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282 PM, ENTERPRISE PM, AND ERP

place to support the finance and human resources functions, as they relate to
project activity.

During the past decade a specific group of tools has emerged to provide such
support. It is called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and it is avail-
able from several very prominent software developers, such as Oracle, People-
Soft, SAP, Baan, and J.D. Edwards. These vendors have sold multimillion-dollar
systems to many of the world’s largest firms, and are now also offering scaled-
down systems to the rest of the businesses of the world.

The people who use these systems are usually outside the project environ-
ment. However, they often share quite a bit of information with the people in-
volved in projects. Until about a half-dozen years ago, there was little interest in
developing an effective means of data sharing. Each discipline went its own way
and the shared data had to be duplicated. Not only was this a waste of effort, but
it also allowed for inconsistencies in the data.

Recognizing this inefficiency and gap in communications, many firms began to
develop in-house connectivity between their projects, financial, and human re-
sources data systems. Then, the ERP industry discovered the world of projects
and reached out to connect with its data.

The integration of project management and enterprise resource planning tools
is gaining interest and support. In doing so, it is moving from a custom applica-
tion, developed by the end user, to a market basket of generic interface modules,
developed by PM software vendors. In this section, we provide examples of some
of these applications. We expand our horizons to enterprise-wide project manage-
ment (Chapter 10.1) and discuss what is involved in using ERP applications with
project management applications (Chapter 10.2).

After completing this section, you will most likely want to go on to Section 11.
There we explore the next phase of the ever-expanding world of project manage-
ment. Commonly called Professional Services Automation, PSA is being embraced
by PM solution providers, ERP solution providers, and best-of-breed PSA providers.
The accomplishments, failures, and potential are discussed in Section 11.