Tag: ERP Integration

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ERP Integration

When it’s Time to Integrate a Solution with Your ERP

You’re probably aware that there are solutions out there that can help you automate the flow of data from your payment, sales, and ecommerce solutions back into your ERP. You’ve probably also been pitched on many of these solutions over the years, and have heard the promises about improved efficiency, happier customers, and the like. But sometimes, all this talk of benefits can overcomplicate what is really a pretty straightforward proposition—

At the end of the day, integrating your ERP is about automating or streamlining the flow of data from external sources to and from your ERP and making sure it lands in the right places. That’s it.

The Big Question

There might be many different benefits associated with doing
this, but getting this data into your ERP in the most efficient, durable, and foolproof way is what it’s all about.

The question you then need to ask yourself is where and when
you would benefit most from this kind of integration. And here are some questions that will help you figure it out.

  • Where are your team members spending a lot of time manually re-entering data into your ERP system?
  • What is the real cost (financial + human cost)
    of all this manual re-entering of data?
  • How often are mistakes made?
  • How much do those mistakes cost?
  • Of all the reasons for not integrating, how high on that list is inertia, or the sheer mental barrier to making a change in your
    processes? (be honest…)

Once you’ve asked these questions of yourself and your team,
then it’s a matter of setting your priorities and moving forward on making a change for the better. These types of changes can sometimes involve big up-front costs that make it all the harder to bring change to your organization.

Luckily, these types of integrations are now available on a
SaaS or monthly subscription model, so you have the chance to deploy the integrations you want, see whether they’re worth it, and then turn them off if you don’t see enough of a return.

If you’d like to learn more about how our ERP-integrated
solutions can provide you with seamless payment processing, remote order entry, and ecommerce, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at sales@conligo.ca. It’s our pleasure to answer any questions you might have and to do everything we can to bring your business to the next level.

Categories
ERP Integration

Backward Integration vs. Building Out from Your ERP

You’ve made a big investment in your accounting and inventory software. After a lot of time, money, and effort, you’ve gotten to the point where you and your team can use it the way you like.

But how do you make sure that your ERP knows what’s happening on your other business platforms, like your online store or payment card gateway? Leaving these platforms unconnected to your ERP requires you to constantly re-enter all the data from these platforms into your ERP, which can lead to costly errors. Worse yet, members of your sales or customer service teams might not have the ability to access vital customer information contained in your ERP.

To deal with these issues, you might go out and get yourself an external ecommerce platform, payment solution, and sales team dashboard. As SelectHub notes, there are many different platforms you can integrate with your ERP. But now you need to manage all these different platforms that don’t talk to each other. That means your sales team might not know vital information about a certain customer’s order history, or they might not be able to remotely send new orders to your ERP. Someone in your office might also forget to take the information from your online orders and enter it into your ERP, which can annoy customers and damage your brand. Or your payment card solution might not send crucial payment and ordering details to your ERP.

One way people try to deal with this problem is backward integration, where you ask a company to build and configure a set of custom connectors to link all of your scattered solutions back to your ERP. But the flow of data in this situation is often not done in real-time, and you find yourself needing to rebuild, redesign, or reconfigure these connectors as your business scales.

The other option is building outward from your ERP with purpose-built solutions. These cloud-based solutions start with your ERP and build outward to provide seamless e-commerce, payment card processing, and sales team intelligence that flows to and from your ERP. That means your ERP knows what the rest of your business solutions are doing. That means more accurate data, more reliable payment card processing, and solutions that scale easily as your business grows.  

If you’d like to learn more about how your company can
further unlock the potential of its ERP by building outward, please don’t hesitate to contact Conligo today at sales@conligo.ca. We’d be very happy to offer advice on the best path forward and to discuss your options.