ERP System

An ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning) is integrated business software that maps a company's core processes onto a shared data foundation. Orders, stock levels, documents, customers and resources are not held in separate programs but in one system that every department works with. When sales confirms an order, stock movements and accounting entries follow automatically, without data being passed along by hand. The goal is to replace isolated solutions in which the same information is maintained several times over and often inconsistently.

The functional scope is modular, so the configuration depends on industry and company size. Typical modules include:

• Inventory management covering purchasing, warehousing, stock levels and shipping
• Finance and controlling covering accounting, cost accounting and reporting
• Production covering bills of materials, manufacturing orders and capacity planning
• Sales and CRM covering quotations, orders and customer history
• Human resources covering master data, time tracking and payroll

Pure trading companies often run only some of these modules, whereas manufacturers additionally require planning functions. An inventory management system is therefore not an alternative to ERP but one of its building blocks.

An ERP system manages the commercial and logistical master data of an article, meaning article number, purchase and sales price, stock level, weight, customs tariff number or supplier assignment. Those fields are not sufficient for marketing purposes. Descriptive attributes, marketing copy and channel specific variants are created in product information management, while images, videos, data sheets and certificates belong in a media system such as TESSA DAM. In practice the three systems work together: the ERP system supplies reliable commercial data, the PIM enriches it editorially, and the DAM adds the matching assets for store, marketplace and catalog.

The value of an ERP system depends on how well it connects to the surrounding system landscape. Three aspects are decisive. First, data ownership: for every field it must be clear which system leads, so that prices or stock levels are not maintained in two places. Second, the interfaces, because store, PIM, DAM and shipping providers continuously draw on ERP data and need dependable transfer formats and update intervals. Rather than connecting every system individually, a middleware such as the OSKAR Middleware centrally handles the translation and control of data flows between ERP, PIM, store and marketplace. Third, data quality, because a shared data foundation distributes errors just as reliably as correct values. An implementation is therefore less a software project than an exercise in cleaning up processes and master data.