Which ERP is best for Salesforce?

Both small and large growing companies use Salesforce and often ask us for recommendations for ERP systems that integrate with SFDC. There are a number of good ERP systems for Salesforce and many benefits for selecting a strong ERP and Salesforce integration strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of selecting an ERP system with tight Salesforce integration and discuss some good examples of Salesforce ERP.

Is Salesforce an ERP system?

Salesforce is not an ERP system, Salesforce is considered a customer relationship management (CRM) system which includes various applications and modules such as sales, marketing automation, ecommerce, service and data management.

Salesforce can do many of the things an ERP system will do, but ultimately it cannot replace an ERP system and instead you need to choose a third party system from a software vendor like Netsuite, SAP, Infor, Microsoft and more if you want financial management and accounting, manufacturing, supply chain and project management capabilities. 

Companies from multiple industries including manufacturing, professional services, distribution and beyond, therefore rely on integrating Salesforce with other ERP systems.

Benefits of Salesforce ERP Integration

As customer expectations on both B2C and B2B companies increase with every passing year, having data flow from the front office to the back office ERP is crucial. Retail has been the first industry to be disrupted by this change. For many companies, Salesforce can be the critical front and mid-office platform of choice for customer relationship management, marketing automation, sales, subscriptions and more.

In fact many companies build their entire product and service offerings on Salesforce itself, also known as the Force.com platform. This is common for software as a service companies for example. This trend is only set to continue as global economies and businesses become digital-first and create new, digital business models and offerings to serve their customers.

But whilst front office systems like Salesforce are important in building highly effective sales funnels that make your business grow, ERP systems enable you to fulfill your customer promise and are equally important in producing scalable companies.

Improve Your Customer Service

Improving the customer experience is a key benefit of tight Salesforce and ERP integration. ERP systems that integrate with Salesforce enable you to push and pull sales order data, customer and product data as well as financial and logistics data in real-time.

For example in the retail and e-commerce industry, many companies rely on passing data from their Salesforce front end to their ERP and fulfillment systems via batch upload.

But when customers expect next-day delivery, sending that data in real time between Salesforce and your ERP becomes a competitive advantage. It also reduces the chance of bigger issues caused by human error, such as missing orders completely.

Increase Profitability

Strong integration between your Salesforce systems and ERP platform can increase your bottom line in numerous ways depending on your industry. For example, let’s assume your business is in the software-as-a-service industry. Using Salesforce data alone you’ll likely have a great ability to report on your sales data, build ideal customer profiles, launch new sales and marketing campaigns and much more.

But by combining ERP and Salesforce data, you can gather much deeper insights into which of your customers and segments are most profitable, who fails to pay on time and where your biggest financial wins are. Bridging this gap is key to building a long-term, sustainably profitable company.

Reduce IT Cost & Administration

Selecting an ERP system that natively integrates with Salesforce CRM can reduce the IT burden and cost in your organization.

Maintaining integrations between your ERP and other platforms can be very expensive and time-consuming, as both Salesforce and most ERP systems need to be patched and upgraded regularly. As these patches are implemented, the connection or integration that links them can be compromised as the fundamental way the system works changes.

An ERP consultant once explained it to me like trying to keep two surfboards perfectly aligned whilst they lay atop the ocean. Waves will inevitably come in the form of new software updates and releases and you’ll need to continuously need to realign the surfboards or the systems.

Now imagine you have multiple surfboards and they all need to be kept aligned to make your business and IT systems run effectively…

This is why many companies choose ERP systems with native, robust integrations with Salesforce.

ERP Software for Salesforce

Rootstock

Rootstock is the leading ERP for Salesforce users in the manufacturing, retail, ecommerce and distribution space. Customers of Rootstock can easily integrate data from sales orders into their production schedules and optimise their customer experience at the same time.

Rootstock is a native Cloud ERP system which is built on the Salesforce platform, allowing its customers to leverage a common data model from sales through to operations and fulfilment. It also boasts one of the most intuitive low code and no code platforms so that customers can easily create custom apps and extensions to cater the system towards specific use cases and needs.

Download the RootStock ERP Solution Guide

FinancialForce

FinancialForce is a Cloud ERP solution which is built on the Force.com platform. As the name suggests, this means that SFDC users have tight integration with their financial data and more if they leverage this Salesforce ERP system. FinancialForce provides out of the box capabilities for billing, project management and more.

Sage Intacct

Sage has very little coverage in the CRM, service and marketing space as a whole and Sage Intacct is no exception. For many years, Sage has partnered with SFDC and publicised that relationship very publicly.

Sage Intacct and Salesforce are a great CRM and ERP combination for professional services companies, SaaS vendors and providers and other in people, service or project-centric industries.

Oracle Netsuite

Oracle Netsuite is an extremely popular Cloud ERP for small and medium sized businesses and comes with a prebuilt Salesforce ERP connector. This makes integration between the two systems easy and cheap to maintain.