Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Integration

What is ERP?

Enterprise Resource Planning, abbreviate as ERP, is a software tool using small and large companies for their overall business management.

Installing ERP software helps automate and streamline everyday operations to enhance work efficiency and reduce business costs. ERP also takes care of all business data and makes real-time data available for efficient business reporting.

ERP tools are designed to assist in managing customer data, business finances, inventory and orders, distribution logistics, retail delivery, and many other vital business operations.

What is ERP System Integration?​

An ERP system is a set of integrated applications that collect, store, and interpret data from various business activities. An ERP system will help your company run more efficiently. By streamlining the flow of information across all departments in your business.

Initially, ERP was introduced as a software tool to automate back-end functions. However, with time, ERP systems are also being used to manage front-end business tasks like marketing automation, eCommerce customers, and online sales.

This expanding scope of ERP software increased the need for ERP system integration. This hugely benefits all business owners, especially manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.

ERP system integration means connecting and synchronizing your ERP tool to other business applications. Such as eCommerce tools, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, marketing and analytics software, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) tools, etc.

In general, ERP software integration ensures that your ERP tool can communicate. It shares data with all other business platforms and tools. This helps your business function without any ambiguity and grow manifold.

Why Should You Do ERP Systems Integration?

ERP is a complete system in itself. But with modern-day advancements and due to the online (using the internet) approach to conducting business activities. Such as marketing, customer acquisition, sales, and others, it has become non-negotiable for you to implement an ERP integration strategy for your business.

In the scenario of a lack of an integrated ERP system, there are a few challenges that your organization can begin to face. Let’s have a look at them here :

  • Increased Need For Manual Dataflow – Since your eCommerce store and CRM are not yet integrated with your ERP tool; you’ll have to move all customer data manually between multiple applications. This is a lot of repetitive effort and leads to additional business costs for conducting operations.
  • Error-Prone Business Operations – Humans are prone to errors, and due to manual data flow between business systems, there can be challenges of inaccurate or outdated data. This can lead to faulty customer and product details and affect critical business decisions.
  • Unavailability of Real-Time Business Data – Since there is a manual data transfer between business applications and ERP tools, any data change is not instantly or immediately made available to other tools and departments. This lack of real-time data is not healthy for business growth.
  • Poor Conversion Rate from the Sales Funnel – It is a huge journey for a lead to first become your client. Then transition into a repeat customer, and finally become your business evangelist. Not having ERP system integration can lead to reduced conversion rates and increased conversion times from one stage to the next. Due to a lack of ERP software integration. You can lose out on a chunk of leads that could actually have been the source of continuous business.
  • Inefficient Teamwork and Collaboration – For teams from different departments to work together effortlessly, they must be able to share data seamlessly. The lack of availability of real-time data not only leads to ambiguity but also causes unnecessary conflicts among team members.

If you feel that your business is currently facing one or more of these problems that we’ve discussed, it’s best to consider ERP system integration for your business.

So, How Does ERP Integration Help Your Business Achieve This?​

An ERP system integration all the resources and functions of an organization. It connects IT, sales, marketing, accounting, human resources, and other departments to share information from one integrated database. Departments and employees can access this information through a web browser or an app on their mobile phones. Doing so helps improve communication between employees. It ensures that everyone can access the most up-to-date information about your products and services.

With an integration ERP system, you have better control over your inventory management. Because you know what materials and items are available for production or sale at any given time without manually checking stock levels in each department or store location. You can also track sales more accurately, knowing exactly where your profits are going. Which helps avoid potential losses due to theft or poor inventory management practices like overstocking certain items while understocking others.

The ERP Integration Challenges

ERP vendors have developed a wide array of integration tools for their customers, but many enterprises don’t use them. Many companies don’t know how to use these tools properly. Businesses often lack knowledge about this subject, so they decide not to go through the integration process. A study shows that 45% of ERP software integration rely on manual data entry or spreadsheets. Suppose you want to avoid these challenges and successfully implement an ERP system software and get the most out of it. In that case, you need to know about the different types of ERP integration strategy available for businesses today. So, let’s take a look at some of the options you have:

Two Types of ERP System Integration

An ERP implementation is a complex process that involves many moving parts. The integration can process tied closely to the overall ERP implementation plan and its associated timeline. Testing of these integrations must also complete before going live. So it’s essential to allow enough time for them to be successful.

