ERP & CRM - Part 1: Why integration is necessary

ERP and CRM. Two systems that are more often than not mentioned in the same sentence. Yet the two solutions have two fundamentally different tasks.
While CRM is used for business processes in the customer-facing front office, ERP systems support business processes in the back office. Back Office. The ERP manages the recording of incoming and outgoing goods and generates receipts, delivery notes and invoices. All in all, it takes over the planning and control of company resources. The tasks of the CRM The contact management and history, sales management and campaign management are all part of the customer management system. It therefore offers the best all-round view of all customer data.

To ensure that business processes run smoothly, CRM and ERP work together. Because even if, for example, a customer has already been noted in the CRM system for a long time, the ERP only registers it when a subsequent process also creates it there.
Or when renewing a service contract, the accounting department (ERP) must also be informed in addition to the CRM, as this is where the invoice is written. However, the CRM system then also needs to know whether the customer has paid the new service contract.

If the two systems do not work together, this results in data gaps due to the interruptions in business processes between the front office and back office described above. Every employee has to interact with both systems. This not only means a great deal of manual effort, but is also extremely error-prone. Because if you manage both systems separately, some objects such as customer data or contracts are often in the CRM as well as in the ERP. If you change something in one system, it still remains incomplete in the other system.

When CRM and ERP systems are integrated, these problems do not occur. Integration also has other advantages:

Improving customer relationship management

On the one hand, customer processes run more smoothly and, on the other, can be better connected with company processes. However, the integration of CRM and ERP particularly improves the collaboration between customer-facing areas - such as sales and processing - and ERP-facing areas.

Avoidance of duplicate data maintenance through ERP and CRM

Thanks to the ERP-CRM integration, the users of the respective systems are supplied with data from both data collections. When a new order is created, all data relating to the order itself and the customer data are automatically transferred from the CRM to the ERP.

Improved data management: clear and comprehensible

In an ERP and CRM system, all important data such as customers, articles, sales documents etc. are available in a clear, standardised interface.
By integrating both software solutions, redundant data storage can be avoided. The data from both systems is constantly synchronised.
This leads to much clearer data management that is also comprehensible in its individual steps. This enables management to make well-founded decisions based on the available data information. This makes integration with ERP and CRM efficient beyond business processes.