Enterprise resource planning system is a system designated towards automating internal and external business processes. Automating considers many problems including communication bottlenecks, process speed and quality issues.

Unautomated business processes are usually suboptimal, inefficient and redundant. Most of them are also hard to automate. This means that before designing a business management system, some business process improvement or reengineering usually takes place.

Business processes tend to change quite quickly and business management systems must adhere to changed requirements for business to operate successfully. This is why business management systems development cycle is of iterative type.