The answer: a combination of ERP and CRM opens up to great advantages for the company.
Both systems separately support specific corporate divisions, but together the processes can be optimized company-wide.
ERP in the back office
An ERP system serves the back office staff. Here it is not first about customers and the sale of products, but rather about the efficient design of processes in the sector of material management, human resources and accounting as well as controlling. Customer-oriented departments are not integrated into the ERP processes. This is why employees belonging to these sectors are hardly helped if the ERP system provides an address management tool.
CRM in customer-oriented processes
A CRM system can never replace an ERP. Indeed CRM should and must support employees with functions that go far beyond address administration and storage.
CRM networks the corporate divisions by bundling the information centrally, making it available at all times and thus creating transparency. Since to ensure competent and individual support:
- employees with direct contact to customers and prospective customers need their data,
- office and field staff must access the same information,
- quotations should be completely traceable,
- service and sales staff must be able to react quickly and make targeted decisions.
Bundling common benefits
An ERP system cannot provide you the required information. But it does have the figures. If the processing possibilities of the data material in the ERP system are limited, the CRM system can take care of that – if it offers extensive options for evaluations and reporting. Here again, CRM and ERP are particularly strong together. The ERP system provides the data, the CRM system analyses them in detail. The sales representatives benefit from the evaluation of the purchasing behavior of their customers which helps them act in a targeted manner. Moreover the management can make targeted decision at short notice using the current figures and better plan for the long term.
If CRM and ERP work hand in hand, resources can be optimally implemented and business processes designed more efficiently. Such a joint use of CRM and ERP data is possible over an interface between both systems. It also avoids double data storage and saves time for data maintenance.
