The concept of Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP for short, as well as the IT systems that are used to implement this concept, have been an integral part of the industry since the 1990s. Initially, mainly large industrial companies were among the beneficiaries of this concept and these systems, but these continued to spread to other industries and medium-sized and smaller companies also showed increasing interest in these systems. Initially, however, there were hardly any specific solutions for companies of a smaller scale. This changed within the first decade of the 21st century with a large number of smaller system providers, with the main aim on medium sized companies as customers, entering the market. The technological progress of the last decade and the ever-widespread use of the concepts of cloud computing as well as the growing pressure due to increasingly networked supply chains mean that even companies for which this topic was not relevant before, due to their small size and limited financial resources, increasingly have an eye on the use of ERP and comparable software. In this thesis the connection between small companies and the introduction of ERP systems is analyzed in more detail, also considering the software as a service concept. Finally, the theoretical knowledge and findings are applied practically during the execution of a software pre-selection for a small company in the automotive industry.