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ERP Enterprise Resource Planning are software packages which manage at least 3 main functions of a company (example: Sales, Production, Purchasing) using only one database.
ERP first appeared at the beginning of the 1990s, it answered particularly to the expectations of the financial and logistics managers of large companies who found themselves confronted, on the one hand, with the needs for reaction, expressed by their managers or by their customers, and on the other, with information systems composed of numerous applications not always communicating among themselves and sometimes installed on heterogeneous platforms.
Presented to programmers and future users as being the system they had been waiting for, ERP was good news for everybody, as at last it would allow them to position and share reliable information, updated in real time and would also allow them to be more efficient in their work. However, due to the 2000 bug, the first projects of implementing the system, made them realise that if ERP was an integrated software package, its implementation signified that all the functions involved in a process should work together, communicate candidly and to close the divide between departments.

The difficulty of working together, of having a global vision, as well as questioning the processes so as to apply the good practices proposed by ERP, was the cause of delays and even failure of its implementation, widely spread by specialised media, even more so, given that the first ERP were “General ERP” with long and complicated settings.

Since then, “vertical” ERP have appeared which are destined to satisfy the specific needs of companies, in relation to their activity, their sector and their typology of production, and to do so more efficiently and more quickly...
Henceforth, ERP have become tools to be reckoned with, to manage all a company’s information. However, so that their use brings real benefits, they must not be mistaken for and used solely as an I.T. tool.