Integrating ERP and eCommerce: Experts weigh in on the benefits

eCommerce is a great way for companies to sell their goods and keep costs down, and the integration of eCommerce and ERP has become a hot topic of late in the Microsoft Dynamics community. The interest is more than just hype, experts say; companies that don't integrate really do miss out on a number of benefits for their organization and customers.

Integrating eCommerce storefronts with ERP systems enable enterprises to streamline business processes, including inventory management, order fulfillment, customer relations, and accounting, as well as item information and product pricing. Integrating eCommerce and ERP allows for a complete process of buying and selling, but very few companies have fully integrated these systems. Rebecca Wettemann, Vice President of Research at Nucleus Research, noted that these systems were bought as standalone solutions, and customization and integration is fairly costly.

Laurie McCabe, partner at SMB Group, agreed that a lot of companies have not integrated their ERP and eCommerce systems.

"What they're doing is manually dragging out data in different file formats from one system and then dumping it into another system," McCabe said. "You're probably spending too much time doing that and your likelihood of getting errors is probably going up because every time we start manually duplicating information we do create more errors."

McCabe added that once companies can get this information from their eCommerce connected with their ERP data, they can generate their reporting based on all of the data, not just what's in the individual systems.

"Really, it's about integrating the data from the ERP system with the data from the eCommerce system, so that you don't have to do that manually," McCabe said. "Then ...