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, People-soft and Siebel coined the term to represent their movements into non-core competency software elements and business processes.
The purpose of the term was to explain that the core transactional process-based solutions now needed complementary functionality to support the whole of the business-commercial model. The core of the solution suddenly needed full integration to all legacy support systems and special modules to support the finance, human resources (HR) and marketing departments, and to fully realise the touted and expected return on investment.
