L'ERP (enterprise ressource planning)
The ERP (in English Enterprise Resource Planning), so called Integrated Software packages of Management (PGI), are applications of which the goal is to coordinate the whole of the activities of a company (activities known as vertical such as the production, the provisioning or horizontal like marketing, the sales forces, the human stock management, etc.) around the same information system.
Term "ERP" comes from the name of method MRP (Manufacturing Resource Planning) used since the Seventies for management and planning of the industrial production.
With the economic crisis, the companies have other choices only to optimize their costs. For that, the saving tool is not other than the ERP. It became the heart of the company, a true muscle able to start again the activity of the company.
But attention, the ERP is not an exclusiveness in the great groups, it is rather an asset for SME which must face their competitors.
More than one simple software, a ERP is a true project requiring a total integration of a software tool within an organization and of a specific structure, and thus of the important costs of engineering. In addition its installation in the company involves important modifications of the practices of work of a great part of the employees. Thus it is considered that the cost of the software tool represents less than 20% of the total cost of installation of such a system.
