Why does ERP and CRM integration make sense for your manufacturing enterprise? Lets get one thing out of the way: Integrating your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application which allows you to manage finance, inventory and receivables with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application which manages relationships, support, upsells will provide dramatic ROI improvements on both investments.

In fact, there are a number of reasons why businesses integrate their CRM and ERP solutions. Manufacturers with sales transactions see almost immediate benefits in the ‘order to cash’ process. Specifically, the cost savings come from reducing errors in order entry, implementing approval workflows for discounts, and reducing the manual labor required to enter orders in both CRM and ERP.

There are several marketing benefits associated with integrating CRM and ERP such as greater insight into the customer base. ERP systems store customers’ financial relationship with the company; CRM solutions store their buying patterns and marketing demographics. Unifying these two sources of customer data can help organizations ensure that their sales, marketing, and service expenditures are targeting their most valuable customers and prospects.

Today, “when” means “now”. In today’s competitive landscape for manufacturers, on-demand and real-time data visibility and accessibility is not a luxury, it a necessity. Alternative Technology Solutions is the leading ERP/CRM product & services solution experts for the mid-sized manufacturing industries and has been helping its 700+ customer base to compete in today’s on-demand, real time data environment. With their expertise in Epicor ERP and Salesforce CRM as a 3rd party support company, Alternative is confident that on premise traditional ERP’s are the foundation for an efficient organization and that there will always be a need to compliment the fundamental ERP systems by adding on high performance extensions to those systems.

Today, over 100,000 of the world’s most innovative companies-large, medium, and small-use Salesforce to close bigger deals faster. As a certified Salesforce Silver Cloud Partner, Alternative is committed to the Salesforce cloud solutions because to grow revenue companies need a Customer Relationship Management application that helps track sales activity-every lead, opportunity, and customer, especially when you’re on the go. In today’s mobile business environment, there’s no reason for a big up-front software investment that’s expensive to install and maintain.

With Salesforce CRM application and mobile cloud-computing model, manufacturers can follow customers and budgets at the same time from anywhere. With the Salesforce pay-as-you-go model, the price of success is dramatically lower for manufacturers.

There are four key areas that every company should consider when integrating its CRM and ERP systems. Alternative’s manufacturing expert consultants will be able to address these business issues with you so they are integrated properly:

1. Contact & Account Integration: Both CRM and ERP systems contain contacts and account information, with ERP focused on billing and shipping addresses and CRM on prospects and sales/support.

2. Product Integration: The CRM application should provide access to the products that are contained in the ERP if true process integration is going to be achieved (for example, allowing sales reps to view, or even over from bills of material with real time and on-demand data of your company).

3. Quote and Order Management: This is necessary if a company is going to turn proposal generation (created in CRM) into actual orders (executed and tracked at the ERP level).

4. Product/Order/Invoice Repository: One of the functions of the CRM/ERP integration should be to provide your sales reps with visibility into the status of the order, as well as to make and track changes.

When considering ERP/CRM integration, prioritize which objects are most critical to the success of your business, and what type of data each of your teams needs visibility and access to.