Business experts around the world recommend business owners and executives to integrate their ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems as an effective way of streamlining their business processes and boosting their productivity. The integration of ERP and CRM systems helps the business owners in accessing the company’s back-office as well as front-office data from one centralized location. This offers them comprehensive and logical data, enabling them to make prudent business decisions. The advantages of merging ERP and CRM systems are immense, key amongst which are:
- Streamlines business processes
An integrated system negates the need of manually transferring data between discrete CRM and ERP systems. This not only saves time and effort, but also eliminates redundant data and automates workflow.
- Enables the company to know its customers better
The merger of ERP and CRM systems helps the decision makers get a complete cognition of their customers, which includes their needs, order history, preferences, buying habits, account standings and a lot more. With better insights about their customers, business owners can take smarter decisions.
- Increases the time at hand to market
As explained earlier, integration of systems helps in getting better knowledge about the customers, which further helps in anticipating their current and future needs. This allows the business executives to align customer’s needs with their business operations faster and more efficiently, giving them more time to market their products.
- Helps in responding faster
ERP and CRM integration helps in improving the forecasting bases of a company by keeping it well-updated with the customer patterns. The integration also makes the organization more flexible. Improvement in forecasting patterns and increase in flexibility helps the company to respond more promptly to any changes in the business environment.
- Improves communication
With the advancement in communication technology, modern companies use countless ways to communicate with their employees and customers. Merged ERP and CRM system offers a single platform for all the communications that keeps everyone on the same page, making it a lot easier to communicate. While improvement in communication with the employees across different departments of the company increases its productivity, the improvement in communication with the customers helps in building strong relationship with them. An integrated ERP and CRM system also helps in keeping a track of previous conversations to track errors and prevent them in future.
- Accelerates marketing
Comprehensive knowledge about the customers- their buying patterns, purchasing behaviours, etc. helps the company pitch in its products to the most likely buyers in the most efficient way. Quicker identification of target markets and more-efficient marketing campaigns greatly speed up the entire marketing operation of the company. CRM and ERP integration also allows the business owners to precisely measure their return on investment (ROI), so that they can take prudent steps to improve their business processes.
- Offers an edge to the company
With streamlined business processes, better knowledge of their customers, increased flexibility, improved communication and accelerated marketing due to an integrated CRM and ERP system, a company can easily outperform its peers.
If you would like to learn more or have questions about ERP & CRM integration for your company, contact MetaOption LLC.