Jeremy Waterman, MD of Softline Accpac, says the success of a CRM project should not be judged solely on how effectively it brings together front-office operations, but on how it also facilitates inter-operation with the back-office environment, encompassing people, processes, departments and applications.

Gartner research suggests that customer intelligence gaps still exist after the majority of CRM implementations because the issue of back-office connectivity has not been adequately addressed. The outcome of this is simply that customer data cannot be shared effectively and business processes are punctuated by errors, delays and paperwork. This then snowballs into customer satisfaction issues and spiralling administrative cost.

Front-to-back-office integration harnesses business processes, applications and data to manage customer relationships more effectively, reduce costs, increase profitability and achieve sustainable competitive advantage, over the long term.

Waterman explains that while front-office applications have historically been developed around the idea of cross-organisational collaboration, back-office applications, by contrast, have been insular in nature, with the finance department slow to open up its data and applications to other parts of the organisation.

“Additionally, many companies still buy their CRM and ERP applications from separate vendors. This combination of factors has meant that business applications have struggled to address key business process needs where the customer lifecycle crosses the front-to-back-office divide. What you’re left with are departmental silos of information, unnecessary administrative overheads and inefficiencies, verbal sign-off requirements, and process duplication.”

Being able to share consistent data between the CRM and ERP applications is an essential requirement for front-to-back-office integration. Customer data, however, is structured according to specific application types and this is why organisations need to be able to create dynamic links from entities within their CRM system to the corresponding entity within their ERP system, whereby changes in either are propagated in both. This ensures that both front-office and back-office staff are working with the same information which reduces the potential for error.

“Enabling users to view combined financial and non-financial customer information within a single application, regardless of where the information is generated or stored is another key requirement for front-to-back-office integration. This 360-degree customer visibility is particularly useful for account managers, that may require access to a customer’s purchase history or for customer service representatives that may need to update a customer on the status of an order,” says Waterman.

He concludes that while front-to-back-office integration can help companies dramatically reduce administrative cost, speed up order fulfillment and improve customer service, it is not without its challenges.

“Undertaking point-to-point, retrospective integration can be a costly, complex and risky proposition for SMEs, and even when a company manages to achieve its short term integration objectives, there is no guarantee that future CRM or ERP upgrades will not render the integration inoperable. The availability of CRM solutions with out-of-the-box, easy-to-deploy product integrations to market-leading ERP solutions, therefore, represents a highly compelling proposition for SMEs seeking to leverage the benefits of front-to-back-office integration cost efficiently.”