Why CRM and ERP Integration
CRM and ERP integration is essential to collect and manage customer information to provide an accurate view of the customer’s status. This view increases knowledge sharing and collaboration across the business departments and teams.
Typically, businesses purchase and deploy ERP – enterprise resource planning and CRM – customer relationship management systems separately. However, if your CRM and ERP systems have their own separate databases, you will consistently have to meet the challenges of keeping them synchronised.
Whether it’s a CRM user from Customer Service or Sales or an ERP user from Finance who updates a customer account, any changes implemented in one system will have to be transferred to the other.
Considering this is a manual process, having to wait for a database to update before you can for example – process bills, replenish inventory levels or arrange product returns for customers, will result in slower operations and an increased risk of database errors.
Implementing an integrated CRM and ERP strategy will ensure both systems will access the same data-sets and ensuring all updates in both systems are done instantaneously, providing the business with clearer visibility and real-time Insights on all stages of your business processes.
- 360 View of your Customer & Business Performance
- Faster & real-time access to critical data & information
- Eliminate time-resourcing data-entry & duplications of effort
- Improved order, inventory and quote management
- Reduced reliance on IT Support
- Deeper understanding of buying behaviours and trends
- Improved budgeting and forecasting
- Empower every employee to help improve the customer experience
- Greater Customer retention and new sales opportunities
- Accelerated invoicing and payments
- A Personalised customer experience journey
What are CRM & ERP Solutions?
Customer Relationship Management CRM is a multi-faceted platform where everything crucial to developing, improving, and retaining your customer relationships is stored. Without the support of an integrated CRM solution, you may miss growth opportunities and lose revenue because you’re not optimising your operating processes or making the most of your customer relationships or sales leads. With the right CRM systems in place – will result in more efficient and effective sales processes to boost sales performance and revenue.
CRM Solutions provide the Sales teams greater visibility and transparency into the Sales Pipeline and development. With accurate and real-time data and information enabling the Sales team to meet the customer needs and build responsive and strong customers relationships.
Enterprise Resource Planning ERP is a business management application which enables companies to transform the way they do business. A comprehensive business management ERP solution will help to streamline and automate systems and processes and manage all the business needs across finance, operations, supply chain, sales, marketing, customer service and more.
Though ERP and CRM Systems are designed to meet the different needs of the business – they are both essential components to a company’s overall success. Each system will provide enhanced functionality and capability to meet the various business and departmental requirements – to ultimately help the company’s success in meeting the overall business strategic goals and objectives.
In today’s ever evolving business climate, now more than ever, having an effective integrated CRM and ERP Strategy is crucial to the business success.
What is CRM and ERP Integration and Why is it Important?
Companies use a wide range of software Solutions to manage all aspects of the business across the end-to-end operations – from Sales & Marketing to Operations, Supply Chain, Finance & HR and more. This often results in multiple independent, disparate, and stand-alone systems being used for different purposes across the business and often, leading to duplication of effort and time-consuming resourcing in meeting the challenges of the vast silos of data and information management.
To enhance the ROI of the business technology investments and to achieve streamlined & automated processes across systems and departments within any company – will require an effective integrated business applications strategy.
With the right CRM and ERP integration strategy, companies leverage the best of both worlds and allowing them meet ever evolving demands.
CRM Solutions offer greater customer relationship management, and where many solutions enable you to have an integrated sales, marketing and customer service Strategy to enhance the customer journey and experience.
Effective CRM and ERP integration supports the Sales & Marketing teams to leverage key ERP information to enhance the customer relationship management experience based on the customer purchasing behaviour and patterns – both supporting customer retention and enabling new and increased sales performance.
What Are the Benefits of CRM and ERP Integration?
One of the key advantages of CRM & ERP integration is to ensure that all customer data is maintained and updated across both CRM and ERP systems. When choosing the right CRM and ERP Solutions for your business, it is critical to understand what the systems offer by way of integrated functionality and capability and to ensure you are getting the best ROI from your CRM & ERP technology investments.
Some of the key benefits which an effective CRM and ERP Integration will bring to a business include:
Increased Efficiencies and Productivity
With ERP and CRM integration, companies can now manage all their customer information using one single integrated system instead of two separate systems. The unified view provided by the CRM and ERP integrated systems will help to generate better Business Insights into your Customers, Streamline & automate processes – and accelerate real-time data-driven decision making across the business.
Greater Customer Service Experience & ROI
An integrated CRM & ERP solution will greatly benefit your Sales, Marketing & Customer Service Support teams to access valuable Insights to help improve the Customer Service processes for improved customer experience. It will also provide the Sales teams with more accurate and real-time customer activity tracking and enabling for more targeted and timelier follow-up on sales opportunities.
Improved Data Access, Reporting & Analysis
The ERP system gains valuable Customer Insights from the CRM data, it can then be used for better business planning & forecasting. For example, if a particular product is performing very will over other products and in particular location/s, this enables the Sales Team to use this information to adjust Production & Distribution plans accordingly.
360° Customer View
Another key benefit of CRM and ERP integration is that it allows for a 360° view of the key customer insights, seamlessly flowing information between both systems. This is now becoming more important as many customers purchase from companies across different channels from websites through to social media platforms and Apps. The integrated CRM and ERP data enables companies to provide more focused, automated and on demand customer service and so reducing, or eliminating human intervention in some many instances.
Improved Security
ERP integration to CRM greatly improves security by limiting unauthorised access to sensitive data while improving overall data capture and accuracy. It eliminates the need for multiple user IDs and passwords and reducing the over-reliance on IT Support.
This is particularly beneficial in scenarios where there are quite frequent occurrences of where users need to transfer files between CRM and ERP systems and where there may be ongoing employee status changes.
Supporting the Business Strategy & Outcomes
The time saved in managing data across multiple systems is greatly beneficial to the business net revenue performance. This unified CRM and ERP solution eliminates duplication of effort and better use of value-add resources while increasing efficiencies and productivity.
With an effective CRM and ERP system working together seamlessly, not only do organisations experience increased efficiency, agility, and flexibility, but they also enjoy better business Insights with access to the data which really matters to the business through real-time and accurate information. This allows companies to be more competitive in today’s fast-paced and ever evolving market and driving the business success.
How CRM and ERP integration improves end-to-end Operations with Cloud?
ERP and CRM integration is a field that has become increasingly popular due to the flexible access to Cloud technology. This has made access to Customer Data & information much easier and the sharing of the critical data across Systems, Users and Departments.
Those companies with access to CRM Sales, Marketing & Customer Service solutions and ERP & financial software are better equipped to make informed, data-driven decisions as they have a 360° view of the business – giving users access to real-time, holistic information to stay ahead of the competition, respond to evolving market trends and plan strategically for future growth and performance.
CRM and ERP integration provides a single unified platform for all customer data and business-critical systems and processes, enabling companies to leverage the data to support its data-driven decision-making. This integrated approach reduces the cost of upgrading and managing two separate systems and eliminates the need for data synchronisation and greatly enhances the ROI of your CRM and ERP technology investments.
How we help our CRM and ERP Customers?
Simply Dynamics is an ERP & CRM implementation partner for Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM Solutions. We support our customers across various industry-specific requirements – with a key focus on enabling our customers achieve their digital transformation initiatives.
Our industry and solution experts help businesses adapt to ever-changing market conditions and support them by offering effective CRM and ERP solutions that helps business growth & performance and increase profits.
It’s time to start managing all your CRM and ERP needs on an integrated platform with Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP and Dynamics 365 CRM – Contact Us now, and our Dynamics 365 ERP & CRM Experts will show you how.