Since growing out of earlier forms of enterprise systems in the early 1990s, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have become the backbone business management soitware for most enterprises. They span functions including accounting, procurement and, for some ERP vendors, they also include warehouse management system (WMS) capabilities. This scope makes ERP software important, but in an era when companies are seeking competitive advantage with omni-channel fulfillment, is ERP still business-critical? The answer might be "no"-at least for legacy ERP deployments used mainly for back-office processes while e-commerce fulfillment is handled by best-of-breed solutions for WMS or other functionality such as distributed order management (DOM). On the other hand, for ERP solutions that have evolved to include functionality in areas like WMS, or ERP providers that have aimed from the get-go at targeting omni-channel environments, ERP remains vital. When a vendor can blend ERP with e-commerce platforms and WMS, it can be an appealing combination, says Ray Rebello, director of product marketing for Acumatica, a Cloud-based ERP vendor. "You can build an amazing system for taking e-commerce orders, but the fulfillment end can fail completely if you're using older, disconnected systems that weren't equipped to handle the fulfillment of online orders in volume," says Rebello. "What is needed is a central system that functions as a single source of the truth."
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