It expands to commercial off-the-shelf, or software or hardware products that are ready-made and available for sale to the public. Like, Microsoft Office is a COTS software product for office work of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation. COTS products are designed to be implemented easily into existing systems without the need for customization.
Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) products bring agility and acceleration in delivering services. COTS usually cover large areas of organizations requirements. COTS include world wide best practices in the offered business processes. But, challenges still remain in there customization standards and migration from one offering to another as well as contextual skill set not easily available and requirement of specialized training.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is an application software which enables an organization to use a system of integrated applications to manage it’s processes and automate functions. ERP software usually consists of multiple modules that are individually purchased, based on what best meets the specific needs and each module is focused on one area of business processes, like sales or marketing like SAP, BaaN, Oracle Apps, etc. Hence, ERP is also a type of customizable COTS.
Software companies have developed ERPs specifically for municipal organizations which help Urban Local Bodies in automating end-to-end business processes thereby improving accountability and transparency across the spectrum of Urban Local Body (ULB) operations.