To help ensure that your integration strategy goes smoothly. You first need to understand the different types of ERP integration strategy and how they affect your project. ERP system integration can categorize into two major types, namely:

Vertical Integration

This type of integration involves extending the functionalities of an ERP financial management system to integrate it with other systems within the same organization. For example, a manufacturing enterprise uses an integration ERP system for management. Its core manufacturing processes and wants to integrate it with the billing and accounting system into a single, consolidated system. In general, connecting disparate systems across departments makes for a seamless flow of information.

Horizontal Integration

This integration involves integration ERP system with third-party systems that extend its functionalities. For example, a company may need to integrate. Its CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software with its ERP system to better access customer data.

It can be more complex than horizontal integrations because it depends on two different software types working together in harmony.

ERP Integration with Different Management Systems

ERP-System-Integration
CRM-ERP System Integration

Integrating CRM and ERP is vital for a business to grow and achieve sales success. In addition, CRM can provide valuable, accurate customer data to streamline and enhance your business development process. As a result, by understanding customers’ requirements, a company will offer products and services that are customized as per the customers’ requirements.

For example, if a sales executive sells a custom product. We need information about pricing, lead time, stock levels, and availability. It ensures that the customer is creditworthy. This information comes from the ERP system integration, which eventually improves customer satisfaction and reduces churn rates.

Human Resources-ERP System Integration

The amalgamation of the human resources function is a critical aspect of ERP. The integrated HR management software for small business can help the company develop a talent pool and workforce planning, help recruit appropriate employees, streamline the performance management process, and provide self-service tools for employees. In addition, it allows you to keep track of your employees and their timesheets in one place. A human resource ERP system allows easy payroll processing for employee records and benefits. Finally, if a company has multiple locations, integrating an HR performance management system into an ERP system can help streamline and standardize the whole process from start to finish.

Inventory Tracking-ERP System Integration

Inventory tracking integration with ERP allows companies to keep track of their inventory levels. ITS are designed to minimize the amount of inventory on hand without hurting sales. This type of ERP integration strategy is critical for companies that have high-volume inventory needs.

Sales Tracking-ERP System Integration

Sales tracking integration allows companies to track customer data and sales performance metrics. For example, a company can keep track of its best customers by dollar amount spent or number of products purchased. This type of ERP integration strategy is critical to know where a company is making money and identifying areas for improvement.

Five Methods of ERP System Integration

Five-Methods-of-ERP-System-Integration
Point-to-point integration:

It is the traditional method of ERP integration strategy. In this method, each ERP module directly connects to the business applications it needs. An ERP integration hub is a middleware layer that connects the ERP system with other systems in the organization. This architecture allows the ERP system to communicate with multiple systems through a single integration point. The hub manages the flow of information between each system, eliminating the need for communication between individual systems. For example, the CRM module in an ERP system may integrate with a marketing automation tool using point-to-point integration.

Hub-and-spoke integration:

It is an alternative to point-to-point, where all your different business applications connect to a central application, which communicates with the other apps. The central app is a hub for all the data from your different business apps, including your ERP Software For Manufacturing Industry.

Connector Integration:

Such integration service is provided by the ERP vendor, which helps the business connect a module in the ERP system to another system. The connector is pre-built based on the specifications set by the user. The business can choose from a list of systems they want to integrate with. And then, they can specify what needs to integrate and how it needs to do.

API Integration:

On the other hand, API integration requires more time and effort when compared to connector integrations. In addition, a developer might be required for API integration since a custom API needs to be built for integration. This type of integration can prefer when there is no out-of-the-box solution available for the required integration. Some specific requirements that need to be met.

