For a successful sales strategy and toolset, integrate your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with Salesforce. By bringing these two key business tools together, you extend the capabilities to optimize the business process flows that reflect how your business serves its customers and prospective customers.
Many companies navigate day-to-day work by leveraging both their CRM system and their ERP system separately. Below, you will find a few approaches bringing your two most powerful customer data tools together through a Salesforce-ERP integration and the associated benefits.
3 Approaches to Integrating
How your company chooses to approach integration efforts depends heavily on your needs, your technical expertise, and your IT budget. Let’s explore these 3 together.
1. Build Your Salesforce-ERP Integration From Scratch
If your organization has a deep technical understanding, you may choose to manually register your data from one system to the other. Keep in mind that building from scratch takes a lot of time, money and resources to be successful. If your organization finds the trade off of added control and customization worth it, this approach may be worth exploring.
With this approach, it never hurts to consult with a partner to consider the pros and cons of an investment in building this yourself. At WhiteRock, we can certainly tailor a solution for your needs, though we rarely face use cases that are so unique that they haven’t already been resolved in our current target customer market space.
2. Utilize a Connector
Salesforce offers purpose-built connectors that can directly connect your Salesforce account to another system like your ERP system. These are limited to the more popular ERP platforms like Oracle ERP and Microsoft Dynamic ERP. Therefore, your options for this approach may be limited based on your system.
In most cases, utilizing a connector will do the trick for the best price. However, there are a few limitations that we’ll want to discuss to ensure you are accomplishing what you hope to. When fewer endpoints are needed to sync and no future change is anticipated, then we will recommend this solution type.
3. Buy an ERP Integration Platform (iPaaS)
An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is an application that helps connect your IT environment and manage your integrations. iPaaS solutions go beyond what connectors offer with the capability to build multiple integrations and have several use cases. These tools provide seamless integration, automatic data sharing, and error control with a wide range of features and prices to fit your needs.
This approach is typically the best fit for our customers. Some of these tools can be pricey but the benefits of a cost effective solution will provide the most dynamic, customizable, and maintainable solution.
Benefits of Integrating
A Salesforce-ERP integration can bring major benefits to your organization. Better customer experience, simplified decision-making, increased efficiency, improved data quality and reduced risk of error are just a few improvements that you may notice after choosing to bring these systems together.
Provide a Better Customer Experience
There’s nothing quite like having a crystal clear overview of your customer’s journey. By integrating Salesforce with your ERP system, you will gain an accurate 360-degree view of customer data across your organization. This will allow your team to serve customers in a more personalized way thanks to access to reliable up-to-date information. Providing this single source of customer truth leads to improved customer satisfaction, allowing your customer to feel seen and heard. Bringing the accurate pricing power of your ERP system together with fast quoting capabilities of your Salesforce CRM also elevates your customer service.
Simplified Decision-Making
Enhance your decision-making process by integrating Salesforce with your ERP system. When you bring data from across your organization together, you access a true 360 view of your real-time business health. This level of visibility also serves to improve the internal decision making capabilities key to getting ahead of the competition.
Enjoy Increased Efficiency
Another major benefit of integrating these two essential systems is an increase in team productivity stemming from ease of access to important customer and sales information. When your sales team can see inventory levels from your ERP system from within Salesforce for example, they get back that time previously spent switching systems. With all information from activity and sales history to credit limits brought together, team collaboration and communication across departments is greatly simplified. Less time is needed to search for accurate information when you have a single source of data truth to rely on. Integrating your systems provides you with an end-to-end view of business processes from order placement to delivery.
Improve Data Quality & Reduce Risk of Error
Speaking of your single source of data truth, the power of Salesforce allows you to automate data management tasks to ensure absolute accuracy. Manual data entry, especially when being conducted in two separate systems has a significantly greater chance of error. By integrating your systems, you open up a world of automation possibilities to make it even easier to keep your data clean and reliable. Reducing or eliminating errors can play a big-time role in helping your organization save money.
Are You Ready to Integrate?
As you consider your own integration journey and how the benefits could impact your business, be sure to consider whether a partner like WhiteRock could help make this a painless and worthwhile endeavor. No matter which approach you choose, we are here to help and have the experience with this process to ensure your integration goes smoothly and successfully.
Why WhiteRock?
With the right partner of Salesforce experts that you can trust and count on, your integration can be greatly simplified and you can feel confident in your new and improved single source of truth. We bring our knowledge of marketing and sales flows, digital transformation, and what “parts to order” for your business into this partnership. At WhiteRock, we take the time to understand your needs, and map out a plan to optimize the right solution. As your organization changes over time, you have us to keep your systems aligned. We support you and set you and your systems up for success.
WhiteRock has the experience needed to help fine-tune your complex processes through highly accountable change process flows related to improvements in your CRM and related systems. Reach out to us at learnmore@whiterocktech.net or via the form below!