Why integrate CRM and ERP systems?
Delivering exceptional customer experiences throughout the customer journey is no longer just a differentiator, but a customer expectation. Optimizing every touchpoint or customer interaction increases the likelihood of customer satisfaction. But without access to integrated data, companies struggle to keep their customers happy.
Integrating customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems plays a critical role in orchestrating seamless customer journeys. we delve into CRM integration and ERP Integration topics separately above. Now, let’s take a look at how your company can benefit from integrating CRM with ERP applications.
ERP versus CRM
A CRM is the foundational technology for customer engagement. Your job is to manage customer interactions and business processes related to the customer lifecycle. There are many CRM systems, including Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM.
An ERP system streamlines a company’s essential revenue-related business functions: sales, marketing, supply chain management (SCM), etc. ERP is often used synonymously with financial system (accounting, billing, financial reporting). However, it can also provide additional modules, such as business intelligence (BI), CRM, materials requirements planning (MRP), and human resource planning. Examples of ERP systems include Epicor, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle NetSuite, SAP S/4HANA, Sage, and Workday Finance.
Both CRM and ERP systems store data vital to the growth and success of a company. Traditionally, everyone’s data has remained isolated (i.e., not easily accessible or automatically shared with other applications).
Data is essential for every business. The integration of CRM and ERP systems provides a strategic competitive advantage, enabling faster, better and more personalized customer experiences. For example, sales representatives with immediate access to available inventory can complete sales orders faster and provide customers with a better shopping experience.
5 points of CRM ERP integration
A CRM ERP integration architecture that synchronizes common data points helps optimize and automate your business processes. Some common integration points include:
- CRM-hosted customer contact information and ERP account data
- Quotes within ERP systems integrated with the CRM that your sales team prefers
- Customer sales histories stored in an ERP synchronized with a CRM to predict customer needs
- Connecting CRM and ERP to allow sales teams to view account payment status
- Provide the sales team with access to integrated ERP data on inventory and pricing.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these use cases.
Synchronize account and contact data from CRM and ERP
The CRM contains lead and customer contact information related to sales orders, while the ERP has customer and account information associated with billing, shipping, and payment. Syncing these points keeps your contact and account information accurate without redundancy.
Access quote and order information from ERP and CRM systems
Sales quotes typically originate from the ERP system, but sales reps need access to quotes and prefer to work from one system: the CRM. Sales representatives typically enter sales orders into the CRM, but it is the ERP that manages the orders, generates invoices, fulfills the orders, and ships the products. Data integration between your CRM and ERP systems keeps quotes and orders accurate and allows sales reps to get everything from the CRM.
Use your ERP sales order history within a CRM
Sales order history is valuable information and companies use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict future purchases. The history of recorded invoices tends to reside in the ERP, so those records must be synchronized with the CRM for sales representatives to access the information.
View account payment status from CRM and ERP
Payment is the completion of the sales-to-cash quote process. Payment data resides in the ERP. If your payment data is accessible to the CRM, a sales representative can be aware of the payment due and assist with collections.
Provide sales teams with products, quotes, prices and inventory.
Product quotes, pricing, and inventory often reside in an ERP. Sales reps need to access that information for customer proposals, product availability, and more. They also need to communicate order status to customers, so integrating product information in your ERP with CRM helps streamline the sales process.
Key challenges for the integration between CRM and ERP
Can CRM be integrated with ERP? Yes. However, since CRM and ERP were designed to do different things, achieving seamless integration of CRM and ERP often faces challenges. These are just some of them:
Lack of IT resources
The complexities and differences between ERP and CRM systems often create large projects that require IT resources and tools. This can lead to slow deployments.
Complexity of CRM and ERP systems
ERP and CRM integration is complex due to the number of systems involved. Typically, there is an ecosystem of ERP technologies that includes legacy on-premise ERPs, SaaS solutions, cloud applications, and multiple integration tools. CRMs have their own ecosystem of mainly cloud-based applications. Each requires specific expertise to integrate outside of your ecosystem.
Data silos and lack of data consistency
Data silos prevent you from getting the most out of your systems. Data from different systems often lacks consistency, due to things like data duplication due to manual data entry, lack of data standardization, or mergers and acquisitions.
Legacy integrations with custom code
Some companies have legacy point-to-point integrations built with custom code. At the time, it may have been the most convenient and cost-effective way to approach integrations. However, in the long run, custom coding reduces extensibility and scalability.
How to integrate CRM and ERP systems
An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) can help overcome the challenges of CRM and ERP integration. Current iPaaS solutions are built in the cloud and used for application integration, data integration, B2B ecosystem integration, on-premises integration, API publishing and other scenarios.
These solutions are generally based on a API integration platform that provide connectivity, workflow design, data mapping and transformation, and an integration lifecycle. Most connect to commonly used ERP and CRM.
Enterprise-class iPaaS platforms support integrations that allow businesses to develop and manage their own integrations without the need for extensive professional services, and can provide high availability, disaster recovery, security, and other capabilities businesses require.
Jitterbit CX360: The Modern iPaaS Solution for Enterprises
the jitter bit iPaaS It offers both the ease of use to address common integrations and the depth to address complex integrations. Our Customer 360 Integration solutions are designed to accelerate business process automation across the entire customer lifecycle. The CX360 methodology, based on our industry-leading API integration framework, leverages best practices from thousands of integrations performed by our customers and partners.
