ERP

Enterprise Resource Planning. A company's IT backbone — and therefore the near-universal endpoint of any EDI flow.

Definition

An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is an integrated information system, usually built around a single database, that covers most management functions of a business: order management (quotes, orders, invoices), purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, accounting, payroll, fixed assets. The leading vendors are SAP (S/4HANA, ECC), Oracle (NetSuite, Fusion), Microsoft (Dynamics 365), Infor, Sage and Odoo in the mid-market.

In the EDI context, the ERP is almost always the source or destination of messages:

1. Outbound: the ERP emits the order (ORDERS / 850), the invoice (INVOIC / 810), the despatch advice (DESADV / 856).
2. Inbound: the ERP receives the supplier response (ORDRSP / 855), the syntactic acknowledgment (CONTRL / 997), the remittance advice (REMADV / 820).

Origin

The ERP term was popularised by Gartner Group in 1990 as the successor to MRP II. Large rollouts concentrated in 1995-2005 (SAP R/3 across European industry, Oracle E-Business Suite at US groups). The cloud shift — Dynamics 365, Oracle Fusion, SAP S/4HANA Cloud — accelerated from 2015 onwards.

Example in context

A retail buyer running SAP S/4HANA places an order with a food supplier running Sage X3. SAP generates the ORDERS message via its IDoc / EDI Subsystem module. A dedicated converter turns the IDoc into EDIFACT D.96A and ships it through AS2. On the supplier side, Sage X3 ingests the order through a reverse-mapping connector.

Related terms

• EDI — the exchange discipline that terminates at the ERP.
• ETL — the complementary discipline for internal analytics flows.
• ORDERS — primary message emitted by the buyer's ERP.
• INVOIC — primary message emitted by the seller's ERP.