Business Intelligence (BI) / Enterprise Service Bus (ESB):

Business Intelligence based on an enterprise service bus provides an abstraction layer for the exchange of data between applications and can support more advanced use cases more quickly than other integrations.

What Are the Benefits of ERP Integration?

By now, we are sure you understand the need to have an ERP integration strategy. Now, let’s understand the advantages of implementing ERP software integration for your business :

Fully Automated Business Processes – Once your ERP software is connected to other business tools, you’ll no longer have to enter data from one application to the other manually. This leads to full automation and helps you save a lot of your productive time.

Ease And Accuracy of Operations – As data is automatically exchanged between business applications, there is reduced human error and ambiguity, which leads to increased accuracy. This also simplifies business operations and makes it extremely easy to execute complicated processes.

Unmatched Operational Efficiency – Since the major time-consuming tasks are automated, your business saves immensely on human workload. Reduced manual effort for admin tasks ensures that your teams can focus better on other useful operations such as market penetration, business expansion, new feature implementation, process optimization, and others.

Single Source of Truth – When real-time business data is available to all departments, no team has to wait for other teams to conduct their operations. For instance, the finance team can make account statements without waiting for income or revenue details from the marketing and sales teams. This is how the ERP system becomes the single source of truth.

Increase in Sales Conversions – This is undoubtedly the most significant advantage of ERP system integration. ERP integration strategy ensures data flows seamlessly, and this helps convert website visitors to leads, leads to customers, and customers to repeat customers in less time than ever before!

Some Benefits of ERP Integration

ERP integration offers significant advantages for your business, including a centralized data repository, lower operating costs, and higher customer satisfaction. Some other key benefits include:

Improved efficiency and productivity

Users don’t have to wait for or switch between different applications to access data. Which helps improve data quality and employee productivity.
Greater sales effectiveness

Greater sales effectiveness
  • Sales teams can use information in the ERP system to increase sales effectiveness. By better accessing critical business intelligence, including delivery times, product pricing, and inventory levels.
  • Seamless integration between different departments and teams
  • An ERP integration creates a single point of entry for users, which helps improve communication and collaboration between departments.
  • Faster reporting of key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • Tracking KPIs across multiple systems can be time-consuming. ERP integration strategy & streamlines the process faster reporting on KPIs, such as order fulfillment, expenses, sales volumes, and lead conversions

What Are the Different Types of ERP Integrations?

After reading all about the numerous benefits of ERP system integration, if you are excited and considering ERP software integration for your business too, the first step would be to decide upon the types of ERP integration strategy that is the best fit for your business.
We’ll discuss in detail about them here :

eCommerce ERP Integration – As an increasing number of customers are acquired online, your eCommerce store is the hub of all crucial customer data. With eCommerce ERP system integration, you can share all data, such as leads, customers, orders, transactions, and shipping statistics, with all other departments in real-time.

The most common eCommerce tools for ERP software integration are – Magento, Shopify, and SAS Hybris. After ERP system integration, the inventory is automatically updated at the front end and back end. In addition, businesses can also implement real-time dynamic pricing that is customer-specific and time-bound.

CRM ERP Integration – CRM for any business is the central place for all customer data such as orders, transactions, communication, etc. As customer service and satisfaction form the backbone of the success of your business, CRM and ERP systems integration is no more a choice.

After the implementation of CRM and ERP software integration, different teams can work towards fulfilling customer requests and offer quick and effective solutions to their queries. This also further helps optimize sales funnels and grow your business.

Project Management ERP Integration – Project management tools help understand the status of different projects, their timelines, pending tasks and deadlines, along with the team members working on the projects.

Integrating ERP with your project management tool helps your business to work more effectively where all managers can look at the ongoing tasks, schedule the next list of operations, and also change priorities for tasks or assign new members to them.

Business Intelligence ERP Integration – Business intelligence software has the power to drive your business to the next level, and integrating it with your ERP tool can turn it into a growth machine!

Implementing an ERP integration strategy for business intelligence tools can be revolutionary for your business. You’ll be able to have access to accurate forecasting that will help in enhanced decision-making. This will also empower your employees with data and insights, which is magical for your business growth.

