Opinion

Tight integration is essential for good web sales

Andrew Brown10 Mar 2010

It’s widely understood that an ecommerce channel can add valuable revenue streams, but too many food and beverage organisations fail to integrate this facility with their core ERP systems.

While many think this is just an added layer of technological nuisance, failure to integrate the two defeats the object of using the ERP system to manage the sales order processing.

It’s all too common within the food and beverage industry to have the simplest possible websites, online catalogues and credit card processing capabilities designed by the lowest bidder. But more often than not, the web developer lacks the skill and ability to integrate the website with the ERP. This results in all the data for the orders arriving through the online channel sitting separate to your core sales and stock information.

By failing to integrate the web sales function with the remainder of the ERP system, there are two core business abilities that are instantly lost:

  1. If your ERP system is your main source of business intelligence (which it arguably should be), then the data is immediately reduced in value as the entire online channel is not accounted for and you instantly lose the benefits of real-​time stock information and sales ordering – a particular problem if yours is a high volume business.
  2. The online function loses all the usual advantages enjoyed by other channels. This includes the customer service element of delivery tracking information being available to customers as the despatch function of the ERP isn’t connected to the web sales.

In short, as tight integration as is possible between the online channel and the other business functions, via the ERP, is absolutely crucial to provide full overall visibility of the sales and stock activities. Without this holistic vision of stock levels and the popularity of individual items, the online and offline sales may as well be two different companies.

About the author

Andrew Brown is MD of the process manufacturing systems division of Solarsoft

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