Michael Grant 
Most US companies do not wake up one morning and decide to buy ERP software. They back into it. A controller is closing the month in QuickBooks with four spreadsheets taped together, inventory lives in a warehouse system nobody trusts, and the sales team keeps its own customer list. At some point the workarounds cost … Read more
“Cloud ERP” has become one of those phrases that means whatever the salesperson needs it to mean. A multi-tenant SaaS product is cloud. A 20-year-old on-premises system running on a rented server in a data center is also, technically, in the cloud. The difference matters, because the two arrangements carry very different costs, upgrade paths, … Read more
“Oracle ERP” is not one product. It is a family of products that Oracle has assembled through acquisition and rebuilt around its cloud platform, and the differences between them matter more than the shared logo. A company running E-Business Suite has almost nothing in common, technically, with a company running Oracle Cloud ERP — except … Read more
The NetSuite ERP system is the product most US mid-market companies end up comparing against, whether or not they start there. It was cloud ERP before cloud ERP was the default, it runs one codebase for every customer, and it covers finance, inventory, order management, CRM, and e-commerce in a single data model. That combination … Read more
Sage is the quiet giant of small and mid-market accounting software in the US. Most people meet it through Sage 50 — the former Peachtree — or through a controller who has used Sage 100 since it was called MAS 90. But “Sage ERP” covers five products with different architectures, different buyers, and very different … Read more
Odoo ERP is the answer to a specific problem: you need a lot of business applications, you do not want to pay per-seat enterprise prices for all of them, and you are willing to accept that the software will not be as polished as a category leader. It is open source at the core, modular … Read more
Ask five people what “Microsoft ERP” means and you will get five answers. A controller at a 30-year-old manufacturer will say Dynamics GP. A CFO at a SaaS company will say Business Central. An IT director at a multinational will say Dynamics 365 Finance. A consultant will start explaining the difference between NAV, AX, and … Read more
Epicor ERP is what happens when an ERP vendor decides that “mid-market manufacturing” is too broad a category. Instead of one product for everyone, it sells a family of systems aimed at specific industries: Kinetic for manufacturers, Prophet 21 and Eclipse for distributors, BisTrack for building materials, and iScala for older international deployments. The products … Read more
Most people who search for “Dynamics ERP” are trying to answer one question: Business Central or Finance and Supply Chain Management? Those are Microsoft’s two current ERP products, and the gap between them is wider than the names suggest. One is a mid-market system that a 30-person distributor can implement in a quarter. The other … Read more
“Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP” sounds like one product. It is actually a set of applications that share a platform, a licensing model, and a release cadence — and the boundaries between them matter when you are mapping users to licenses. A warehouse supervisor, a project manager, and a controller may all be “Dynamics 365 users,” … Read more