single database system, monolithic in structure and seamlessly transactional in function , over the time the whole definition permeated to other resources like money , material etc . And today while generating huge data at the full length and breadth of any organization by first capturing them in its most rudimentary and raw form and then processing them as the next most valuable resources ie information , the next big thing which is fast getting traction is to decipher the same resources to be most potent decision making tool with huge autonomy embedded inside the system through the Business Intelligence in particular or business intelligence in general . In fact it is thus the full cycle of definition of ERP is now going to be completed when we see that with the evolution of organization from division to department to diversification of business , the resources allocation and relocation also have gone through different turn and churn creating different timelines to explain any company’ status quo first simply digitalized then automated then autonomous and further augmented in next stage of real time decision making and so on. While coined very loosely at the beginning the term ERP now consolidated its definition as huge transformational one , the platform of its also is transcending from intra company to inter company very fast by engulfing and encircling full enterprise and beyond through radicalization processes ,incremental growth thus leveraging its strength of integration across the whole ecosystem where the organizational boundaries with comparative advantages getting further blurred to generate wealth for everybody of the chain perpetuating a continuum of positive some game in geometric progression.