The above sections described core characteristics of an ERP system. Modern ERPs include however much more than just unified database, wide functional coverage, work-flows, and MRP. They also extended the functional scope to cover CRM, KM and etc.
CRM stands for “Customer Relation Management”. The idea of CRM is quite simple: to collect and present all information related to a client.
In a pure ERP system, such information are the person’s contact, orders, invoices and such. CRM extends the information to include events and tickets. Events represent each contact made with a customer: a phone call, a visit, an email and so on. Tickets represent the specific interaction types with a customer. For example, a customer received the product he ordered, but he don’t know how to use the product, then he may ask for help. In this case, a support ticket should be opened in the CRM. All actions (events) which may happen in order to help this customer, e.g. emails, phone calls, and etc.) should be attached to this support ticket. Once the problem is resolved, the ticket can be closed.
Such information are normally hosted at the same location as the orders, packing lists and invoices because human relations with the customer (events & tickets) are directly related to trade relations with the customer (order, packing list, invoice). CRM can also be used for public relations, sales management, supplier management and so on.
We could therefore claim that “keeping track of the relation history with people” is a frequent characteristic of a modern ERP.