Preface

Every business that deals with customers has a CRM application of some kind to manage customer interactions, and an accounting or ERP application of some kind to deal with financial transactions. Even though the business process of managing customers is directly related to the business goal of making new financial transactions, these two applications are rarely integrated.

This book is dedicated to showing you how to build an integration between your CRM and ERP applications.

I have spent most of my career working on systems integration projects. I have spent the last thirteen years with Sage Plc, a global business management software company, building integrations between CRM and ERP applications. Sage produces over twenty ERP applications–from tier 1 single-user accounting applications to tier 5 enterprise-level ERPs–in different geographies across Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and Africa, and it has integrated most of them with its CRM application, Sage CRM, and other CRM applications. This has given me a very wide range of integration experiences with many different technology stacks and features.

This book is aimed at anyone who is thinking about building an integration between any CRM and ERP application. You could be an IT manager, project manager, or developer in a business that uses any decent CRM and ERP application, or a business partner or development partner for any commercial CRM or ERP application. You could be thinking about building an integration from scratch, or extending an existing integration.

The structure of the book is designed to take you, in a logical sequence, through all stages of building an integration; from a discussion of the business benefits of building an integration, through how to build an integration, which features to build, and how to project manage the implementation. I have kept the scope of the projects at the low end of the scale, always avoiding super complex architectures and designs so that they can be implemented by one or two good developers.

At the end of the chapters, there are advanced workshop checklists, which are aimed at exploring alternatives, shortcuts, improvements, and different design approaches that you can take. You should follow through the design of a feature, and once there is an understanding of the design goals, you should go through the advanced workshop section to evaluate alternatives that may be more suitable for your own particular situation.

Once you have read through the chapters and completed the workshops and advanced workshop sections, you should have all you need to start your integration project. You should have a business justification for implementing your integration, an integration architecture for your integration, and detailed designs for each of your integration features, all tailored to your CRM and ERP applications. You should have a resource plan and project plan for implementation and deployment, and an ongoing plan for support and maintenance of the integration.

What this book covers

The book takes you through all stages of building an integration, including a discussion of the business benefits of integrations, how to architect and design an integration, which features you should build that are of most benefit to you and your business, and how you will project manage and develop the integration.

Chapter 1, What is CRM Integration and Why is It Good For Your Business, talks about what we mean by an integration that links a CRM application with an ERP application, what are the business processes that will be affected by an integration, and most importantly, why we do it—what are the business benefits that you will achieve. The chapter also introduces some of the terminology that will be used throughout the book.

Chapter 2, How to Implement an Integration, is technology focused, where we look at some of the different integration architectures that are available and the building blocks and components that are needed for building an integration. Many technical concepts that will be used throughout the book are introduced in this chapter.

In the subsequent five chapters, we design for specific integration scenarios. The first scenario is common to all the integration solutions, and then you can look at the other integration features and check out which ones are interesting for you right now, and which ones may be put off to a later phase.

In each chapter, we take you very carefully through all the design steps, using examples along the way. We cover all areas that are affected by the integration; backend changes, schema changes, user interface changes, security, and reporting. Within each chapter, there are workshops containing questions, evaluations, and research topics. The intention of the workshops is to prompt you to do your own parallel planning and design as you move through the book. Each workshop section contains important decision points that need to be resolved by anyone who is doing an integration.

Chapter 3, How to Build a Contact Integration, is where we design an integration for contact management, allowing your CRM users to improve how they manage their customer relationships. The contact management integration is a fundamental feature of any CRM to ERP integration, linking customers and contact information such as phone numbers and addresses between CRM and ERP, thereby removing the need for double entry of data and keeping your information consistent across the business. As this is the first chapter to talk about integration design, we take you very carefully through all the design steps, using detailed examples to explain each step of the process.

Chapter 4, How to Build a Sales Management Integration, is where we design an integration for sales management, for the benefit of your sales team and sales managers. Sales management integration brings in efficiencies and improvements in your sales team's productivity by linking the sales quotes and sales orders in ERP with the contact management and sales opportunity functionality in CRM.

Chapter 5, How to Build a Collections Management Integration, is where we design an integration for collections management to improve your business's cash flow. Collections management integration speeds up the collection of unpaid invoices from your delinquent accounts by linking sales invoices in ERP with your powerful CRM contact management functionality.

Chapter 6, How to Build a Vendor Management Integration, is where we design an integration to manage your vendor relationships for the benefit of your purchasing team and any other members of your business who deal with vendors. The vendor management integration provides a simple vendor management tool by linking your ERP vendor lists to' your powerful CRM contact management functionality.

Chapter 7, How to Build a Support Management Integration, is where we design a support management integration for the benefit of your customer support team and any team members who deal with customer issues and complaints. The support management integration can make your support team's workflow more seamless, transparent, and efficient by linking CRM support features with ERP functionality.

Chapter 8, How to Develop and Maintain Your Integration, after you have designed your integration, it needs to be implemented. We provide you with some simple project management techniques and examples that can be used during the building, deployment, and ongoing support and maintenance of the integration.

Chapter 9, Where Next for Integrations–the Cloud and Other Areas, discuss how technology changes will affect the future of integrations between CRM and ERP.

Who this book is for

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