The main part of this article comes from the Adeaca blog: https://www.adeaca.com/blog/faq-items/what-is-a-project-erp/.
All-in-one ERP was designed for project-based businesses such as architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), product-to-order (ETO) manufacturing and professional services organizations (PSO).
For any company, no matter what industry, projects are important to its business. The many companies that operate the majority of their business in projects include architecture, engineering and construction, project-based ETO manufacturing, aerospace and defense, professional services, and more. These companies provide products and services directly to customers through projects and are often referred to as project-based companies.
However, there are other types of companies, including retail, distribution, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and others that manage projects within the company. Almost every medium to large business needs to integrate their projects with the rest of the business in terms of cost and value delivered. Many of these companies have project-based divisions or major capital projects that require project business management.
Project ERP vs Traditional ERP
Traditional ERP solutions were originally designed for industries with high-volume, repeatable processes. They are very effective in commercial industries where it is easy to apply technology to standardize processes and data to automate and speed up production.
For companies that deliver projects externally to clients or manage projects internally, non-standard business practices present unique challenges. Traditional ERP components cannot meet the needs of these companies by providing the level of automation and visibility needed to succeed.
Problems with Traditional ERP for Managing Project Businesses
Typically, many companies end up using an additional 10 to 15 different applications to manage their project business processes. Most of the time, most of their information and processes are managed in spreadsheets. As a result, these companies must use controllers and data processes to manually transform, consolidate, and validate large amounts of project data from disparate business systems.
This manual integration process can lead to errors and delays that ultimately lead to important decisions based on unreliable data.
All-in-one Advantages
First of all, the scope of project ERP is very wide, and few software vendors can provide project ERP, so All-in-one has an absolute advantage in coverage.
Secondly, All-in-one extends its distortion control and WIP costing advantages in project management to overall business management, so it also has absolute advantages in these two aspects.
Finally, All-in-one is designed and developed by native integration, which is very different from the way other software manufacturers acquire products with different technology stacks. Therefore, it also has absolute advantages in terms of efficiency and cost of implementation and maintenance.