Theme: Clear responsibility between business and production
Quick definition
ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning, is a system category for business planning and shared resource flows such as orders, purchasing, inventory, finance and often master data. In manufacturing, ERP meets production activities through information exchange rather than automatically controlling every physical process.
In context
ISA-95 describes activities and interfaces between business planning and logistics and manufacturing control. ERP commonly supports level 4 functions and MOM/MES level 3, but the abstract model does not require a fixed product placement or technical topology. One product may support activities on both sides.
A concrete order flow
ERP creates a production order with item, quantity and requested date. MOM/MES adds equipment, sequence, material consumption, downtime and quality results. Report-back updates inventory, delivery and cost. Every transition needs defined identity and failure handling.
The interface is a business contract
An API solves transport, not meaning. The contract must state who owns order status, units, recipe version, material lot and corrections. It should also address late, duplicate or reordered messages and explain how systems recover.
Opportunity and limitations
A well-bounded ERP can provide shared planning and financial traceability. Forcing all production logic into it can slow change and bury domain knowledge in customisations. The opposite problem, local copies of business data, creates competing truths and difficult reconciliation.
Decisions before integration
- Which activities belong to business planning and production operations?
- Which system is authoritative for each identity and status?
- What timeliness and feedback does the process require?
- How are outages, duplicates and version changes tested?
HubMind’s view
Design the boundary around decisions and information, not a supplier’s architecture diagram. ISA-95 supplies a language for activities and exchanges. The next step is to test the contract against outages and corrections. Choose the concrete solution according to consequence, ownership and rate of change.
Related concepts
MOM, MES, ISA-95 and Data Mapping.
Sources and further reading
Scope and freshness
This page describes ERP’s industrial boundary using ISA-95’s public activity and interface model. It does not prescribe a vendor, monolith or network topology. Reviewed 31 August 2026.