The entrepreneur wave has many riding on it. When these chaps try to expand, they often get blurred by the sight of softwares to be used in their business and specially complicated ones like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Also a lot of B-school students fear these IT concepts. And whether these two are different is always a point best left undisturbed by many.
Here is all you need to know about them as a manager-
In Simple Words:
When you send a courier you are always concerned about the status of that courier as to has it reached? Is it safe? Is it in the air or on road? But then they (DHL, FedEx, and DTDC) arm you with an alphanumeric code that you can put on their website and track your parcel. How do they do it?
The Real Deal:
ERP:
When an organization tries to expand its major concern is how to track all the chaos going around. ERP simplifies this process by maintaining a central database that has every recorded information about every department in the organization. Since it plans the various resources of the organization it is said to be Organization oriented. It provides information about all departments like finance, accounting, procurement, inventory, payments, delivery, support, payroll, human resource through different modules.
It’s like a portal that gives all the answers asked to it. But this portal is not made on its own, all departments of a company add their bits and over time it becomes a huge repository of information.
When a parcel is taken to the courier shop, the person there takes the parcel and enters it in his ERP-UI with the tracking code attached to the parcel. After that day’s parcels are taken in trucks from the shop the person enters that activity too and the process continues.
All information about the shopkeeper receiving the payment from customer, salaries to people, expenses of the company go into the finance module of this database. Similarly information about material procurement and production goes to the manufacturing unit. All the modules are maintained in this manner. It’s simply collecting all the information at once and then later analyzing it.
CRM:
While ERP is called Organization-oriented software, CRM is called Customer-oriented software. As the name suggests, CRM keeps data about the existing and potential customer and helps in maintaining a relation with them.
It is mainly the responsibility of the marketing and sales team to manage this software. Its purpose is to provide every information and insight needed by the sales and marketing team to serve customers better by giving them a good deal.
A Comparison Between the Two:
ERP and CRM are related at some level. Because of the overlapping, the CRM can be integrated with the ERP central database. The two can obviously interact.
CRM has a big role in maintaining leads via a website. An online store of any company always has to be in contact with the inventory module of ERP and then display it on the site. Also it has to connect with the supply chain module in order to be able to tell the customer an exact date and time when it will be delivered.
All B2C businesses do not keep all the information about its customers. So it maintains a code that you can enter into the website and it will tell you all about your parcel. To make it better, the CRM software itself gathers information about the parcel and its sender and receiver and informs the sender via email or SMS when the parcel has reached the desired destination.
Over years CRM has become complementary to ERP and if your IT department can use it for the benefit of your business, it will provide limitless convenience and accuracy to you.