Our own "Murph" has coined a new definition for ERP...
It was sometime around 1990 that the abbreviation ERP was coined to represent the term ‘Enterprise Resource Planning (or Planner).’ It represented an extension of the systems that IBM implemented for Materials Resource Planning (MRP) in the 1960s.
ERPs were supposedly designed to encompass the vast majority of business processes that larger ‘Enterprise’ companies needed to manage themselves. By unifying business processes within the ERP, businesses gained what was supposedly a ‘single source of accurate date’ which today is commonly referred to as a ‘single source of truth.’
But the reality is that as businesses have continued to grow and evolve, things that most ERPs provide by on-their-own are inadequate for today’s environment. As with the evolution of accounting systems into ‘financial platforms’, so have ERPs also evolved to serve as the central hub for tightly (or perhaps not so tightly) interwoven third-party applications performing functions that the ERP itself cannot perform alone. Countless ERP App Developers have become the resource tools by which their functionalities are meeting the needs of 'Enterprise' companies and providing the essential 'resources' those companies need to incorporate into their ERPs.
Therefore, I believe it’s time for yours truly, “Murph” to coin a new definition for the ERP acronym…. “Enterprise Resource Platform.” The vast majority of ERPs today are just that, “Platforms” providing the means by which all of a business’s requirements can be centrally managed (regardless of the specialized applications and resources required) while faithfully retaining the genera of ‘single source of truth.’
What do you think? Please post your comments below!