EDI ERP Integration – Electronic Data Interchange is a platform that helps with electronic data transfer across the organization. Data such as purchase orders for raw materials, customer details for order and shipment, and inventory levels can be shared between partners, vendors, clients, suppliers, and distributors.

As soon as your business implements EDI and ERP software integration, you can rest assured about the accuracy of data being communicated immediately between trade partners of your business. This also helps improve the supply chain and logistics for your company.

What Are Some Typical Challenges in ERP Integration?

As ERP software integration involves connecting your ERP software to different business applications, it can be a challenging process. Even if you carefully design an ERP integration strategy, there can be some pre-integration and post-integration challenges that you encounter.

Let’s have a look at a few of those :

  • Deciding ERP Systems Implementation Strategy – As business objectives are different from one business to another, and it’s best for you to create an ERP integration strategy that works for your business goals. The ERP implementation strategy you adopt must also align with your business operations.
  • Maintaining ERP Software Integration – Implementing an ERP integration strategy is not a one-time job. As your business grows, there can be changes in its goals, data points, and processes. Therefore, regular maintenance of the ERP software integration is necessary to ensure that everything continues to work without failure and that you get the most out of it.
  • Standardizing Data Across Business Applications – Different business applications provide data output in different formats. Sometimes, what is relevant to one process may not be relevant to the other. Also, the data formats and types can differ from process to process. At the time of ERP software integration, we need to make sure the API of the ERP and other business applications can exchange data without any conflicts or errors.
  • Incorporating the Ability to Customize – To make all business applications work together in harmony with the ERP software tool, the ERP software vendor must offer customizations and adapt their system to the specific needs of your business. This will require you to be careful when choosing your ERP tool and vendor.

How to Integrate an ERP With Your Existing Software Operations and Business Applications?

Integration means making two or more systems work together without glitches. For this to be possible, you need APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to ensure these multiple business processes can communicate with each other and exchange data seamlessly.

There is a new cloud-based approach to integration that is getting widely popular. It is called iPaaS (Integration Platform As A Service). This allows all applications to sync faster. There is no requirement to write any code, and you can connect ERP systems to your SaaS products.

The iPaaS code is available for some of the most widely used business processes and SaaS tools. However, these might sometimes require some tweaks from the developer.

What Are ERP System Integration Best Practices?

Here are a few things that we can do to minimize the chances of facing challenges during ERP system integration :

Create an ERP software integration plan with your team. Ensure the plan aligns with your business goals, and remember to follow the plan religiously.

Reduce all roadblocks by informing all your vendors, partners, and team members about the upcoming change due to ERP software integration.

Ensure good data management by cleaning data, normalizing formats, deleting redundant data, and reviewing who has access to what data.

How Can Shopify Help With ERP Integration?

If you are keen on implementing ERP system integration with your eCommerce store to provide more value to your customers and grow sales, you must consider Shopify.

It is not only the market leader for eCommerce stores but has also partnered with the world’s leading ERP tools, namely Microsoft, Oracle, and Netsuite. All these ERP tools follow the guidelines of certification programs and work directly with the developer success team at Shopify.

They are highly recommended as they leave no stone unturned to offer a memorable merchant experience.

Conclusion

The right new ERP system can make the difference between a company that succeeds and fails. As a result, ERP software integration has become essential for businesses looking to streamline internal processes, increase productivity and reduce costs. The primary purpose of ERP integration is to ensure that all the processes are operating effectively within their respective units. An ERP system integration has been performed. Many of the world’s successful companies, and this trend is not going away. As a result, There can expect to grow in popularity in the coming years.

Frequently Asked Question (FAQs)

As your business grows, managing your accounting and financial data can soon turn into a tedious and complicated affair. At first, using a spreadsheet to store and record your finances is doable, however with the progression of your business, it will be almost impossible to keep watch over all of your financials and transactions with a spreadsheet or manual financial system. That’s where a dedicated ERP financial management software like CyberTech comes in.

