Many business leaders view enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems simply as separate platforms with separate purposes. But if your organization has disconnected ERP and CRM systems, you’re likely facing some big challenges.
If you’re a finance leader, this could mean that you’re struggling with limited visibility into budgeting and forecasting. If you’re responsible for driving revenue, you may be unable to create the right connections between sales, marketing and customer success. And for those managing marketing efforts, using fragmented data can make it difficult to build personalized campaigns.
Integrating your enterprise applications can help you overcome these obstacles. Here’s a rundown of the key benefits of integration, how it improves your business processes and steps you can take to get started.
When you properly connect your ERP and CRM systems, you can create significant value for your team and organization in several critical ways:
Many organizations operate on tight margins. Manufacturing and distribution (M&D) companies, among others, are feeling the squeeze of rising operational costs, especially for labor, making it increasingly challenging to stay profitable. As expenses continue to climb, you may need to find new ways to maintain financial stability, and automation can help save you time and money.
Integrating your ERP and CRM platforms allows information to flow seamlessly across departments, reducing manual processes and strengthening your team’s effectiveness. This integration lays the groundwork for automating tasks like data entry, invoicing and inventory tracking, minimizing human error and freeing your staff to focus on higher-value work.
By combining ERP-CRM integration and automation, you can eliminate the guesswork of things like sales forecasting and order fulfillment – and help keep your business competitive without cutting headcount.
Integrating your ERP and CRM systems creates a seamless, real-time view of your entire operation. This enhanced oversight allows you to actively monitor resources and improve cash flow while delivering a better customer experience.
For distribution companies, for example, this means gaining better visibility into both inventory and customer demand. You’ll know exactly what’s available, where it’s located in the supply chain, how old it is and how fast it’s moving — helping you avoid excess stock that ties up cash flow or outdated products that lose value.
At the same time, you’ll be able to access detailed customer insights to get a better picture of who your customers are and what they want. You can then use this data to enhance and personalize your customer experience, giving you a better chance for success in a hypercompetitive marketplace.
Integrated systems can also help your organization stay on top of demand swings and react promptly to fluctuations by providing a holistic view of both the demand and supply sides of your business. You’ll know what your customers are buying, when they’re buying it and how it aligns with your supply chain. This allows you to identify patterns. So when disruptions hit, you’ll have the tools to quickly adapt and maintain operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
If your systems don’t talk to each other, your teams lose speed and efficiency. Sales lacks real-time access to essential data, and finance struggles to get accurate transaction information. These disconnects slow down decision-making and create frustration across departments.
An integrated ERP-CRM system breaks down these barriers, allowing key employees to access the same data and share up-to-date details from both systems within a single interface. Teams can work together more effectively, get accurate details in real time and keep your operations moving forward without the recurring roadblocks.
Consolidating your data doesn’t just mean easy access for your teams. It also ensures that both your operational and customer data are managed in one reliable source of truth.
Instead of juggling duplicative, error-prone data entry across multiple platforms, an integrated ERP-CRM system allows you to share financial, operational and customer data in a single reporting hub. You gain a clear understanding of both your internal operations and customer-facing processes, with the confidence that you’re working from accurate, up-to-date information across your entire organization.
With readily available, accurate insights, your people can make faster, better-informed decisions that simplify operations and drive efficiency. This helps you respond quicker to market demands and fulfill more orders, for example.
Surpassing customer expectations requires more than just great products — it takes exceptional, personalized service. With an integrated ERP-CRM solution, you can gain a full understanding of your customers’ behavior and purchasing history. This lets you deliver personalized follow-ups and customize offerings to match their needs.
You can also make it easier for customers to track orders and make repeat purchases, creating the smooth experience that customers now expect. By making customer interactions effortless and providing responsive, reliable service, you can improve satisfaction and build the trust that is essential for enticing repeat customers.
When your ERP and CRM work well together, so do your teams. An integrated ERP-CRM system allows sales, finance and operations to all work from the same real-time data. This improved coordination means faster decision-making, fewer errors and more efficient workflows. So, your people can spend less time on paperwork and more time working together to drive results.
Integrating your systems helps your teams work smarter by simplifying critical business processes.
ERP-CRM integration supports a fully automated, paperless lead-to-cash process — one that lets you convert CRM quotes into ERP orders with a single click, or automatically trigger invoicing and automate the revenue recognition process. This reduces delays and errors, allowing sales teams to respond immediately to customer inquiries about orders or billing.
By accessing real-time information, you can be more responsive, plan strategically and simplify the sales process . This approach minimizes inefficiencies , accelerates cash flow and helps you meet critical deadlines, transforming the way your business operates.
