Ecommerce is a global phenomenon—and it’s not just impacting the B2C marketplace. According to a SalesForce survey, 89% of B2B decision makers attribute future growth to the success of their digital commerce program. If your B2B products and services are not available for your customers to purchase online—yet—or if your ecommerce platform isn’t integrated with your other business software, it’s time to consider your plan for the years ahead.
Why It’s Important to Sync Your Front and Back Office Systems
Whether or not you’ve invested in an ERP solution yet, you’re probably on board with the concept of integrated software and why it makes a difference to data management, business intelligence, and company performance. When your business data (and processes, for that matter) are sitting in silos across your company—some in the back office and some in the front office, possibly united (but not centralized) with some manual workarounds—you have the potential to miss opportunities and sacrifice the customer experience. Learn more in Are Data Silos Creating a Big Data Problem for Your Company?.
In a disjointed scenario in which separate business systems operate independently, decision-makers can’t access a single view (certainly not in real-time) of the company’s health, operationally or financially, making it difficult to understand the top line’s impact on the bottom line. It also makes it nearly impossible to maximize customer relationships and drive ongoing value—and isn’t that the reason you’re offering ecommerce capabilities in the first place?
Delivering a Seamless Ecommerce Experience
Today, “making a sale,” fulfilling orders, and delivering timely service requires cooperation between multiple departments and business systems: marketing automation, point of sale, ecommerce, order management, inventory management, finance and accounting, business intelligence, and more. Ideally, all of these systems and workflows are connected so there’s a “single version of the truth,” a centralized location where data is made accessible to sales personnel, back office employees, decision-makers, and even customers.
You can depend on a cloud-based ERP to manage your back office tasks and an ecommerce system to handle sales and customer data—but if you want to provide accurate, consistent experiences for customers as well as your employees who work on various areas of client servicing, you’ll find a way to integrate the systems or start fresh by implementing an all-in-one solution. For instance,
- Acumatica’s Commerce Edition integrates Acumatica’s financials, sales, inventory, CRM, and fulfillment systems with popular ecommerce platforms.
- NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce combines both ERP and ecommerce system functionality including order management, inventory, merchandising, marketing, financials, and customer service.
Which solution is right for your organization? That depends on what systems you are currently running, if any, as well as your back and front office needs and goals. You may have an existing ERP system and want to introduce ecommerce—or vice versa. Perhaps you’re in the market to implement both at the same time. At MIBAR, we help clients assess their computing environments and match them with the right technology to fit their goals, budgets, and customer expectations.
If it’s time for your business to integrate your business systems, contact us for a free consultation.
Additional resources you won’t want to miss:
An Executive’s Guide to eCommerce Integration Into ERP
Digital Transformation and the CMO
Why Technology is the Secret to Bridging the Marketing and Sales Gap
