ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems are used for business process management and bring operational efficiency in the whole business system. ERP is a collection of software applications . The collection of the softwares are called ERP Modules. They are designed to work together but can be configured to work independently as well. The various modules of ERP systems are as follows:

Financial Accounting Module:

The function of the Financial Accounting Module is the recording and reporting of financial transactions. These transactions include expenses, revenues, and sale of products or services. Other common functions of the Financial Accounting Module include:

• Balance Sheet Calculation and Management
• Bank Reconciliation
• Cash Flow Forecasting
• Asset Accounting
• Tracking of flow of financial data
• Creation of Organizational Structure (Defining Company, Company Codes, business Areas, Functional Areas, Credit Control, Assignment of Company Codes to Credit Controls)
• Financial Accounting Global Settings
• General Ledger Accounting (Creation of Chart of Accounts, Account groups, Defining data transfer rules, Creation of General Ledger Account)
• Account Payables, accounts receivable, fixed assets, general ledger and cash management, etc.

Material Management:

This module is responsible for the material lifecycle, which includes indenting, procurement, and returns management. MM Module also manages inventory and handling of manufacturing-related expenses. It analyzes demand against available resources to ensure that sufficient materials are available at all times to keep up with customer demands.

• Purchase Requisition from Production Department
• Evaluation of Requisition
• Asking for Quotation
• Evaluation of Quotations
• Purchase Order
• Receipt of Material
• Issue of Material
• Purchase Invoice
• Payment to Vendor

Sales And Distribution Module:

This module is used to manage the entire Sales Life Cycle, starting Pre-Sales Activities, Sales Order Processing, Inventory Sourcing, Delivery, Billing & Invoicing, and Payment & Receipt. Sales and Distribution can monitor a plethora of  activities that take place in an organization  such  as product enquires, quotation  (pre-sales activities), placing order, pricing, scheduling deliveries (sales activity), picking, packing, goods issue, shipment of products to customers, delivery of products and billings. In all these processes, multiple modules are involved such as FA(Finance & Accounting, CO(Controlling), MM(Material Management), PP(Production Planning), LE(Logistics Execution), etc.; which shows the complexity of the integration involved.  

• Setting up Organization Structure
• Assigning Organizational Units
• Defining Pricing Components

• Pre-Sales Activities: Include prospecting of customers, identifying prospective customers, gathering data, contacting them and fixing appointments, showing demo, discussion, submission of quotations, etc.
• Sales Order: Sales order is recorded in our books after getting a confirmed purchased order from our customer. Sales order shall contain details just like purchase order. For example-Stock Item Details, Quantity, Rate, Due Date of Delivery, Place of Delivery, etc.
• Inventory Sourcing: It includes making arrangements before delivery of goods; ensuring goods are ready and available for delivery.
• Material Delivery: Material is delivered to the customer as per sales order. All inventory details are copied from Sales Order to Material Delivery for saving user’s time and efforts. This transaction shall have a linking with Sales Order. Stock balance shall be reduced on recording of this transaction.
• Billing: This is a transaction of raising an invoice against the delivery of material to customer. This transaction shall have a linking with Material Delivery and all the details shall be copied from it. Stock balance shall not affect again.
• Receipt from Customer / Payment:This is a transaction of receiving amount from customer against sales invoice and shall have a linking with sales invoice

Supply Chain Module:

This module helps enterprises to keep track of the movement of goods in the enterprise through the different business processes. Supply chain management has complications because it has numerous moving pieces. Integrating this apparatus with the rest of your system is beneficial. Warehousing management, transportation management, analytics, collaboration, and vendor support are some of its typical features. For further optimization, companies may wish to utilize a Just-in-Time system to reduce the costs associated with holding inventory.

Production Planning Module:

This module helps manufacturing plants, plan and schedule production. This module tracks the process of production planning, starting from Issue of Raw Material from stores, to conversion into Work-in-Progress, to conversion into finished goods, to stock transfer to godown.

• SOP - Sales and Operations Planning (SOP) provide the ability to forecast sales and production plans based on historical, current and future data.
• DRP - Distribution Resource Planning (DRP) allows companies the ability to plan the demand for distribution centres.
• BOM - A bill of material (BOM) describes the different components that together create a product. For example- A computer is a product. It is a combination of CPU, Keyboard, Monitor, Mouse etc. The bill of material contains the item number of each component, quantity required in the manufacture of a product and the unit of measure of the item.
• MRP - Material Requirements planning relies on demand and supply elements with the calculation parameters to calculate the net requirements from the planning run.
• Production Planning –This includes material forecasting, demand management, long term planning and master production scheduling (MPS).
• Capacity Planning –This evaluates the capacity utilized based on the work centres available capacity to show capacity constraints.
• Product Cost Planning –This is the process of evaluating all the time values and value of component materials to determine the product cost.

