Chapter 6. How to Build a Vendor Management Integration

In previous chapters, we designed contact management, sales management, and collections management integrations. All the integrations had one feature in common: they made use of synchronized customers, or as they are called in the ERP, accounts receivable customers.

This chapter will also focus on the benefits of synchronizing vendors, or accounts payable vendors, for use by users of the CRM application.

There is a class of applications called vendor relationship management (or supplier relationship management), which is for managing vendors. VRM (or SRM) applications can include specialized features for dealing with vendors to help with complex bid negotiation and evaluation. We will not attempt to duplicate a full VRM system. Instead, we will build a simpler alternative, by bringing vendor records from ERP to CRM and integrating them with CRM functionality. Using your CRM application to manage your vendor relationships adds value to...