By Kathleen Garvin for Brainyard

By Austin Caldwell | Senior Product Marketing Manager
Oracle NetSuite

By Lisa Schwarz | Sr. Director of Global Product Marketing
Oracle NetSuite

Companies that excel at inventory management drive the maximum amount of profit—and customer satisfaction—from the least amount of investment in stock. And as we see from those efficient businesses, managing inventory successfully is all about data: purchases, reorders, shipping, warehousing, storage, receiving, customer satisfaction, loss prevention, stock turnover and more.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is management software, typically packaged as one bundle of applications that assists businesses to automate their data collection, management, storage and interpretation. ERP uses data from sources such as service delivery, inventory, marketing and accounting.

Innovation is essential for growth in the modern business environment, and the faster an organization can innovate, the better its chances of growing rapidly. However, on-site ERP software is often too rigid to match the pace of evolving business and technological practices. On the other hand, cloud-based ERP systems like Oracle NETSUITE offer suites of ERP applications over the internet and do not require installation on computers.