Travelers on the London Underground are used to taking a big step when the train carriage stops at a curved platform. A similar mismatch exists when ERP and CRM systems need to be interfaced, but the solution is not so simple.

Most solutions for CRM Users involve either the import of data to CRM from ERP or direct access to the ERP systems, but this is not what CRM users really want. CRM users need:

• indicators, when things go wrong or not according to plan and

• aggregated figures or KPIs with the ability to drill down when needed.

ERP manufacturers have tried to create their own integrated CRM applications, for example SAP or SAGE, only to find that CRM apps must be considerably more flexible than ERP systems and that a tight integration makes the CRM System inflexible. More on this in a later post. The solutions of these companies now supplied are in fact not tightly integrated at all, they only appear to be.

Of course, this can be done by importing large volumes of ERP data, but this redundancy is not beneficial to performance or flexibility. A better solution is to insert a middle layer of multi-dimensional data so that CRM Users can use simple dashboards for their data access.

Typically products such as SAP Netweaver or BW are in a position to supply suitable data, but BW projects tend to be long and complex and make it difficult to keep up with sales people who change their requirements often dependent on market and sales conditions.

The most economical and practical solution is to introduce a middle layer and to use products such as QlikView or Dundas Dashboard to present and manipulate data. There are more products available, but it happens that I have recently been involved in evaluating these two.

It is surprising that CRM integrators often ignore this middle step. Controllers would never think of going directly to raw data during the financial planning process.

Tags: Dundas, ERP, Qlikview, SAGE, SAP