Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms each serve as invaluable tools within the world of commerce. CRM platforms enable the enterprise to track, manage and streamline interactions between company and customer, allowing for strategic relationship progression. The ERP provides a comprehensive system for organising a corporation’s core business functions, and can incorporate the automated management of IT, human and services resources.
Such benefits are equally as applicable to a large multi-national company as these can be for the smaller businesses. The features and functionality that each of these systems provide are essential for effective strategy, planning, visibility, and even in addressing specific customer needs or business projects.
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CRMs and ERPs: Essential backbones for the efficient business
CRM and ERP platforms are mission critical applications, and a significant amount of business activities will rely on how well these platforms function. Thus, an unexpected issue that causes anything from unreliable data, to problems generating reports, to data that is not accessible at all, can result in business losses. To mitigate any such issues, it will be important to a business to ensuring that these essential enterprise tools are running smoothly and efficiently.
ERP benefits
An efficient ERP implementation requires complete integration across an enterprise’s resources is essential where inventory management, finance, warehousing and customer relationships can all be managed and analysed as a whole. It is only through this holistic viewpoint that a business can have better visibility and a complete understanding of business operations.
Tangible benefits gained from an efficient ERP then includes:
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Improved fulfilment times
Supply chains that are documented in real time
Protected business data by comprehensively defined user roles and robust security
Solid information that is gained from data that guides your business decisions
Always adequate inventory and stock levels
An ability to achieve consistent customer satisfaction
Efficient resolution to customer service issues, queries and complaints
CRM benefits
CRM systems are only useful it is reliable, efficient and capable of evolving as a customer base grows and diversifies. From a customer experience perspective, a CRM should also be able to handle all dealings with customers efficiently.
For either business to business or business to consumer customers the tangible benefits of an effective CRM include:
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Receiving the product or service more quickly
Queries and complaints that are dealt with smoothly and quickly
New services or products that cater to customer needs
New methods of customer to company interaction; such as ordering online or correspondence through new means, such as live chat
Services or products that are tailored to the customer
When CRMs and ERPs are anything but useful
Unfortunately CRM and ERP systems can be bogged down by performance issues arising from poorly written code, ungracefully aging older software versions and poor legacy hardware performance and compatibility. In instances such as these businesses may be faced with the prospect of either a cumbersome and underperforming CRM or ERP system, or an expensive and undoubtedly long term project to upgrade or migrate to a newer system.
CRM and ERP Systems that evolve with a business
No successful business stands still: sales increase, resource needs become more demanding and customer bases grow. To meet these needs as well as the ever evolving world of information technology capabilities, enterprise applications need to continually grow and evolve also. However, each upgrade cycle will usually come with caveats: it will inevitably break something, resulting in many man-hours of planning, bug tracking, scenario testing, simulations, and configurations.
To address this, ERP testing tools aim to make platform upgrades, code overhauls and iterative improvements easily achievable with reduced downtime and business interruption. Such automation also standardizes the testing process, which enables IT departments to facilitate upgrades and new feature introduction more easily.
Empowering businesses
High quality enterprise automation tools provide capability to clean enterprise software code, determine potential pain points and errors in doing upgrades, and even produce a complete system analysis that results in specific recommendations. Big data plays a big part in enabling such tools to be effective, enabling enterprises to focus more on their core business competencies. When a business is able to effectively manage its resources, inventory, sales cycle, fulfillment and customer service, the end result is a better experience for the customer.
