ERP

ERP (enterprise resource planning) is the company’s core system: it records orders, purchases, inventory, work orders, payables and receivables, invoices and costs. The promise is that each piece of information is entered once and used by every department.

How it works

In practice, many companies use the ERP only for tax and finance, and the rest happens in spreadsheets, email and chat. That is where integration comes in: instead of someone copying data between the ERP and the production spreadsheet, a routine reads and writes to the ERP via API, database or file import. The ERP stays the source of truth, and the repetitive work around it stops depending on typing.

Practical example

A distributor received sales reps’ orders as photos and retyped them into the ERP. An automation now reads the order, creates it in the ERP and replies with the order number; at night, another routine exports prices and stock from the ERP to the digital catalog. Same ERP, no more typing.

Common mistakes

• Switching ERP to fix what is really a process or integration problem.
• Keeping parallel spreadsheets that never match the ERP.
• Integrating without a rule for which system is the source of truth for each data point.