Thoughts on a system that allows people to access and change records that are already open

Curious about this, as I've run into it on both systems that I am currently working on. In Pro*Tech, multiple people can work in the same record, and over-write each other's work. In our ERP system, I had a PO open and was editing it, and someone else was able to make updates to that PO. When I went to save and close it, I got an error message that said that someone had made changes to the record after I had retrieved it from the database, and that I needed to re-do my changes.

I've previously worked in database application development, and this is a blatant violation of record locking, which is designed to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening. The old systems I worked in gave you a warning if you tried to open a record that someone else currently had open. It would give you a read-only copy, and would then notify you when the record had been released. This is the way it's supposed to work.

Anyone else run into this?