Sidebar: Y2K and ERP
Customer Relationship Management
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a software application designed to manage an organization’s
customers. In today’s environment, it is important to develop relationships with your customers, and the use of a welldesigned
CRM can allow a business to personalize its relationship with each of its customers. Some ERP software systems
include CRM modules. An example of a wellknown
CRM package is Salesforce.
Supply Chain Management
Many organizations must deal with the complex task of managing their supply chains. At its simplest, a supply chain is
the linkage between an organization’s suppliers, its manufacturing facilities, and the distributors of its products. Each link
in the chain has a multiplying effect on the complexity of the process: if there are two suppliers, one manufacturing facility,
and two distributors, for example, then there are 2 x 1 x 2 = 4 links to handle. However, if you add two more suppliers,
another manufacturing facility, and two more distributors, then you have 4 x 2 x 4 = 32 links to manage.
A supply chain management (SCM) system manages the interconnection between these links, as well as the inventory of
the products in their various stages of development. A full definition of a supply chain management system is provided by
the Association for Operations Management: “The design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain
activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics,
synchronizing supply with demand, and measuring performance globally.”
Mobile Applications
Just as with the personal computer, mobile devices such as tablet computers and smartphones also have operating systems
2 Most ERP systems include a supply chain management module.
This is where companies gained additional incentive to implement an ERP system. For many organizations that were
considering upgrading to ERP systems in the late 1990s, this problem, known as Y2K (year 2000), gave them the extra push they
needed to get their ERP installed before the year 2000. ERP vendors guaranteed that their systems had been designed to be Y2K
compliant – which simply meant that they stored dates using four digits instead of two. This led to a massive increase in ERP
installations in the years leading up to 2000, making the ERP a standard software application for businesses.