One of Treefrog’s special sauces is our experience and skill integrating ERPs with web technologies. We have experience with numerous ERPs (for example, SAP, Epicor, SYSPRO, etc.) and many web platforms (for example, Magento, Shopify, WordPress, etc.).
What benefits to closing the gap between your ERP data and your web platform look like?
Here are some examples;
- Synchronize Inventory
Inventory levels that are accessible to your customers, along with stocking dates for out of stock products, photos and specifications that are always accurate empowers your customers to plan, to make decisions and to take action whenever and however it suits them, whether you’re selling B2C or B2B. Combine this information with web analytics can help you gain visibility into what products your customers are browsing, what items they’re purchasing together and what products they’re searching for that you don’t yet have.
- Synchronize Pricing
Synchronizing your web information with your ERP data means making pricing changes once and only once. Customer-specific pricing, even on a product-by-product level, becomes much more manageable through customer portals and logins. Pricing levels can even be time-based for a specific category of customer for the duration of a marketing campaign or seasonal promotion.
- Ditch Data Entry
Are your users manually re-entering web data into your ERP? Sales Orders? Quotes requests? Your manual processes, wherever they exist, are completely unnecessary! They are compensating for the inability of your systems to move data between them. This makes room for error, is an unproductive use of your people’s time and makes it difficult to capture customer information and track sales analytics. Every company we work with is finding it harder to fill key positions. Why not leverage the time of your best people toward high-value activities? By automating those that don’t require their judgment and intellect, you free up capacity and make their work experience more fulfilling.
- Know What’s Happened (Revenue analytics)
Capturing your web data and ERP data in one place means more visibility into monthly, quarterly and annual revenues, quoting activity and browsing activity. Not only does integration enable more accurate and detailed revenue reports, you can now combine this revenue data with other customer data to help you understand what your customers are thinking and doing. Now, you can understand what’s working for your customers and what isn’t, enabling to you respond.
- Know What’s Coming (Revenue Forecasting)
When a customer requests a quote from you today, where does that information go? More importantly, when a customer sends a quote to their customer for one of your products, do you even know about it? Our ERP-web integrations bring visibility to the entire sales channel, not just the first link in the chain (your direct customer). When you know what kind of activity your customers are up to with their customers, you can more reliably anticipate what’s coming for your business.
- Notify Customers
If you asked your customers what they’d like to be notified of in real-time what would they say? In-stock notifications? Shipping notifications? Price changes? Quote responses? New products? Notifications can significantly impact the experience of your customers, and with web-ERP integration, you have options. You can notify them on almost any change in data that you choose, as long as it exists in either your web data or your ERP data.
- Help your Customers Help their Customers
In the B2B world, the most impactful difference you can make in the life of your customer is enabling them to positively impact their customers. What if your B2B customer could take a quote you’ve given them and convert it into a quote for their customer, by adding their own materials, labour and markup? Simplifying the quoting process for your customers means faster turnaround for their customers. What if you could directly tie-in to the distribution systems of your customers?
- Support Growth
Once you’ve automated processes and put key information directly in the hands of your customers, you’ve created an infrastructure that enables growth without creating additional demands on your people – to answer questions, enter orders or pull together data from multiple sources to answer key questions.
- Be Flexible
With the integration of your ERP and web data, you create flexibility. Your have the flexibility to add new online or traditional sales channels, add new product lines, new markets (local or international) or any combination of these three opportunities without sacrificing operational efficiency or overall performance.
- Be Future Ready
Technology is changing at an increasing pace. Creating the infrastructure for your front-end and back-end data to work together enables you to leverage other emerging technologies for even more opportunities – with IoT, big data predictive analytics, AI, VR. Once a central reservoir is in place, capturing all your key data, we can leverage that data to make use of other forms of technology.
- Leverage your Legacy ERP
ERP upgrades are hard. Hard on cash flow, hard on your people, and hard on your customers and suppliers. They are the change that every business dreads, but cannot avoid. Integrating data between your web and ERP can buy you time by putting the data you already have to work for you…while you plan for the upgrade you know you ultimately need.
If you are unsure where to start with integrating your ERP into your digital platform, we would love to chat. We have helped several organizations identify gaps and solve major issues in your company’s efficiency and growth opportunities. Contact us today. We’d love to chat!