Salesforce CRM and ERP integration in Life Sciences

Good planning and strategy development are critical to the success of the entire process. The commitment of stakeholders, and especially of managers, is significant. Also, involving people from different departments in this process is crucial because these changes are implemented throughout the entire organisation.

Determine the value it intends to provide. TCO (total cost of ownership), productivity, and business outcomes are all factors to consider when planning and understanding ERP integration.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) is computed by summing the costs of three technology budget line items:

• A  platform that supports the implemented integration technologies, for example, Salesforce.
• For software that makes the integration approach possible, Mulesoft is a good choice.
• Costs: Internal, external, and contingency labour is required to carry out the organisation’s integration strategy.

Business outcomes: Before you can integrate your ERP system with Salesforce, first, you must determine what data and information you want to integrate and under what conditions. In other terms, what data will be integrated into Salesforce with the ERP?

To simplify an evaluation, organisations can investigate the impact of integration by looking at what these numerous apps power and facilitate beyond the realm of IT efficiency. Some helpful effect categories are:

• Time-to-market of revenue-generating external products, computed by calculating the potential interest produced by accelerating time-to-market and thereby extending time-in-market by a number of months or years.
• Contribution to boosting the productivity of corporate activities, business divisions, or revenue-generating teams.
• Contribution to risk reduction for future potential dangers or occurrences.

So, how exactly do you arrange your data integration project? It’s very simple:

STEP 1: Define business processes and the scope of data integration.
STEP 2: Link systems together using a data integration platform.
STEP 3: Synchronize the systems

When you select and prepare an integration solution, you must know that integration needs and processes will evolve and grow as your organisation develops. Therefore, a data integration plan should be a long-term vision.

The CRM system is built around a customer who is displayed as an account. Many different objects will be associated with the account in some way. Each system should contain a proper subset of accounts necessary in your company to ensure that this foundation is present in both systems. In general, it appears that having the following data in each system is a good idea:

Salesforce: any account with which you might conduct business, such as suspects, prospects, and customers.
ERP accounts include customers and suppliers with whom you do (or have done) business.

We must also decide which system will be in charge of accounts that exist in both systems. Typically, this will be an ERP system, or a bi-directional sync will be required.

Because a customer account often originates from a lead in CRM, the evident approach is to merge customers from CRM to ERP. However, it is not always the case, as customer communication is often bi-directional for both the sales and finance teams to retain client information. In addition, this removes disagreements between sales and finance over who is responsible for manually entering the data into the other system.

The ERP system should be where products are live and managed. This also permits real-time pricing changes in the ERP to sync over to Salesforce, ensuring that your sales reps have the most up-to-date information and are not selling on last month’s prices.
Another benefit of storing product details in ERP is that the system will always be the source of truth for all critical product data, financials, and inventory.

However, allow no changes to the fundamental product information in Salesforce. It should be kept in the ERP. Allowing individuals to alter it in Salesforce will result in a complicated structure in which changes bounce back and forth between the two platforms. Instead, keep it visible in Salesforce but unchangeable. This promotes the notion that your ERP is the ultimate authority on all pricing-related information.

All financial information pertaining to the sales process should be stored in your ERP, but whatever your sales representatives need to view or report on should be stored in Salesforce. This will provide salespeople with a comprehensive perspective of their whole book of business, allowing them to understand their next steps with each customer, regardless of where they are in the deal cycle. It also provides reporting on the entire pipeline and your sales forecast, allowing your sales managers and executives to respond to deviations in either way.

Some businesses may be tempted to preserve their legacy quoting tool if they already have quoting capability embedded into their ERP. However, we don’t advise it. Quotes and Opportunities in Salesforce should be synced with one another. When you include ERP quoting, you’re creating a perplexing two-way integration involving three separate records at a vital moment in the sales process. That kind of arrangement will cause a slew of technical and data issues later on. Having your sales data sync back to your ERP at a predefined point once the sale is complete is preferable.

The process begins with product information in your ERP. The data should then be returned to your ERP once the deal is completed and the future steps are no longer in the control of your sales team. The concluded contract remains in Salesforce for accurate sales reporting, but the identical data is immediately copied across as an ERP order. This enables back-office teams to respond appropriately to a new sale: fulfilment can act, billing can invoice the customer, and the ERP can instantly tie out your inventory information.

The entire sales process is up and running as a complete loop via the two platforms with these Salesforce-ERP integration best practices in place. Customer-facing teams have access to all of the information they need to sell and serve customers more effectively, while internal support staff have access to all of the information they need to keep logistics, billing, and fulfilment operating smoothly.

One of the biggest challenges when transferring data from Salesforce to the ERP, is full transparency on the data transfers. This is critical, specifically when any problem occurs.

Forgetting to consider what happens when an error occurs is the most common mistake when building a custom interface. A connection error when syncing both systems is one of the most common errors. While syncing a few fields may not be a big difficulty, transferring all information connected to a client or an order may be more difficult unless a chosen system includes an easy and fast approach to deal with all transfer mistakes.

There are various methods for dealing with data integration errors. Although, the whole process should be planned and discussed with all stakeholders. Users should know how it works and who will be notified to react when facing integration errors.

While ERPs serve as a system of records or data master for much of an organisation’s data and transactions, they also house critical customer and business information. Companies are increasingly relying on modern CRM systems to serve as an engagement system, where employees choose to perform their work and where the majority of sales data is housed.
As a result, linking all of these systems is critical to creating the 360 consumer view, partner, and employee experiences that drive digital transformation.

Data governance establishes rules and methods for keeping data clean. Consider it in the plan to guarantee usability, quality, and compliance with the policies that are important to your firm.

On the other hand, data stewardship is a distinct role and set of operations that include executing duplicate checks and archiving inactive records. Stewardship also entails enforcing rules and ensuring that everyone plays fairly.

Data governance and data stewardship are inextricably linked. When done correctly, your priorities and procedures will evolve. To keep data clean, follow these recommended practices:

• Using data governance information, make your priorities known to everyone in your organisation.
• Duplicates are eliminated from the start by purifying data at the point of entry.
• By empowering users, everyone takes ownership of data quality. Stewards protect and update the data.
• Regular archiving and duplicate checking are required for housekeeping.
• Reporting your outcomes and obtaining key performance indicators (KPIs) assist you in visualising the state of your data. The more you measure and make the outcomes accessible, the more your data stewards will address issues.

Data alignment is one of the most powerful master data management solutions. The organisation was discovering a variety of data anomalies as a result of having so many systems. Customer and product data must be consistent across platforms.

Master data might include product, customer, supplier, location, and asset information in addition to any other information sources that drive your firm.

With all of the time and effort invested into building a consolidated source of customer information comes the difficulty of ensuring that this data is used effectively throughout the organisation. And it is a significant challenge.