Enterprise Resource Planning application has been there for years long. The introduction of applications like Inventory Management and Control happened in way back 1960's. This Inventory Management and Control application used to take care of the inventory management such as recognizing the inventory requirements, keeping the targets, monitoring and reporting item usages, reporting inventory balances and analyzing inventory status with the perfect reports.
Material Resource Planning (MRP) was introduced some where in 1970. MRP used to take care of the scheduling the operations and accepting the raw material purchases depends on the requirements of the production, tracking the finished goods, reporting the inventory status etc.
In early 1980's Material Resource Planning II was introduced. Manufacturing Requirements Planning II is an application software that used to take care of the production planning, raw material purchasing, delivery methods and reporting the inventory status.
In 1990's Enterprise Resource Planning was introduced with the advanced features and modular applications. Enterprise resource planning is a module based application software that streamlines the entire business environment by integrating all the functional departments such product planning, parts purchasing, inventory control, product distribution, fulfillment, to order tracking. It also integrates the accounting, sales and human resource departments together so that all the functional departments come under the same database and results into the efficient flow of the information and communication.
Once the ERP application was introduced with the advanced features, most of the big and established companies started implementing the enterprise resource planning application to take the advantage of the integrated environment. Of course some of the companies failed in the implementation but most of them have seen huge amount of the changes in the business environment, working process and information flow. This is where the popularity of the ERP applications started growing.
After this stage in the early 2000's, most of the medium scale companies were also stated looking for the ERP software. Even, most of the vendors started working on the development of the cost effective ERP software that can fit into the medium scale company's requirements and budget. Almost all the ERP developers have introduced enterprise resource planning software for the small and medium scale companies.
After the year 2005 and 2006, the trend has been again changed with the arrival of the web based software in the market. Web based software are cheaper when compared to the traditional client server based software. Web based software vendors target the small and medium scale companies with the robust features and flexible implementation strategies. On-demand software application has become hot cake for the small and medium scale companies once they are introduced into the market.
Enterprise resource planning software has been transforming itself by step by step for the past several years. To put in a nut shell, it has been modified in such a way to fit into the customer requirements and budget as time passes. With the arrival of the web based software applications into the market, even small scale companies are also thinking of implementation the ERP system.
