I have talked a lot in past blogs about the great benefits experienced by companies integrating their CRM and ERP systems. Allow me to mention a few:

• You get a 360 degree view of your customers, allowing you to build lasting relationships and provide with top class customer service.
• You gain efficiency by giving you instant access to business critical information.
• You get rid of time-consuming and error-prone manual routines.
• It secures a much higher user adoption, because when your systems are integrated, users will always find the data they need to perform their daily tasks.

You can also read more about CRM-ERP system integration benefits here .

It is a general rule that companies benefit more from an integrated CRM-ERP solution than two stand-alone ERP and CRM systems. In fact, this rule also applies to any other systems you decide to integrate in order to streamline and optimize your business processes.

System integration success story

Let’s take one of my customers as an example: Berling Media, a publishing company based in Stockholm, Sweden. Now, the book publishing industry has experienced many disruptions in the past decades, and Berling Media has taken several actions along the years to keep up to date with the new digital era and the demands of the modern reader – one of them being the adoption of a print on demand strategy. Their print on demand business is made possible by a solution called Publit that allows their customers to order books via their webshops. The order is then transferred to Publit that prints the books and sends them to the customers. It is a pretty lean and clever way to handle book printing. No money spent on printing books that will never be sold, no expensive storage.

To make the solution complete, Berling Media was only missing an integration that would automatically report back to their ERP System (Microsoft Dynamics AX) and invoice the customer. That’s where we could help them. Berling Media was no new comer to system integration. Among others, they had already used the RapidiOnline solution to integrate their Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics AX solutions. Using RapidiOnline, we integrated Publit with Microsoft Dynamics AX and today, Berling Media has eliminated the manual, time-consuming and error-prone keying of the order from Publit into Microsoft Dynamics AX.
You can read the full story here .

System integration to increase solutions ROI

When two systems are complementary in a business process, you usually benefit greatly in integrating them. Nowadays, there are even very cost-effective cloud-based solutions that allow fast, automated and secure data integration. Integration solutions can run as a service, and implementation time can be surprisingly short; making it both possible and affordable to move forward with an integration. Think about it this way: if you are not integrating such two systems, you are unlikely to be reap the full benefits and therefore get the best return on your investment.