CRM and ERP. Many wonder what is CRM, what is ERP, what’s the relationship between ERP and CRM and what’s the difference…
CRM and ERP are software that helps businesses with operations to run smoothly. So if you are looking for new technology to adopt, to improve your business, knowing the difference between CRM and ERP will help you big time.
CRM and ERP are two separate software although they overlap in some areas. In this article, Tigernix experts share the relation and the difference between CRM and ERP software.
What is ERP?
Standing for Enterprise Resource Planning ERP software is designed to optimize and improve operations of an entire business or organization. An ERP helps you bridge all the departments of your organization through a centralized system. Helping you streamline your operations in departments and operations among departments, an ERP helps you improve every area of your business.
Some other features of an ERP are
- Financial management – Manages capital inflow and outflow. (Expenditures, general ledger, balance sheet, bank reconciliation, tax management, and payments.
- Sales & Marketing – Manage sales workflows ( sales inquiries, quotations, sales invoice sales orders, and tax compliance)
- HRM – Manages all human resource operations (Employee profiles, employee records, job profiles, skill matrix, performance reviewing, wages, payroll system, travel expenses, and reimbursements)
- Manufacturing – Handles everything in the manufacturing process. (Product planning, materials sourcing, inventory control, daily production, monitoring, and product forecasting, shop floor control and sales & distribution plan.
- SCM – Covers all the aspects in your supply chain (purchase order management, manages product flow, returns and more)
- Inventory – Manage material management module( measure stock targets, track and monitor items, standardize replenishments and manage orders and shipments)
- Purchasing – Manage procurement management. (supplier listings, quotation requests and analysis, purchase orders, goods receipt notes, and stock updates)
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management or CRM is a software solution that helps you maintain and manage your customer information. Usually, CRM is a module that comes with an ERP system.
A CRM comes with many features to help you to manage your customers for better-improving customer relationship. The system will collect data and share with necessary teams, analyze them making your CRM processes easier than ever before.
Here the system’s main focus is to help you utilize more and more data effectively to increase sales, improve customer retention, identify patterns and deliver customers a better customer experience.
Some of the key features of CRM software are
- Contact management – Helps you manage all customer data from customer contact information, transactions, support interactions to demographics and more.
- Lead management – Helps you manage leads from early stages of the sales cycle till they convert through centralized customer profiles that enable access to all the details involves in the sale cycle.
- Email tracking – Help you monitor and manage email campaigns with a click through inbuilt CRM tools.
- Campaign management – Improve your campaign management from creation to delivery through effective customer segments, targeting, and data-driven insights.
- Reports and dashboards – Help you generate in-depth reports automatically in real-time with high accuracy delivering your insights on the market, new trends and patterns, and behaviours.
- Mobile app – Offers instant on the go access from iOS and Android through an inbuilt mobile app enabling easy collaborations and better connections with CRM data.
Here you can read how to select a good CRM system for your organization.
The relationship between CRM and ERP (CRM Vs ERP)
By now you must understand the difference and the relationship between ERP and CRM software. However to sum up everything, here’s a summary on the topic.
CRM vs ERP
ERP
- Operation Area – All the areas of the business including all the departments.
- Function – Manage business operations and processes
- Main Focus – To improve the efficiency in all the aspects of the organization streamlining and optimizing operations.
- Financial benefit – Cut down costs in operations through efficiency
CRM
- Operation Area – Marketing, sales and customer relationship management
- Function – To manage data and operations in customer relationship management
- Main Focus – To improve sales and customer retention
- Financial benefit – Improve profits by generating more sales volumes.
CRM and ERP are two different software, that can bring many benefits to the table only if you select the right software for your situation. Since now you know clearly the difference between CRM and ERP we hope you’ll invest in the best software to overcome the challenges you are facing in your organization.
