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 ERP
(enterprise resource planning) is an
industry term for the broad set of activities supported by multi-module
application software that helps a manufacturer or other business
manage the important parts of its business, including product planning,
parts purchasing, maintaining inventories, interacting with suppliers,
providing customer service, and tracking orders. ERP can also include
application modules for the finance and human resources aspects
of a business. Typically, an ERP system uses or is integrated with
a relational
database system. The deployment of an ERP system can involve
considerable business process analysis, employee retraining, and
new work procedures.
Manufacturing
Resource Planning – MRP
is a software based system that integrates most aspects of a manufacturing
concern, such as ordering, manufacturing, shop floor job scheduling,
purchasing, packing, shipping, receiving, and inventory as a unified
whole.
It combines these functions in such a way that advantages
and synergies of processing all information as a single system
are exploited. These advantages are made possible only because
of the added power over the process provided by applying computing
power to the task.
Modern
MRP systems (sometimes referred to as MRP-II) also
close the loop, taking and feeding back measurements of important
process metrics in order to make the MRP process more accurate.
For example, in MRP each processing step required to manufacture
an inventory item is assigned an estimated amount of time for
completion.
The MRP system uses this information to determine
a variety of things, including how long it will take to complete
orders for that item, and how long each manufacturing machine
on the shop floor must be reserved. It then schedules the manufacturing
of the item along with other manufacturing jobs required, allowing
an estimate to be made of when an order will be completed at
the time the order is first taken.
In MRP-II the actual amount of time taken for each step in the
manufacturing process is measured, and used to adjust the times
on record for those steps.
In this way an MRP-II system continuously
refines, and dramatically improves its ability to accurately schedule
jobs and predict order delivery dates.
Customer
Relationship Management or "CRM" systems are used to help support personnel 'know their customer'.
At a minimum, such systems provide 'contract management':
they track whether a given customer has actually purchased
a support contract, what type of a contract it is (regular,
premium, unlimited) and how much time/incidents are
left before the contract expires.
They frequently rate
customers by importance, priority, friendliness, and
special treatment the customer may need. CRM systems
are usually integrated with Help-Desk/Call-Tracking
systems (below). At the low-end, CRM systems are no
more than glorified address books, such as the contact
management systems that salesmen use to collect and
scan through sales leads.
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