There are five major reasons why companies undertake ERP. i) Integrate financial information—As the CEO tries to understand the company's overall performance; he may find many different versions of the truth. Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales have another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenues. ERP creates a single version of the truth that cannot be questioned because everyone is using the same system. ii) Integrate customer order information—ERP systems can become the place where the customer order lives from the time a customer service representative receives it until the loading dock ships the merchandise and finance sends an invoice. By having this information in one software system, rather than scattered among many different systems that can't communicate with one another, companies can keep track of orders more easily, and coordinate manufacturing, inventory and s