I’m strong on avoiding bad names. “ERP” is not as bad as “artificial intelligence“, because you can use it as a meaningless sequence of letters. Still, if you want to understand what we mean by “ERP”, you are likely to lookup what the initials mean, and then you’ll be in trouble. The meaning of the acronym seems to be lost in history. It would be better if we used “George” instead of “ERP”. It might be even better if we called it company management software.
What such company management systems do is help with the tasks that are common in almost all companies:
- Managing employees
- Managing suppliers
- Managing customers
- Managing sales
- Managing orders
- Invoicing
- Accounting
- … and more
In many company management systems, these tasks are different “apps” or “modules”, which communicate with one another. (Such “communication” is often called “integration”, but that’s another unclear name.)