Mea Culpa! I stand corrected. I’ve been found guilty of slinging acronyms without proper identification and publicly keelhauled for the less-than-professional use of buzzwords. It’s all because of my piece yesterday on Overstock’s ERP Software Woes. Read on for the gory details …

Gnomie Ted wrote:

I hate the over-dependence on acronyms anymore, like “everyone knows” what they mean.

http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?p=dict&String=exact&Acronym=ERP begins a list of 63 currently known antecedents for the acronym “ERP.” After eliminating a number of ones that are (hopefully) obviously wrong, I’m going to guess the right one is number 16 on the list, “Electronic Retail Payment.” Do I win, or is it really “Engine Room Pump” after all?

Ahoy! Engine Room Pump would’ve been a good one …

If this was a newspaper or magazine article, I would have been smacked with an editorial style book, as I did not define the acronym (Enterprise Resource Planning) at the first usage. Instead, I merely linked to a definition of ERP.

Sorry about that!

Related: What’s the difference between ERP and CRM?