A Great ERP Deserves a Great CRM
LET ERP BE ERP
WHY LET ERP BE ERP
Your ERP is good at what it’s good at, tracking product, watching inventory, knowing what’s sitting in which warehouse, running your shop floor, and holding your bill of materials together. You paid a fortune for that, and it earns its keep every day. But if you’re a manufacturer competing in today’s market and that system isn’t talking to your CRM, you’re leaving money on the table, and that’s not an exaggeration, it’s the real cost of quoting slower than the competitor who already knows what’s in stock. If you ship product in boxes, you don’t really know what you sold until you go check the ERP, and if Salesforce isn’t connected to it, neither do your sales reps. Connect the two and your sales team gets faster, sharper, and harder to compete with, because they’re working from what’s really happening on the floor instead of whatever someone remembered to update last. We build this same connection into Epicor and Sage every day. If your system isn’t one of the big five, that’s exactly what the rest of this page is about, and the full picture of how we work across every ERP we touch lives on our manufacturing page.
IF YOUR ERP ISN’T ONE OF THE BIG ONES, HERE’S A SAMPLE OF WHAT WE’VE CONNECTED
Oracle, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft. AS/400. Procede. Odoo. CDK. DSI. JobBOSS and Karmak, CDK, Pronto. Syspro. Aptean Traverse and Intuitive. Infor Visual Manufacturing and Syteline. Global Shop Solutions. Plex. Made2Manage. Fishbowl. Genius ERP. Acumatica. ABAS. Ascent ERP. Adage ERP. E-Automate. Agility. Even QuickBooks, if that’s genuinely where your numbers live.
SOMETIMES THE SIMPLEST INTEGRATION IS THE RIGHT ONE
Not every integration needs to be a live, bidirectional sync to be a real one. Koru’s shipment data used to live across a pile of spreadsheets, one per distributor, none of them lining up on account numbers. We built an intake system that reads those spreadsheets straight out of email every month and reconciles them into Salesforce automatically, giving their team supply chain visibility across a network of two hundred plus partners without asking a single distributor to change how they work. Sometimes the smartest integration isn’t the fanciest one, it’s the one that meets your data where it already lives.
NO API? NO PROBLEM
Some of the systems we connect to don’t hand over a usable API at all. JobBOSS is a good example. That used to be where integrations stalled out. It isn’t anymore. We write directly against the data those systems already hold, using SQL views and queries to pull quotes, jobs, and sales history straight out of the database and into Salesforce as the single source of truth. JADCO runs JobBOSS, and their own words on it say it better than we can: “our decision to let our ERP be our ERP and to have Salesforce be the central source of that data was key in our success with our CRM.” Other systems do give us a real way in, Infor’s ION API is a good example, and when that’s true, we take it just as fast. Native API, custom code, MuleSoft, whichever path fits how your systems are built is the one we take, we’re not precious about the method, we’re just not willing to leave your ERP sitting in its own silo because the easy path wasn’t available.
WHAT CHANGES ONCE THEY’RE CONNECTED
Sales stops calling the shop floor to find out if something’s really in stock or already spoken for. Finance stops waiting on someone to re-key a closed deal by hand three weeks later, it lands as a real order the moment it closes. Leadership stops reconciling reports that don’t agree with each other and starts looking at one number everyone trusts, because it’s coming from the same place. None of that depends on which ERP you run. It depends on whether the two systems are finally talking.
WHAT THE DATA CAN SHOW YOU
Connecting your ERP to Salesforce is table stakes, it’s the price of admission, not the payoff. The payoff is what you build once the two are talking. Put an activity leaderboard, calls made, opportunities owned, opportunities kept current, next to real sales numbers pulled straight from your ERP, and more often than not the same names land at the top of both lists, proof that the discipline you’re tracking in Salesforce is the thing driving revenue, not a separate story running alongside it. Flip it around and cross a neglected opportunity list against what those same accounts have already bought, and you’ll usually find money sitting in plain sight, real, active accounts nobody in Salesforce has touched in months. It doesn’t matter whether that data is coming out of SAP or a system nobody outside your industry has ever heard of. Once it’s in one place, it tells you the same story.
P.S. if you found this useful, check out our full manufacturing website!
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