Plant Maintenance Module:

This module helps in keeping a plant/equipment history database. This module is a functional module that handles maintaining of equipment and enables efficient planning of production and generation schedules also helps the plant managers to maintain the production plants, effectively and efficiently. There are basically four types of Planned Plant Maintenance i.e. Preventive, Predictive, Corrective and Shutdown Maintenance. And Unplanned Plant Maintenance is also konwn as Emergence Maintenance. Plant Maintenance comprises the following activities:

• Inspection-
An inspection is, an organized examination or formal evaluation exercise, which is done after regular period of time, in order to verify plant operations. All measures which establish the actual condition of a technical system.
• Preventive Maintenance-
Preventive maintenance (PM) is the regular and routine maintenance of equipment and assets in order to keep them running and prevent any costly unplanned downtime from unexpected equipment failure. A successful maintenance strategy requires planning and scheduling maintenance of equipment before a problem occurs. All measures which maintain the ideal condition of a technical system.

Maintenance Task List

Maintenance task lists describe a sequence of individual maintenance activities which must be performed repeatedly within a company. Task lists are used to standardize these recurring work sequences and to plan them more effectively. Many manufacturers deliver their technical objects together with maintenance task lists; these task lists are, however, frequently created within the company itself. Task lists help to reduce the maintenance effort when standardized work sequences change, for example as a result of new legal regulations. You must carry out the changes at exactly one place in the corresponding maintenance task list. All maintenance orders and maintenance items that refer to the maintenance task list automatically receive the actual status of the work sequences.
• Repair-
All measures which restore the ideal condition of a technical system
• Other measures taken using the maintenance organization

Quality Management Module

Quality Management (QM) Module helps in management of quality in productions across processes in an organization. This module helps an organization to accelerate their business by adopting a structured and functional way of managing quality in different processes. Quality Management module collaborates in procurement and sales, production, planning, inspection, notification, control, audit management and so on.
Quality Management Module Processes are as follows:

1. Quality Planning:
Quality planning is the process of planning the production activities to achieve the goals of meeting the customer requirements in time, within the available resources.
2. Quality Control:
It is a system for ensuring the maintenance of proper standards in manufactured goods, especially by periodic random inspection of the product. It involves the checking and monitoring of the process and products with an intention of preventing non-conforming materials from going to the customer. Various result areas are identified for each process and studies are conducted to verify whether those results are being achieved.
3. Quality Assurance:
Quality assurance concentrates on identifying various processes, their interactions and sequence, defining the objectives of each process, identifying the key result areas and measures to measure the results, establishing the procedures for getting the required results,documenting the procedures to enable everyone to follow the same, educating the people to implement the procedures, preparing standard operating instructions to guide the people on work spot, monitoring and measuring the performance, taking suitable actions on deviations and continuously improving the systems.
4. Quality Improvement:
Quality improvement is a never-ending process. The customer’s needs and expectations are continuously changing depending on the changes in technology, economy, political situation, ambitions and dreams, competition, etc.

Project Systems Module:

This module helps the project managers to manage the project workflows. This is an integrated project management tool used for planning and managing projects and portfolio management. It has several tools that enable project management process such as cost and planning budget, scheduling, requisitioning of materials and services, execution, until the project completion.
This module is closely integrated with Supply Chain, Material Management, S&D, PM, and PP, etc. Before starting any new project in any of the above modules, the Project Managers need to clearly define the process and set of tasks to be performed known as Process Flow in Project Lifecycle.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Module:

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a customer-centric approach to managing the relationships between a business and its customers. Customer Relationship Management is a system that aims at improving the relationship with existing customers, finding new prospective customers, and winning back former customers. A CRM system can help companies improve their customer service and marketing initiatives. It can also help them improve their operational efficiency by automating their customer information management tasks.

Human Resource:

In this module, HR managers can create and edit employee records including hiring data, termination data, and payroll information. This module also provides a dashboard with key performance indicators in the form of graphs for HR managers to use in monitoring their work