ERP and eCommerce Integration – How Does ERP Software Help?
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software is a complete tool for integrating business processes and implementing business strategies for smooth implementation. ERP solutions are designed keeping in mind the present day needs of companies to implement various business processes that include inventory, purchasing, sales, customer service and many more. ERP integration has become one of the most popular business solutions these days. By incorporating ERP solutions into your business, you can increase the efficiency of your business, minimize costs and improve customer service.
Benefits From Using ERP Solutions
Most of the ERP solutions available in the market today integrate financial management, customer relationship management, human resource management, supply chain management and accounting solutions with the main purpose of eliminating cost, improving quality and minimizing errors and wastage of time, money and other resources. If you are planning to integrate an ERP solution in your company or are already using ERP software, then you must be aware of some of the ERP Integration Benefits. By adding these benefits to your ERP ecommerce functionality, you will be able to boost your company’s productivity and lower the costs as well.
Improved Decision Making Capability For Your Organization
ERP integration offers several ERP benefits like improved information management, improved productivity, better collaboration, easy access to real-time data, elimination of duplicate and inaccurate data and many more. These benefits result in improved decision making capability for your organization and successful integration of new customers. ERP integration increases the efficiency of your ERP software by providing you with new ways to store and share data, analyze them and make necessary changes. ERP ecommerce functionality allows you to integrate all your business processes including inventory control, purchasing, sales, financial management, human resource management, accounting and distribution. With ERP integration you also get improved functionality for payroll, employee self-service, project accounting, distribution and other product and service management applications.
Vendor Architecture
When integrating an ERP solution in your company, the best way is to buy a complete vendor architecture where each of the components is within a single system. The vendor architecture also helps in the integration of any of the modules into your ERP system without making any changes to the existing ERP modules. Before integrating any ERP solutions, make sure that your company has planned and mapped the requirements of the ERP in detail. The planning and the maps allow integration solutions to be planned in accordance to the specific requirements of your organization. Any of the vendor solutions that are used for ERP inventory management and customer relationship management should be integrated as per your ERP requirements.
Completely open source ERP solutions
Some of the benefits of ERP integration include reduced training costs for your employees, easy integration with third-party applications and better integration with your ERP. Smaller business firms may adopt the ERP software packages from the larger vendors but if the requirements of your organization are far different from the standard ERP packages, you might have to deploy additional resources or change the architecture of your ERP. There are also third-party vendors who offer completely open source ERP solutions, but these solutions are not as robust and secure as ERP solutions developed by the established software giants. To remain competitive in the market, most of the small and mid-sized companies rely on ERP solutions developed by the software giants but many of these ERP packages lack certain functionality that a small-to-medium sized business would require. Such shortcomings can lead to a delay in the deployment of ERP solutions across an enterprise.
Integrations with eCommerce stores require extensive planning and proper implementation of the ERP architecture. Since eCommerce is becoming a lucrative business option requiring sophisticated business processes, extensive planning and strategy are required in order to integrate the ERP and eCommerce. Integration of ERP and eCommerce requires extensive analysis of the business process and strategic plan. The ERP system should be designed keeping in mind the type of business that it will support, i.e. whether it will support a back-end inventory or an eCommerce store. Since ERP solutions require extensive configuration and monitoring, it is recommended that ERP systems are implemented with the assistance of a professional vendor who has experience in integrating ERP and eCommerce stores.
