ERP and CRM: Striking differences or similarities?

ERP and CRM: Striking differences or similarities?

Difference between ERP and CRM

Yet another piece full of with industry jargons!

This is the first thought that crosses over most business owner’s mind who aren’t familiar with these software’s, functionalities and their abbreviations.

Most business owners are not knee-deep into IT and software’s their instinct drives them to make good overall business decisions, however when it comes to the tech most feel the need to reach out to consultants to guide them on how they can leverage these modern age tools to grow their business.

Simplifying ERP:

Consider this, you own logistics business, similar to FedEx.

Imagine the chain of process that follows after you receive an order of delivering one item from a location to another.

The process vaguely described would look something like this:

-          A customer places the order with a retail partner with your business

-          Your system registers the order when to pick up the package along with other orders

-          The package is picked from retailer and arrives at your shipping center

-          Package is secured and is shipped soon as possible, either directly to the customer or to another port of location depending on your distance to the drop point.

-          The item is shipped at arrives at a local delivery unit of yours close to the customer’s location

-          Your delivery executive picks up the items and delivers it to the physical location to the end user in the chain i.e the customer.

-          Fees is collected and the process is wrapped up.

This is all that happens during one item being delivered, Imagine, having to deliver thousands of items without having a organized way to keep track of each step. Chaos, right? This is where ERP system comes into play, An ERP system generally consists of module, each module is dedicated to specific departments within the business who control and update them as the process moves forward.

For example: Sales team updates a total of 100 items being ordered, which is updated in the ERP software from where warehousing team can ensure availability of 100 units of item ordered and update the same on the software arranging a pickup schedule so the delivery team can track it on the ERP software and pick it up to be sent out accordingly.

ERP systems streamline processes and bring unity within processes in an organization.

So, Is CRM an entirely different concept?

To understand this better, CRM stands for customer relationship management, as the name suggests CRM is entirely customer-centric, the focus here is not on overall business nonetheless an important element of the business that is your customer.

Sales and marketing teams are traditionally the departments that indulge into CRM since these two teams are the one’s that has most interaction (direct and indirect) with the customers and understand them better than other departments.

The goal of CRM software’s is as obvious as they seem: To maintain a healthy relationship with your customer, to understand them better in order for you to come up with solutions that are best suited for your audience and address their problems effectively.

In a nutshell:

CRM and ERP are overlapping concepts, however with modern advancements in tech, it is quite easy to find yourself a software that could be a combination of the two, In fact many ERP software’s have dedicated CRM module within them that allows you to control have an effective combination of the two while still having one software.