It integrates all facets of the business, including planning, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. It is usually comprised of several modules such as a financial module, a distribution module, or a production module. Each of these modules share information that is housed within the database structures on which the ERP system was coded. ERP helps to break down barriers between departments within a company. For example, many times the sales department may be selling 25% more product than the production department can produce. By utilizing an ERP system, the sales department, production department, operations management, shipping, financial department, purchasing department all have access to the up-to-date information that is needed to operate smoothly within any manufacturing environment.

As the ERP methodology has become more popular, software applications have emerged to help business managers implement ERP in business activities such as inventory control, order tracking, customer service, finance and human resources.

SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing) is the leading ERP package built around the company's R/3 system that provides the capability to manage financial, asset, and cost accounting, production operations and materials, personnel, plants, and archived documents. SAP applications can provide an environment where transactions are synchronized throughout the entire systems, for e.g. a sales-order entry can trigger actions within each application that relate and are relevant to the transaction.

Competent Systems has a group of highly skilled professionals with expertise in ERP Software packages like SAP , Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and a range of mid-market ERP vendors who all provide similar packaged ERP applications.