Positive customer interactions are fundamental for business success: for example, 52% of consumers are more willing to shop again with companies that offer good service. However, the traditional ERP vs. CRM approach to data management leads to siloed information, which can disrupt your ability to deliver a first-class experience. If you have more valuable data about your customers in your ERP vs. CRM systems, it becomes challenging to understand each of them holistically and provide consistent support, and valuable opportunities may be missed as a result.
The solution is to effectively integrate your customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Connecting these two resources will provide your organization with a unified view of key data.
Continue reading to learn how to resolve the ERP vs. CRM data disconnect to improve your operational efficiency, enhance customer interactions, and maximize performance.
What Is the CRM vs. ERP Problem?
While both CRM and ERP systems are vital for managing business operations and customer relationships, they often operate in isolation, leading to data silos, inefficiencies, and a lack of a unified view of the customer.
First, let’s look at the key features of each in more detail.
Your CRM tool:
- Provides visibility into customer interactions from initial contact through the lifetime of the relationship
- Helps streamline processes like sales and service
- Offers insights into customer behavior
Your ERP system:
- Deals with key business operations such as finance, procurement, manufacturing, and more
- Acts as a unified platform for managing these functions
- Allows tracking of inventory levels, monitoring finances, and optimizing resource allocation
Without seamless integration between these systems, your staff are hindered by manual data entry, delayed information sharing, and missed opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Additionally, without a holistic view of the customer, your organization will struggle to deliver personalized experiences and make smart decisions, ultimately harming customer satisfaction and loyalty.
What Is CRM-ERP Integration?
CRM-ERP integration refers to enabling efficient communication between your systems to improve the management of customers and business operations.
By connecting your CRM and ERP, you can access all their various processes and data sets in one centralized platform without switching between systems.
One of the big challenges with this kind of integration is establishing the optimal data integration pattern—the directionality of each data field between CRM and ERP.
For instance, the ERP system should always overwrite something like inventory quantity in the CRM, since the ERP contains the master inventory records. However, for customer-facing data like Deal Status, the CRM should always overwrite that information in the ERP as account executives and sales teams will work primarily in the CRM to manage deals and opportunities.
Establishing these data integration patterns and rules is crucial for a successful CRM-ERP integration.
The Boomi Enterprise Platform excels at establishing the directionality of each data field between CRM and ERP. To learn more, check out our ebook, “Exploring Data Integration Patterns.”
Common Use Cases for CRM-ERP Integration
To better understand how integration is superior to the ERP vs. CRM approach, let’s look at some of the most common ways integration enhances your operations:
- Lead-to-Cash Process Automation: With important information flowing automatically between the systems, it’s easier to move prospects from initial contact to completed purchase.
- Quote and Order Management: Your sales team will have up-to-the-minute access to data such as product availability, pricing, and inventory levels directly within the CRM. This helps ensure customers receive correct information from the start.
- Customer Service and Support: Anyone supporting customers, such as contact center agents, benefits from a comprehensive picture of each buyer’s profile, history, and current needs across both main systems.
- Supply Chain and Inventory Management: Real-time visibility into inventory, production scheduling, and supply chain updates means you can plan distribution optimally and reduce unnecessary costs.
What Are the Benefits of CRM-ERP Integration?
By bridging the gap between your essential customer relationship and business systems, you can unlock a variety of advantages. Let’s explore some key ways integration can benefit your firm.
- Enhance Marketing Accuracy: When customer information is connected across your systems, your marketing team gains better insights into customer needs, preferences, and past purchasing decisions. This perspective allows team members to create targeted campaigns that resonate better with specific customer segments. Integration also enables analysis of which types of campaigns lead to more sales, guiding the refinement of your marketing strategy over time.
- Improve Sales Controls: With real-time data on inventory, pricing, and products from your ERP, your sales representatives can give customers accurate quotes up front, reducing the risk of overselling or underselling. The integration also allows for better tracking of sales performance, helping management make informed decisions and implement effective sales controls.
- Optimize Customer Experience: Getting a 360-degree customer view of interactions across departments allows you to provide a consistent experience. Customers will feel better understood at every touchpoint, and your customer service team will have the relevant background information to enable a smooth resolution of issues. Moreover, the integration of these systems empowers account managers to proactively monitor customer activity and identify opportunities for account expansion. By leveraging insights from both ERP and CRM data, they can strategically suggest additional products, services, or upgrades that align with each customer’s unique needs and preferences. This targeted approach to account management increases customer revenue and strengthens the customer-business relationship, driving mutual growth.