CX360 comes with ready-to-use components that enable rapid integration between common applications. You can create customizations for the most complex aspects of ERP and CRM system integrations using the intuitive graphical interface.
CX360 comes with a full lifecycle APIM tool and the following capabilities:
Single platform for integration
CX360 is based on Jitterbit’s API integration platform, which has robust capabilities for designing, templating, deploying, and managing integrations.
Ready-to-use components
«Application». connectors provide pre-built, reusable connectivity to a specific endpoint, such as Salesforce for CRM and NetSuite, SAP, and Epicor for ERP.
Integration recipes are single, pre-built integrations that move data in one direction between similar objects in two applications or systems (i.e. synchronize contacts between Salesforce and SAP).
Process templates are pre-built use cases that accelerate the execution of specific business processes (i.e. Opportunity to order for Salesforce-NetSuite and Salesforce-SAP), which requires connectivity to multiple objects and fields between the source and target application.
Intuitive graphical interface to customize complex integrations
For most companies, pre-built components can handle the most common aspects of integrations. But for more complex integrations, customization may be required for data transformations or other business logic.
CX360 offers the best of both worlds; Pre-built components for common integrations and an intuitive drag-and-drop graphical interface for creating reusable code. IT resources are minimized and reusable code is extensible as your company grows
API Management
API Management allows you to create, run, secure, manage and analyze all APIs and microservices using a single platform. APIs can access any application or data source, whether in the cloud or behind the firewall, at any time.
The CX360 toolkit has been shown to accelerate business process automation by up to 80 percent.
5 benefits of CRM ERP integration using Jitterbit
- Establish process automation throughout the customer life cycle.
- Improve efficiency by eliminating bottlenecks
- Implement Client 360
- Provide a personalized customer experience
- Integrate data to improve your value chain
Enable business process automation throughout the customer lifecycle.
CRM and ERP integration automates business processes that drive the customer lifecycle. Connects customer order information (orders, invoices), product supply chain information (quotes, prices, inventory), financial information (accounts receivable, revenue recognition), and other information to enable a 360 view degrees of your customer data. customer order scenario, for example, where an ERP and CRM integration automates in the most creating a sales order to synchronize orders, contacts, products. When an opportunity is closed in a CRM, a sales order is created in the ERP automatically. Customer and contact information is synchronized between systems, eliminating manual data entry and potential data errors. Product and price list updates are automatically sent to the CRM so the latest information is available for sales. As a result, customer orders are created faster, the company gains insight into which products have been sold, and revenue is posted sooner.
Drive greater efficiencies
Order processing can be slowed down by the fact that sales-related documents are scattered across multiple repositories. By automating processes to bring together documents from different systems, manufacturers can reduce bottlenecks in the ordering workflow and reduce delays in the fulfillment, delivery and billing process. Access to all customer and product information in one digital workflow reduces payment bottlenecks and improves order turnaround time.
Achieve a 360 Customer
A Customer 360 It is a complete picture of each customer and the overall relationship the customer has with a company. A 360-degree view is the presentation of customer information in a meaningful way. CRM ERP integration is essential to aggregate customer information and provide an accurate view of customer status. This view increases knowledge sharing and collaboration between sales, finance, product manufacturing, and other teams. Access to real-time data allows your teams to make smart decisions faster, resulting in better sales forecasts and more accurate planning.
Personalize customer experiences
CRM ERP integrations help gather intelligent information about customer needs or wants. If you can access all the data found in the back office, you can create unique personalized offers for your customers. However, the right technology is needed to combine this data with additional online, offline and third-party sources to create a unique and dynamic customer profile. You can then use this single view of the customer and apply AI to recommend messages and offers that best fit all of your digital commerce interactions.
Optimize the value chain
The integration makes better use of data across your company’s value chain. A complete view of customer data allows manufacturers to better predict customer demand and quickly adapt to changes in the marketplace, accelerate the engineering-to-order process, and communicate more effectively.
Customer Success with Jitterbit in CRM ERP Integrations
SAP is a popular ERP system; Many Jitterbit customers have successfully integrated SAP with their CRMs, allowing them to:
- Gather better, actionable customer insights
- Save time and enable near real-time access to business-critical information
- Improve delivery times and increase customer satisfaction with warranty, shipping and returns management
- Grow your business faster with automated business processes and connected systems
Our clients across industries have achieved more from their ERP systems by integrating with CRM. For example:
- Trading companies have integrated large volumes of financial, product and customer data, bringing together crucial sales details in one place.
- Manufacturing companies have eliminated manual data entry and automated closed-loop processes between sales, product, credit, and accounts receivable departments, making near real-time access to business-critical information available in a CRM. .
- Pharmaceutical companies have connected order management in their CRM with order fulfillment in their ERP, automating the ordering process.
- Healthcare companies have integrated back-office product and customer order information and made it available to CRM to help sales staff improve customer service.
Learn more Salesforce SAP integration solution.
CRM and ERP integration enables exceptional customer experiences
Become a leader in new business rules by delivering exceptional customer experiences. CRM ERP integration is a critical step and can be achieved with iPaaS. Jitterbit’s CX360 is a modern solution that provides a powerful toolset with pre-built templates for common application integrations and the ability to create customizations for more complex integration needs.
With Jitterbit, you can deliver exceptional customer experiences and establish a scalable foundation for growth.
