Enterprise software is common these days for any business. Enterprise software has undergone many changes in its evolving phases. This article tries to point out the major changes it has undergone.
- Enterprise software is also called as “Enterprise system” or “Enterprise application software (EAS)”. Businesses/organizations deploy enterprise software, which works for their business and covers all areas of their business.
- These are mostly used by the public sector and large organizations as small and medium scale business can not afford.
- Before 1990, Businesses used to run their operations with Material Requirements Planning (MRP-I)
Material requirements planning (MRP-I)
- MRP-I was actually developed in 1964 by Joseph Orlicky and the first company to use this software is “Black and Decker” in 1964.
- MRP-I helps businesses to have control over the inventory levels of the organization/ business.
- It helps in production, sales and distribution areas of the business.
- In 1975, around 150 companies stated using MRP-I. By 1981, around 8000 companies adopted this software for their business.
Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP-II)
- MRP-II was developed by Oliver Wight in 1983.
- This can be taken as the successor of MRP-I.
- MRP-II is not completely a software application. It is a combination of human resources and utilization of computer resources productively among the business people.
- It helps in the financial management and planning of the business. It also helps the organization in the crucial situations to take decisions.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- ERP was developed by Gartner Group in 1990 as an extension to the MRP-I and MRP-II.
- It has the capability of combining the internal and external managements of the business.
- As it covers almost all the areas of the business like planing, finance, production, sales and services and distribution. It is considered to be crucial to many small and medium scale organizations.
- Later in 2000, ERP was added with the additional functionality of communicating with clients/partners, which was known as ERP-II.
Enterprise Software (ES)
- The term “enterprise software” came into existence after 2000.
- ERP-II along with some extra subsystems like Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management and Business Intelligence is called “enterprise software”.
- ES covers all the functional areas of business starting from initial planning to the prediction of the business in the future.
- The advanced feature of ES is “enterprise social system”. This helps business interact with the customers and partners to provide services and also to get the feedback from this. This gives the opportunity to businesses to share resources with the partners and perform any modifications in their business to provide better customer service.
- Enterprise software is quite expensive as it is designed to cover all the functionality and perform all the operations of the business. Hence, it is not affordable to all the organizations.
ES has become popular with businesses. Many software companies are into the business of developing enterprise software.
