When most people imagine the IT systems of a large enterprise they probably conjure a vision of air-conditioned rooms stuffed with computers busily humming away.
But by and large, it's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that lies at the heart of a large enterprise's computing activity. Although it's tempting to do so, don't pronounce the term as a word that rhymes with "burp;" say each letter: "E-R-P."
No matter how you pronounce it, the term doesn't shed much light on what the software actually does. ERP software integrates the information used by an organization's many different functions and departments into a unified computing system. That means that instead of using isolated departmental databases to manage information, such as employee records, customer data, purchase orders, and inventory, everyone in the enterprise relies on the same database. This allows employees in different departments to look at the same information.
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