What is ERP? Not Wyatt?

When I see ERP I think of Wyatt Earp, don't ask me where that comes from. Maybe from watching too many cowboy shows on TV when I was young. While Wyatt Earp and ERP are not actually pronounced the same I see an analogy here.

Wyatt Earp is a legendary lawman of the turn of the 20th century back in the Wild American West. He was noted for his exploits and adventures and was one effective sheriff and entrepreneur. He got things done.

ERP on the other hand is short for Enterprise Resource Planning, the main type of software used for running businesses, small and large. The term and abbreviation was once pretty much reserved for high end tier one systems but now is applied to every thing, from QuickBooks and Peachtree on up to Accpac, MAS 90, 200, 500 or Dynamics.

ERP software should be an very effective sheriff for your business and help you get things done but often it is not. The problem is:

Most ERP systems are used just for accounting and basic business processes. They are used to record history and execute transactions that for all intensive purposes have all ready occured.

Thomas Wailgum Senior Editor for CFO Magazine writes in an article ERP Definition and Solutions "Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, doesn’t live up to its acronym. Forget about planning—it doesn’t do much of that—and forget about resource, a throwaway term. But remember the enterprise part. This is ERP’s true ambition. It attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs. That is a tall order..."

The good news is that there have been many improvements and additions to the popular ERP solutions that enable you to use them for real ERP.

For example take a look at Sage EES (Extended Enterprise Suite) for Accpac and the MAS 90, 200 solutions.

View these two videos.









To be continued.