Businesses of every size depend on accurate information to operate efficiently. Sales teams need customer and order information, accounting departments need financial records, warehouses need accurate inventory data, managers need reports, and executives need a clear overview of company performance. When these activities are handled through disconnected applications, spreadsheets, and manual processes, information can become fragmented and difficult to manage.
Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, is designed to solve this challenge by connecting important business functions through a centralized platform. A self hosted ERP gives organizations an additional level of control because the ERP environment is deployed and managed on infrastructure selected by the organization rather than being completely operated by a third-party SaaS provider.
Self hosting can offer flexibility, customization, and control over infrastructure. However, it also requires responsibility for maintenance, security, backups, updates, and system availability. For that reason, businesses should understand how self hosted ERP works before deciding whether it is the right approach.
Self hosted ERP is an ERP solution that a business installs and operates on infrastructure under its control. The infrastructure can be a company-owned physical server, private data center, virtual private server, dedicated server, or cloud infrastructure that the organization manages.
The ERP application typically communicates with a database where business information is stored. Employees access the platform through a browser or another supported interface.
Unlike a traditional SaaS ERP model, where the provider usually manages the application infrastructure, self hosting gives the organization more responsibility for the technology stack.
A typical self hosted ERP may include modules for: