It can be difficult to manage an ecommerce business when there are so many moving parts and places to store your data. Managing multiple platforms can become confusing while manual data entry can become a chore while trying to keep your ecommerce business afloat.
That’s where ERP integration comes in, to give you an overview of your business operations in one place. We’ll cover:
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is the software ecommerce businesses use to manage day-to-day activities. It tracks business resources and combines multiple business activities, allowing data to flow between key areas such as:
This helps to reduce data duplication across business operations and becomes a single source of truth. It can also help to streamline processes, reducing manual tasks and creating a more efficient operation overall.
In broad terms, an ERP integration is a way of connecting your ERP to your website and other business applications. This could be within an existing ecommerce platform like Magento, or a bespoke web application. The goal is to enable seamless real-time data sharing between the two software platforms.
However, ‘ERP integration’ is still a broad term. There are several approaches to ERP system integration with different levels of complexity, depending on the needs of your business.
When looking at options for your ERP solution, it’s important to define your objectives and consider some fundamental questions.
Would you like customers to self-serve more, or would you like to reduce the effort required to manage your product catalogue? ERP implementation can automate these processes and streamline the day-to-day management of your business.
Decide what information needs to flow between your ERP application and website. For example: order management, inventory levels, customer details or all of the above as this will impact how your ERP is set up.
Determine where and how you’ll manage different types of data. Product marketing data, for example, might remain on your website, while inventory data could reside in your ERP. You may choose to integrate all of your applications within the ERP to maintain data integrity across different platforms.
For example, is there a PIM (Product Information Management) system or a courier server that will form part of the overall solution? This will impact how the ERP integrates platforms and systems your business uses.
An ERP is useless without a plan so it is important to consider the above questions and understand what you want the ERP to do before implementing it.
There are several key benefits to integrating your ERP with your website, especially if you operate in ecommerce.
An ecommerce integration means your customers can place their own orders, without human intervention. This can directly reduce your overheads because the purchasing process will be automated. Additionally, it gives employees more time to focus on their work when they’re not managing data, which can also increase productivity.
When data is manually transferred between your website and ERP, this increases the potential for mistakes. An ERP system can reduce errors in data entry, inventory management, customer information and more which is inevitable when we account for human error.
An ERP can ensure businesses and customers have the clearest, most up-to-date view of product availability, pricing, dispatch and delivery notifications. It can also ensure that data is easy for employees in different departments to find and manage.
ERPs are extremely complex. Seemingly simple things, like creating a sales order, can be difficult. But with an ERP integration, you can create a simple, optimised user journey for your customers and staff members that works exactly how you need it to.
In highly regulated industries, compliance is non-negotiable so an ERP makes it much easier to stay compliant. The best solutions can ensure you always have up-to-date records that are easy to find, audit and adjust to current regulations. Customisable reporting tools can also help to reduce workload and the work required to ensure you stay compliant.
With a clear business case for an ERP integration, you’ll need to decide what data to share between systems. At a minimum, this will typically include sales or order data, but this can be taken much further and feature:
In addition to deciding what information is shared, you will need to decide which system is the ‘source of truth’. This is where you’ll manage the data. Typically this will be within the ERP, but not always. For example, some ERPs don’t support the sort of data you’d want to add to your products for marketing purposes. So, this is something to consider when deciding which ERP vendor is best for your business.
For web orders, the initial order data is generally recorded in your web application. However, the sales order in the ERP may be different to the web application so the ERP might become the ‘source of truth’. This means it’s often easier to present the customer with the ERP sales order data rather than the web application order data. It can be difficult to keep these in sync so the ERP data will be more accurate.
However, this can seem complicated so there is a benefit to sharing your sales order data with your website too. This will enable customers to see not only the web orders they have placed but also orders they’ve placed via other channels like over the phone.
ERP integrations can be challenging to understand and implement. However, they deliver significant benefits when they are used correctly. At Reckless, we’ve implemented a range of ERP integrations through third-party tools like Celigo as well as direct API connections. We can help you identify the best approach for your business, address potential challenges, and create an integration that works for your unique needs.
Get in touch to see how we can help.
