The Special Role of Todays ERP.

As companies cut budgets in the early 2000s in the wake of the global economic slowdown, many were not able to finish the job of integrating old siloed processes and organizations with the ERP tools available. The result was that potential benefits of ERP remained just out of grasp. It was not uncommon for companies once again to have "islands of automation" with the problems inherent with processes that were not connected end-to-end or tools that failed to connect divisions and partners cross a geographical area or around the world. But times are changing. Firms and industries, even whole economies, are recovering from the global recession. Yet, today, management is not showing much interest in expanding capital expenditures even in the face of historically low cost of capital. In fact, managers are turning to the very technology they invested in during the 1990s to further reduce operating budgets across their enterprises. The goal is clear: to improve internal productivity across the board and around the world.