ERP systems, in theory, can help with all the back-office
administration tasks of most companies. Say you are running
a bicycle shop. Once you make a sale, you enter the order
on the ERP system. The system then updates the stock of bicycles
in the shop, incorporates the sale into the financial ledgers,
prints out an invoice, and can prompt you to purchase more
bikes to replace the ones that you have sold. The ERP system
can also handle repair orders and manage the spare parts stocks.
It can also provide automated tools to help you forecast future
sales and to plan activities over the next few weeks. There
may also be data query tools present to enable sophisticated
management reports and graphs to be generated. In addition,
the system may handle the return of defective items from unhappy
customers, the sending out of regular account statements to
customers, and the management of payments to suppliers.
ERP systems can assist with the scheduling and deployment
of all sorts of resources, physical, monetary and human. A
water company might use their ERP system to schedule a customer
repair job, deploy staff to the job, verify that it got done,
and subsequently bill the customer. An oil company might use
it ensure that their tankers are loaded, that a shipping itinerary
is prepared and completed on schedule, and that all the equipment
and people required for loading and unloading the cargo in
each port are present at the right times. A bus company might
use their system to manage customer bookings, record receipts
and plan preventative maintenance activities for their fleet.
