Companies invest a lot of time and money in enterprise resource planning software—and yet, at the end of the day, those weighty ERP systems still don’t necessarily fulfill all a company’s needs when it comes to financial reporting requirements, such as those outlined under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
ERP systems aim to integrate all of the divisions and functions across a company onto a single computer system and database, so that various departments can easily share information and communicate with each other. This means that the systems of, say, the manufacturing department, are connected to the finance or human resource operations; employees in each division can view the information, update it, and help speed along a process, such as fulfilling an order.
