The often abused and misused systems term ‘enterprise’ lends some of its history to the manufacturing and supply chain solutions defined in the 1990s. At that time core software suppliers such as SAP, Peoplesoft and Siebel coined the word enterprise to represent their movements into non-core competency software elements and business processes.
The word was required to explain that the core transactional process-based solutions now needed complementary functionality to support the whole of the business/commercial model.
