Unito’s Quick Guide to ERP Integration
Your ERP (enterprise resource planning) tool is the beating heart of your organization. It’s at the core of essential workflows, automates essential tasks, and more. But does it always have the data you need? Or are you finding yourself frequently managing manual exports or copying and pasting data into it?
Here’s why ERP integrations are essential for using these critical systems.
What is ERP integration?
ERP tools cover multiple business functions, and are used by enterprise-sized organizations to centralize the data and workflows needed for these. While most ERP solutions have built-in methods of pulling data in from other essential tools, they rarely cover your entire tool stack. That’s where ERP integration comes into play. Integrating your ERP suite with as many of your tools as you can ensure you have all the data you need to plan your projects, make better strategic decisions, and keep your teams aligned.
ERP integrations can be built in-house by your software or IT team, deployed and customized by a partner, or even used as-is through pre-built integration platforms.
ERP integration priorities
While you could potentially integrate just about any tool with your ERP with the right combination of custom-built integrations and third-party services, you’ll usually want to focus on a few business functions at first, for a few reasons:
- It allows you to test specific solutions with lower stakes.
- It reduces the complexity involved in ensuring compatibility between integrations.
- You can quantify the positive impacts of a smaller test to get buy-in for larger integration projects.
With that in mind, here are a few areas where you can begin your ERP integration efforts.
CRM platforms
Your CRM holds contact information for current and potential customers, your sales team’s pipeline, and often support tickets as well. Often, these systems are attached to extensive marketing features as well. That makes your CRM the hub for everything your customer-facing teams do, meaning it’s full of data essential to increasing revenue and keeping your best customers.
Integrating your CRM platform with your ERP means you can access all the customer and revenue data you need.
Business intelligence (BI) software
There can be some overlap between BI and ERP, especially since some tools offer features from both categories. Here’s the best way to differentiate them:
- BI turns raw data into insights.
- ERP automates and supports business processes and tasks.
While BI might help automate some aspects of your tasks or ERP might process important data to help support important workflows, this isn’t what they’re built for. That’s why integrating them is so important. You get the best of both worlds; deep data from your BI platform and action from your ERP suite.
E-commerce
If your organization engages in e-commerce, you have loads of data on your customers, products, and revenue streams in a single platform. That’s true whether you use custom-built e-commerce solutions or third-party platforms like Shopify. If e-commerce is a big part of your operations, having access to that data in your ERP can be a great test for an integration service.
Project management software
While many organizations use their ERP tool to manage their projects, it’s not necessarily suited for all organizations. Professional project managers might have their own favorite project management tool they bring into any project. Likewise, some teams might run all their most important initiatives out of a different tool.
By focusing your integration efforts on these tools, you can feed important projects with data from your ERP, or ensure the outcomes of those projects are represented in your ERP.
Enterprise asset management (EAM)
Organizations that rely on expensive assets and equipment in their activities use EAM software to optimize their use — increasing productivity and profitability. While some ERP tools might have features that account for these assets, they’re rarely as deep as dedicated EAM tools. If expensive assets are important to your operations — say for construction or manufacturing — then this would be a great place to first test an integration.
The benefits of ERP integration
Having essential data from your most important tools in your ERP platform comes with several benefits.
Real-time data
Enterprise-sized organizations are rarely lacking in data. The real problem is two-fold: having the right data and making sure it’s up-to-date. When your ERP isn’t integrated with your most important data sources, information might get copied and pasted, or you might have to rely on spreadsheets and similar reports. These workarounds usually produce data that quickly becomes outdated. With the right integration, you can have real-time data from all your other tools right in your ERP system.
Single source of truth
One of the challenges of any workflow dependent on multiple data sources is the tool silo. Without an integration, data, processes, and project deliverables are essentially trapped in their tool. An integration breaks these silos, turning your ERP into a single source of truth for all your projects with all the data and deliverables you need.
Better compliance
As organizations grow larger, so do their compliance requirements. Data security, tax law, ESG (environmental, social, and governance) standards, and accounting standards are just a few examples of these requirements. Integrations help maintain data integrity across tools (i.e. keeping it consistent and up to date) making compliance much easier.
Faster decision-making
Leaders often need to make quick decisions to capitalize on opportunities or correct mistakes. In this position, nothing is more frustrating than waiting for data and reports to trickle in to ensure you have all the facts before making a decision. When you have ERP integrations running in the background, leaders can access all the data they need, when they need it, without needing to request it.
The challenges of ERP integration
While an ERP integration comes with benefits, implementing one isn’t always seamless. Here are some hurdles you might run into.
Stakeholder buy-in
If your organization has always relied on manual work and exports rather than ERP integrations, you’ll face a bit of an uphill battle. That’s because there are multiple stakeholders involved, from the IT department who’ll have to deploy the integration to the finance team that needs to approve the expense. You’ll have to get buy-in from each of these stakeholders before implementing your integration.
Budgets
For most teams, getting budget for an integration means making cuts somewhere else. That can lead to intense debates about where to cut — and how much — which can bring the potential implementation of an integration to a standstill. Leaders who pitch an ERP integration need to clearly demonstrate the value it would bring to offset the extra spend.
Technical complexity
Not all ERP integrations are created equal. Some can be deployed and customized by the layman, with no technical skills required. Some will need users with a more technical background — usually the IT team — to deploy them. Finally, there are others that can only be deployed by specialized third-party consultants. This complexity can make getting your integration ready to use time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Deployment and onboarding
Deploying an integration can take time — especially if it’s more technically complex. You need to ensure it works correctly with your existing system, that the right teams have access to it, and that it performs according to your specifications. Getting all this right can take time, meaning you won’t necessarily see a return on your investment right away.
What are your options for integrating an ERP?
When you need to integrate your ERP system, you have a lot of options. Here are four broad categories of integration platforms you can look at.
Built-in integrations
Most ERP software has a number of built-in integrations that allow you to centralize data from some of the most popular data sources without any third-party software. The depth of integration and features for these can vary, but generally, they’re a good starting point if your system hasn’t yet been integrated with any other tools.
Point-to-point integration
A point-to-point integration is a single connection between two software tools. Usually, this involves having your software development or IT team use each tool’s API to translate data from one into something the other can use. These allow you to completely customize what you integrate — and how — but they are resource-intensive since you need to build them yourself.
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service)
An iPaaS solution connects multiple tools through a single platform, usually with a simple, low-code (or even no-code) interface. That means just about anyone in your organization can use it, deploy it, and customize it. Some of these platforms support two-way syncing, meaning you can get up-to-date data both in your ERP and your data sources with a single integration.
API management
An API management ERP integration allows your IT team to centralize the APIs of all relevant tools in one platform, striking a balance between point-to-point integration and iPaaS. It allows you some of the customization of building integrations from scratch while retaining some of the ease of use you’ll get from pre-built, third-party integrations.
Optimize ERP systems with the right integration
ERP integration centralizes data from multiple sources within the system you rely on for workflows, tasks, and business strategy. While they can be difficult to set up and make a significant impact on your budget, these integrations give leaders a more holistic view of your organization. For many, they’ve become essential.