While enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has existed as a manufacturing tool for nearly five decades, digital manufacturing has taken a giant leap forward over the past several years with companies increasingly adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) or Cloud ERP models. 

With traditional, on-premise ERP software, solutions are locally installed on a company’s hardware and servers and then managed by the company’s IT staff. But with Cloud ERP, the software is centrally located, i.e. in the internet “Cloud,” and accessed by customers using a web browser. Additionally, SaaS solutions are typically licensed on a subscription basis and based on multitenant architecture to support scalability.