Solving the CRM-ERP Data Conflict: A Practical Guide to Integration
How to Effectively Integrate CRM and ERP Customer Data
Integrating customer data between your CRM and ERP systems is crucial for gaining insight into the value of your customers, and enabling a seamless end-to-end business process from sales through fulfillment. This requires a well-designed structure for your customer data and integration, to prevent inefficiency, maintain data integrity, and enhance the value of both systems.
Understanding the CRM-ERP Customer Data Conflict
One of the biggest challenges in CRM-ERP integration is reconciling the different ways these systems structure customer data. While they both store information about the same customers, they serve distinct functions:
CRM (Customer Relationship Management): Designed for managing customer interactions, CRM systems (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365) structure customer data around a single Account record as the central hub of relationships. Supporting records include Contacts, Opportunities, Orders, and Activities to track interactions and sales progress.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): Focuses on fulfillment, finance, and operations, and often structures customer data into multiple related records. A common model, such as Oracle’s Trading Community Architecture (TCA), represents a customer as multiple entities (Party, Account, Site, and Site Use) to facilitate complex transactions like invoicing and shipping.
This discrepancy creates a 1-to-many data mapping challenge between CRM and ERP. If not addressed correctly, it can lead to inefficiencies, poor user experience, and data inconsistencies.
The Risks - A Real World Example
Consider ACME, a customer in your ERP system with:
30 locations where products are shipped
1 head office for billing and relationship management
Your sales reps engage with the head office, but fulfillment teams need site-specific shipping details. How do you structure CRM data to support both sales and back-office operations?
A common approach is integrating all customer sites into the CRM. However, this may result in 31 separate Account records, making it difficult for sales reps to manage relationships efficiently.
How do you ensure that you sales reps are enabled to sell and manage their relationships efficiently, but also enable the back office teams to fulfill orders effectively?
An Optimized Approach to CRM-ERP Customer Data Integration
Depicting the common integration challenges between the Salesforce Account model and the Trading Community Architecture (TCA) Party Model.
There is no universal solution—your approach should align with business needs. However, the following framework has proven effective in many cases:
1. Let Each System Do What It Does Best
Your CRM and ERP serve different purposes, so avoid forcing one system’s structure onto the other. Instead, optimize how data is shared between them to maintain efficiency in each.
2. Define CRM Accounts Based on Where you Manage your Relationship
Identify the lowest level in the organization where your team manages relationships (e.g., locations you visit, key contacts you interact with). This should define the Account in your CRM.
Supporting data, such as additional addresses or locations, should not be separate Accounts but instead linked to the primary record.
3. Transform ERP Data to Fit CRM Structures
To resolve the 1-to-many issue, your CRM integration should consider merging relevant ERP records into a single Account representation:
Use the ERP Party and Account records to form a unified CRM Account
Identify the primary billing and shipping locations and integrate only essential supporting details.
To manage the technical operation:
Leverage a strong integration platform like Mulesoft to orchestrate the data
Store ERP record IDs within the CRM Account to maintain links to the source; or,
Consider a Master Data Management (MDM) solution or UUIDs to centralize and reconcile customer identifiers across systems.
4. Integrate or Provide Access to Supporting Data
If sales teams need to reference multiple shipping locations, integrate or provide access to Sites, Locations, and Addresses as related records (e.g., Salesforce standard objects like Addresses or Locations may meet this requirement). Benefits include:
Maintaining a single Account view with all associated site, sales and service data
Seamless integration with Field Service and other Salesforce Clouds
To help your teams navigate large sets of integrated ERP data when completing sales and service processes, you can create custom UI workflows to support selecting the required locations.
Alternatively, rather than storing all ERP data in the CRM, consider using real-time ERP data visualization tools to provide access to relevant information when needed.
Additional Considerations and Challenges
Even with this approach, integration challenges may arise:
Multiple Lines of Business: If an ERP Party has multiple Accounts serving different business units, you may have to determine whether these could be a single Account or split to serve each team
Mergers & Duplicates: Data merges, duplicates, or splits for technical or business reasons can risk synchronized data. Ensure your integration supports these use cases when customers consolidate or change structures.
Data Governance & Security: Data security challenges may arise, if there is any sensitive data that need sto be selectively controlled in either your CRM or ERP.
Performance Optimization: Large-scale integrations can slow down systems. Careful integration design in terms of data volumes, frequencies, and other fine-tuning may be needed to manage performance efficiently.
Final Thoughts
A well-planned CRM-ERP customer data integration enhances efficiency and improves both sales and operational processes. By structuring your data model effectively, using strong integration tools, and considering data governance, you can ensure a seamless, scalable solution.
Struggling with CRM-ERP integration challenges? feel free to reach out. I’m happy to connect you with recommended partners for this type of integration.