In fact, an ERP financial module is one of the most widely used software by businesses and financial departments to manage and record their cash flow, taxation, financial transactions, and revenues. In addition, it is capable of automating your financial activities and eliminating duplicate data while reducing your operational costs.

There is no denying that accounting, bookkeeping, and finances are the essential aspects of any business that deals with manufacturing, production, and trade. At the end of the day, every business’s core objective is to make a profit.

An ERP accounting software is a full-fledged business management software that enables you to integrate, automate, and handle your company’s important transactional activities through a central database. These operations include supply chains, banking, manufacturing, financial reporting, transactions, warehouse management, payrolls, etc. As your business volume and size expand, you need a robust system that enables you to record, synchronize, and categorize your financial data and transactions accurately and faster. Rather than spending hours going back and forth between different sources to collect and save your data manually, an ERP accounting system provides all the required information and data instantly and automatically.

When integrated with accounting, ERP software can help manufacturers and businesses automate tasks and handle their accounting and bookkeeping needs effectively. Compared to labor-intensive bookkeeping, leveraging an ERP accounting system like CyberTech will help you conduct your financial processes faster and accurately. Below are how you can unleash the real power of ERP software to optimize your all financial activities:

  • Collect and integrate forest of financial data from various platforms
  • Track your revenue and manage your credit
  • Generate detailed, accurate financial reports such as balance sheets in different formats
  • Gain actionable insights to monitor the overall performance of your business
  • Control and track day-to-day transactions that take place in your company
  • Automate payments, streamline your tax filing, calculate insurance contributions.

With your growing infrastructure, a vast amount of financial data is being produced with every tick of a clock. To increase your productivity and business value proposition, it is important to invest in an ERP system that can help you automate and keep track of your financial transactions. Linking ERP and accounting will give you complete control over your financial processes and help you maintain strong, precise accountability while reducing your operational costs. By making use of features like analytical reporting, you can generate timely, insightful financial reports, which aid in monitoring and taming down your expenses. It will also simplify the process of collecting and storing your data from multiple platforms and eliminate the risk of duplication errors with just a few clicks. Other key accounting processes, like profit tracking, payroll, asset tracking and management, and tax management, can be managed efficiently with ERP business management software.

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software comes with a number of integrated modules designed to manage various business operations, and one of such applications is accounting. Gathering and entering data by hand is time-consuming and prone to error.

The accounting module automates data entry and eliminates the daunting task of cross-checking the information by removing duplicates. The business can directly pass on the necessary financial information to external departments when required. An ERP software makes it possible to automatically create financial entries into the ledger, which can be used to record and monitor transactions on a daily basis. Once set up and running, it can track product inventory and availability, enabling a business to forecast its inventory needs in advance.

Many businesses have a misconception that an ERP system is an upgraded version of regular accounting software. Well, it’s not true. While both ERP accounting system and accounting system share a few similar characteristics, they differ in terms of security, range of services, and functionalities.

An accounting information system only manages accounts and records financial transactions. Conversely, an ERP business management software is designed to handle multiple areas of your business, including bank accounts, financials, inventory, supply chain, logistic requirements, financial reporting, and payrolls.

The finance module in an ERP software controls the major financial management operations such as general ledger, financial accounting, legal consolidation, and tax management. The business can utilize this component to control budget estimates, integrate financial reports, and monitor financial transactions. An ERP financial software allows you to generate and run analytical reports in order to measure and track the financial performance and health of your organization. It can automate and facilitate cash flow and management, invoices, and billings. The financial accounting module provides the company with the ability to access real-time financial data along with multi-currency support.

The ERP finance module offers a wide range of features and functionality, such as general ledger, vendor management, reporting, multi-currency support, cash management, and banking management. It helps businesses collect and churn financial data and speed up the process of generating financial statements. One of the main advantages of an ERP financial management system for finance is that it can be operated in multiple languages, companies, and geographies. Even when your departments function from across geographies, an ERP system is capable of tracking and managing everything from one central location. It also allows you to predict and evaluate future expenses and revenue, which further helps you draft and implement smart and data-driven financial plans.