ERP systems are the prerequisites of Business Intelligence systems. They address the same market, have the same benefits, offer support for the same areas and activities within an organizational entity.

The main difference between them is that the ERP systems have only two layers, those of Knowledge Management and Information Retrieval, lacking it's third and most sophisticated BI level - Intelligent Data Analysis.

Another very important difference is that in BI systems, application integration is "a must". Whilst ERP systems usually consisted of one or few applications that ran on desktop environment, what we are whitnessing now is a revolution in communication between control& automation procedures and enterprise management procedures(e.g. GPS for trucks and transport control), between business agents and their partners(B2B) or their clients(B2C).

Business Intelligence systems are an upgrade to the Enterprise Resource Planning systems and thus all subjects reffering to the latter will be discussed in the framework of the former.