- Tighten Procurement and Finance Controls: CRM-ERP integration streamlines your procurement processes by providing real-time visibility into inventory levels, purchase orders, and supplier information. This enables you to optimize inventory management, reduce stockouts, and negotiate better terms with suppliers. The integration also strengthens financial controls by providing accurate and timely sales, expenses, and revenue data, which helps finance teams generate more reliable reports, forecast cash flows, and make informed decisions.
Thanks to Boomi’s low-code, cloud-based integration platform, Australian company Ampol was able to shrink development timelines by 70% and slash integration expenses by 30%.
What Are the Top Challenges of CRM-ERP Integration?
While integrating your critical systems has clear benefits over the ERP vs. CRM status quo, there are a variety of potential hurdles to consider. Let’s examine some of the primary challenges you may encounter:
- Data Standardization and Quality: Your systems almost certainly use different data formats, fields, and naming conventions, making integration complex. Ensuring accuracy and consistency across both as information is synced presents an everyday challenge. Missing or erroneous data could undermine the benefits offered.
- System Compatibility and Customization: If separate vendors created your CRM and ERP solutions, incompatibilities between their designs must be resolved. Customizing either system, such as adding new fields or modules, increases the challenges and adds to the testing required to maintain integration functionality.
- Change Management and User Adoption: Linking the systems will impact your teams’ workflows and processes. Users may refuse to embrace new working practices without proper guidelines and support. Rolling out changes and ensuring adoption across your organization requires careful planning, training, and communication.
- Integration Complexity and Maintenance: As the number of databases, interfaces, and systems in your integrated infrastructure grows, so does the complexity. Troubleshooting issues that arise over time demands specialist technical skills and resources. Keeping integration running smoothly presents an ongoing challenge.
- Data Security and Compliance: Sensitive customer and business information will pass through more systems, increasing risks. Strong access controls, activity logging, and data encryption must be developed and maintained to protect against threats. Regulations may also impact how certain data can be integrated or used.
- Connectivity Challenges with Legacy ERP Systems: Older ERP solutions may lack modern APIs and the flexibility required for seamless integration. Using alternative techniques such as file transfers or custom connectors to interface with legacy platforms can be limiting and complex.
- Integration Solution Limitations: While standard integration solutions exist, each has potential limitations that could impact your ability to meet your particular business objectives:
- Point-to-Point Integrations: Connecting specific systems often requires extensive custom coding for every connection, making them time-intensive to set up and maintain.
- Native Integrations: Native integrations built into individual applications may offer only basic capabilities. They likely cannot satisfy complex requirements or future expansions.
- Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS): iPaaS can fulfill many needs but rely on specialized skill sets that may not always be available in-house. An iPaaS with dedicated customer support and training programs is essential.
- Off-the-Shelf Integration: Off-the-shelf integration options run the risk of not thoroughly addressing your specific technical and functional demands now or as your needs evolve. It is important to ensure your chosen solution supports flexibility and scalability long-term.
- Need for Comprehensive Process Automation: Integration alone may not be sufficient to truly transform key processes like quote-to-cash. Organizations may need to build workflow automations that can handle business events, triggering real-time actions across CRM, ERP, data, and teams, ensuring resilience, scalability, and efficiency.
Why Boomi Is the Best Solution for CRM-ERP Enterprise Integration
Resolving the ERP vs. CRM problem with integration is extremely valuable, but it’s also complex, involving challenges like data standardization, system compatibility, and change management.
Boomi provides a comprehensive, cloud-based integration platform that simplifies integration, and offers a cost-effective, low-code approach to digital transformation.
The Boomi Enterprise Platform’s key features include:
- Streamlined Application Modernization: Boomi simplifies connecting your existing on-premises or cloud CRM and ERP systems, regardless of vendor or deployment model, enabling low-risk, cost-effective modernization.
- Scalable and Flexible Integration: Boomi’s single-instance, multi-tenant architecture ensures high uptime, scalability, and guaranteed updates, making it future-proof for growing enterprises.
- Comprehensive Capabilities: Boomi offers master data governance, automated workflows, API management, and more, with a drag-and-drop interface and crowd-sourced intelligence for rapid integration development.
- Cost-Effective and Low-Code: The cloud subscription model enables digital transformation without significant upfront investments, while the low-code approach empowers technical and non-technical users to build and manage integrations.
- Robust Security and Compliance: Boomi prioritizes data security and compliance, ensuring proper access controls, data encryption, and auditing mechanisms.
To learn more about what Boomi can do for you, discover how the American Cancer Society (ACS) integrated key applications with Boomi. By unifying its systems, including CRM and ERP, the organization was able to leverage 36 million golden records, increase ride shares by 39%, and improve care for 30,000 patients a year.