ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is the system of record for the financial and transactional side of a business: purchase orders, inventory, work orders, accounting, and operations. ERP owns the manufacturing BOM once it goes into production and consumes the engineering BOM from PLM through documented translation. ERP and PLM are complementary systems of record — PLM owns what the product is, ERP owns the financial transactions around making and selling it — and most enterprise integration projects of any complexity ultimately require getting the PLM-ERP boundary right.
Why it matters
The PLM-ERP boundary is where most large engineering organizations spend the most integration money and produce the most arguments. ERP teams often want to own the BOM because they own the work order; PLM teams own the design intent that the BOM expresses. The right answer is that PLM owns the eBOM and the controlled mBOM, ERP consumes the mBOM for procurement, and the translation between them is documented — but achieving that in a brownfield shop with twenty years of legacy ERP customization is one of the more political projects in enterprise IT.
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Cite this definition
Finocchiaro, Michael. “ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning).” DemystifyingPLM PLM Glossary, 2026, https://www.demystifyingplm.com/glossary/erp-enterprise-resource-planning