At large organizations around the world, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is changing the way companies manage their resources, both human and monetary. This post is the first in a series about how ERP is becoming increasingly valuable to organizations in their efforts to realize their potential.

The need to manage company resources–whether it’s knowledge, money, talent or equipment– is paramount across all industries and business sectors. ERP is extremely valuable to HR departments because it allows them to really get in to the data and see where they can help improve an organization.

One way is by creating surveys for managers to fill out regarding employee performance and for employees to fill out about job satisfaction, their perceptions of management’s direction, etc. After correlating the results, it may become obvious that discussions should be scheduled to clear up discrepancies.

It is also possible to handle payroll through ERP, as Case’s ERP implementation demonstrates today. This allows HR to handle business metrics such as worker-salary efficiency and turnover.

Stay tuned: next time I’ll talk about ERP from a financial frame.