For a growing number of companies, revenue recognition is an important challenge — especially in complying with ASC 606/IFRS 15 guidelines for recognizing revenue. Properly recognizing revenue at the right time and matching it to the right expenses is becoming a critical task to ensure compliance and accurate financial reporting. With an ERP-CRM integration, once your customer pays for services, the accounting team understands when to recognize the revenue because they have full visibility into the sale.
For M&D organizations, revenue recognition is more nuanced. It often depends on specific production milestones — such as order placement, production, shipment and invoicing — rather than a specific payment event. ERP-CRM integration supports efficient lifecycle management by providing visibility into each stage. This allows finance teams to recognize revenue based on the fulfillment of performance obligations, which is crucial for compliance with accounting standards.
Some ERP systems offer built-in, customizable rules for revenue recognition. When integrated with CRM, these systems can automatically apply the rules based on the data gathered in the sales process, ensuring compliance and accuracy in recognizing revenue.
In cases of long-term projects, such as with custom machinery that can take months or years to build, M&D organizations may use models like percentage of completion (PoC) to recognize revenue as milestones are met. An integrated ERP-CRM can help with PoC revenue recognition by ensuring that revenue is recognized steadily and in line with project completion, giving your teams the data they need to make informed decisions and maintain cash flow consistency.
Sales, finance and operations often collect and store separate data and records on customers, inventory, orders, credit and more. This results in wasted time rekeying data along with the potential for errors. The integration can be set up to share almost all data between the two platforms, meaning you can decide what is most important to your business goals.
With a complete picture of customer accounts, each team has the insights they need to operate efficiently. Sales can track customer behavior — what they’re buying, when they are buying, who is making the purchasing decisions and the factors that influence those decisions. Operations can use this data for product development and management and inventory planning. Finance can monitor payment history and assess profitability.
For instance, if finance flags a customer as chronically delinquent, then sales may reconsider pursuing that account for further business. Or, if sales hears repeated requests for a new product feature, they can log that information for operations to consider potential product development. This seamless flow of information helps teams work together more effectively to achieve common goals.
Many organizations don’t have the right tools and processes to generate sales orders from CRM leads, synchronize inventory levels with sales data or optimize demand forecasting. With an integrated ERP-CRM platform, you can improve planning and decision-making and better manage your sales cycle alongside your client relationships.
When data is consistent, leaders can make informed decisions, ensuring accurate customer quotes and realistic timelines. Enhanced customer insights and inventory management help you maintain compliance with customer requirements, reducing the risk of costly chargeback penalties.
These initial steps will give you a head start on your ERP-CRM integration.
Start by evaluating whether your current systems can keep up with your changing needs. When evaluating your ERP, consider if it supports all your procure-to-pay and lead-to-cash processes, revenue recognition and consolidations for multiple ledgers, locations, entities and currencies. You want to make sure your finance team can focus on high-value tasks instead of spending too much time on period closings or report generation.
When looking at your CRM, check that it provides features beyond basic contact and sales management. It should allow you to track customer relationships across the entire customer lifecycle, spanning marketing, sales and customer service. Make sure it also has advanced reporting tools that are customizable for your specific needs, and automation capabilities to minimize manual and repetitive tasks.
For example, top-tier CRM systems have automated communication logging, where email exchanges are automatically logged into the CRM without the need for manual input. This saves time and reduces errors, so your sales team can focus on building relationships instead of entering data.
Look for cloud-based solutions that simplify financial, sales and service processes. On the ERP side, consider trusted options like Sage Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics 365(Business Central or Finance & Supply Chain) and Workday Financials. On the CRM side, some proven choices include Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CE.
What information is most used between your departments? Identify what data you want your integrated ERP-CRM to share so that you're clear from the get-go. You can make updates as your needs evolve.
It's typically faster and more cost-effective to do an application programming interface (API) integration versus a point-to-point integration. API is the modern approach and is based on a tried-and-true framework that connects to most ERPs and CRMs.
Many organizations believe they have a strong handle on their data, and it can be tempting to stick with familiar software. But disconnected platforms often hide costly inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
Reluctance to embrace change can leave your business struggling to stay competitive. If your ERP and CRM aren’t integrated, you’re not just behind the curve — you’re missing crucial insights buried within your own siloed systems. Uncovering this information helps you eliminate the guesswork and make truly informed, strategic decisions across your organization.
Your ERP and CRM can work much harder for your business when they’re integrated. Don’t let disconnected systems cripple your efficiency and bury valuable data insights. Find out how our award-winning business application experts can help you overcome your ERP and CRM headaches and seamlessly integrate your platforms.
Contact our experts today to assess your infrastructure and identify your critical opportunities for data insights and growth.
