An ERP system helps you take a customer order and processes it into an invoice and book the revenue. That is why ERP is often referred to as back-office applications. It doesn't handle the up-front selling process, although most ERP solutions include customer relations management software, called CRM. Instead, ERP streamlines all the steps a customer order has to go through from the time it is entered until the product is in the customer's hands. When a customer service representative enters an order into an ERP system, she has all the information necessary to complete the order: the customer's credit rating and order history from the finance module, the company's inventory levels from the supply chain module and the shipping dock's trucking schedule from the logistics module.