*This is a repost from Fisher Technology's integration blog series.*
In this first part of our integration series, we are going to discuss the approach we take for an integration project between an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and eCommerce store.
When you are looking to integrate your ERP with an online eCommerce store, you have many options to consider. Firstly, you need to decide whether you just want to synchronize your data, manually export details from your eCommerce store into your ERP, or automate the whole process. Once you have made those decisions, you then need to look at the different vendors who can offer the integration of your choice.
At Fisher Technology, our specialty is working with automating the integration process but we have learned that no two integration projects are alike.
Our process when we engage with a new prospect who is looking to integrate their ERP with eCommerce is to do a detailed discovery not only of the systems they use but to get a good understanding about what type of business they are in.
During our analysis we typically ask questions such as:
- Whether they work with B2B or B2C or both
- Have they already got an online presence and if so are they moving to a new store or staying with an existing one?
- How much traffic are they seeing i.e. orders they are receiving at the moment and what is the information that they want shared between both systems?
Our next step in the process is to schedule time to show a demonstration of what a working integration would look like. Typically this is not overly detailed from a demonstration point of view but enough ideas are shared so that we can delve even deeper into customers’ requirements for the integration.
On the surface, customers are usually looking to integrate a few core pieces of information between the two systems and those are:
- Customer Contact Details
- Inventory
- Shipping
- Credit Card Handling
You might think that these are standard features. You would be right except when in business do two organizations even if they sell exactly the same type of product work with the same processes? As we said earlier, no two integrations are alike and the reason is that no two companies are alike.
Our customer base encompasses a vast range of industries from beauty supply to dental equipment, from industrial gloves to spiritual awakening to name just a few.
Not only do we cover a range of industries for these integration projects, we also work with many different mid-market ERP’s specifically:
- SAP Business One
- Sage 100
- Sage 300
- Sage X3
- Microsoft Dynamics AX
- Microsoft NAV
We find that these companies whose revenues are between $1 million and $250 million (mid-market) favor best of breed eCommerce Platforms for their online presence and the ones that are most popular are:
- Shopify
- Magento
- BigCommerce
Because our integration is designed to work according to customers’ business needs and the engine that drives our projects is a flexible tool that can easily be extended without the need to custom code we are able to work with all these diverse organizations and systems for their integration projects.