Blurring the line between ERP and CRM

The traditional divisions between applications are now really starting to blur as cloud services continue to develop and obvious business links between them increase the cope for collaboration.

A good example of this is ERP and CRM, where understanding what customers are planning to buy, or might want to buy soon – the CRM piece - has a direct effect on how the production planning and execution processes needed to fulfil such customer desires – the ERP piece – needs to be managed.

This area of collaboration between business applications has been targeted by FinancialForce.com, which provides cloud ERP based on the Salesforce1 Platform. It has just introduced FinancialForce ERP, a unified family of cloud solutions powering customer-centric businesses.  

The idea behind this is that businesses are starting to win and retain customers by aligning ERP processes around customer touch points. This has the potential to create a unified, informed view of the customer across the entire organisation.

The new ERP system is an amalgam that has resulted from the acquisitions of Vana Workforce and Less Software last year, which resulted in the addition of FinancialForce Human Capital Management and FinancialForce Supply Chain Management to the company’s product portfolio.

Both are built entirely on the Salesforce1 Platform, and share the same cloud as FinancialForce Accounting, FinancialForce Professional Services Automation and Salesforce CRM. This creates seamless visibility from front to back office and a single user experience across the entire enterprise. Together, the applications make FinancialForce ERP, a unified family of cloud solutions that can power a customer-centric organisation’s back office needs.

Built on the Salesforce1 Platform, FinancialForce ERP connects customers, employees, partners and products into a single system, providing everyone with a consistent view of customer activity. Customers using Salesforce CRM and FinancialForce ERP are able to take advantage of cross-departmental reporting, analytics, workflow and collaborative capabilities including Salesforce1 Chatter.

According to the company, today’s ERP systems are anti-social and transaction oriented. It claims they lack visibility to the conversations surrounding a customer or transaction, which can give vital information on the thoughts, feelings and personal interactions that are key to personalising the customer experience.

Embedded on the Salesforce1 Platform, FinancialForce ERP allows contextually relevant conversations to be tracked alongside transactions, accounts, reports or other objects. Conversations traditionally lost in a sea of emails can be attached to any business activity and are now helping to put more context around a cold transaction. As a result, employees better understand the customer and each other. 

There is an obvious argument here as to how close this is to the classic perception of an ERP system, which are fundamentally geared to maintaining the production process, from raw materials stock control to delivery of finished products. It would be possible to see this as a richer Customer Experience Management tool.

There is then a less obvious argument – that is worth having – as to whether this is the direction in which ERP should develop. This is, no doubt, a subject CSW will return to.  

The company, however, feels that FinancialForce ERP is built to adeptly change, upgrade and configure according to businesses’ evolving needs. The family of solutions allows companies to adapt and grow their applications without getting locked into old software versions.