Several companies who run a B2B, B2C, or sales order entry eCommerce site never realize how Microsoft Dynamics eCommerce integration can save potential cost over time from operating an online store that can seamlessly integrate with a backend ERP software or financial system, such as Microsoft GP.
Microsoft Dynamics Ecommerce Integration
First, it is important to describe what exactly is meant by “integration.”Integration exists at various levels. However, in this context it will be used to refer to the ability of a site to effectively communicate and seamlessly integrate with a backend ERP system, enabling a change or order in a single system to disappear directly in another system without having to use third party services or import/export excel/ CSV files.
For a business’s perspective, there are 3 important reasons to perform integration: increase sales revenue, reduce costs, or both. Integrating your ERP software system with an eCommerce site can help you achieve your business goal quickly because developing a B2B/B2C eCommerce site based on current technology and successfully integrating it with the Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP, or NAV that you use can bring several advantages: 24/7 website availability to take customer orders and respond to their inquiries, order entry errors reduces cost efficiency, efficiency/ better utilization of resources (such as employee time), and provides more information.
A fully functional website is critical in achieving your business objectives. If customers are not able to find your site and products (items), view pricing details, checkout easily, etc. then it is going to be very difficult for you achieve your business goals. A good website should have a wide range of tested functionality to work well with SEO tools, B2B/B2C eCommerce, marketing, and promotion on the site.
Considerations for Integration
Avoid Being a Victim of your Own Success
It often reaches a point where successful business are spending more resources (time and money) on data management in their web store, as well as their ERP – product details/ info, customer information, prices, stock levels, web orders, etc. Unfortunately, this raises the risk of errors, especially omissions in both of these systems, therefore, affecting profit margins. However, with a powerful eCommerce platform seamlessly integrated to your Microsoft Dynamics GP, 24/7 synchronization of key data is enabled between both systems. Ultimately, you will experience a reduction in time spent managing various data entries in both systems, maximizing profits and improving customer relations in the process.
Speed is Critical
Your eCommerce company is a clear representation of your business or company, and it goes without saying that speed enhances an online shopping experience. For instance, your Microsoft Dynamics GP is not fully optimized to offer the ideal data structure for page load times, including refresh rates and how quickly web content populates. However, a powerful caching mechanism paired with a fully optimized eCommerce SQL Server data structure can enable you to offer customers the best shopping experience online without even having to compromise the speed or general performance of your Microsoft Dynamics GP.
Consistent availability
Unlike a physical offline store which may have hours of operation, an online store is a different thing altogether – you are open for business 24/7 all year through. So, you need to know how to use an eCommerce platform to manage your store. A good eCommerce solution should allow you to perform ERP system maintenance and upgrade from time to time without any downtime. Furthermore, your orders should be able to flow back to your system after you have completed updating your eCommerce platform.
Securing the ERP environment
Effective Microsoft Dynamics ecommerce integration will allow data to securely flow between Dynamics GP and your web store in secured/encrypted files to make your business’s backend completely anonymous, safe, and secure over the internet. Since the web store and your Dynamics GP environment are hosted separately, the customer doesn’t have direct access or permissions to your Dynamics GP, as customer requests are all processed by the web store, thus, reducing your Dynamics GP server load and eliminating any security threats.
Ways to Save Your Resources (and Money)
For organizations saving cost, time, and resources in the long run, the solution lies majorly in the amount of maintenance necessary to manage separate sets of data between the site and the ERP system. For instance, a business has a huge number of inventory items and accepting 400+ orders a day. However, taking these online orders and re-entering them manually into the financial system means added hours of unnecessary maintenance per week. In addition, you constantly need to update item pricing and inventory levels for the products on your site and if there’s no synchrony between the site and backend accounting solution, then you may run the risk of selling inventory you don’t have and/or consistently lose sales.
Your company can experience cost saving right from the amount of labor saved from preventing duplicate data entry. In addition, alleviating unnecessary tasks and jobs allows employees enough time to focus on core business, where they become more productive and efficient. By eliminating unnecessary manual data entry after receiving orders in Microsoft Dynamics, you will be allowing sales orders to be placed directly on the website, increasing workers’ productivity and focus.
Microsoft Dynamics RMS offers a complete point-of-sale (POS) business solution to small and mid-market retailers, capable of adapting to meet specific and unique retail requirements. Therefore, a complete integration ensures seamless data flow for not only inventory, but also catalog date, customers (shoppers) and orders that fully support your fulfillment process.
Conclusion
Your business needs an eCommerce solution that is not only secure, but also feature-rich, designed to drive traffic to your site and increase conversions. Reducing operating cost and increasing efficiency requires an effective eCommerce solution with other back-office systems, such as accounting, Order management Solutions, CRM, POS, and ERP. Small and mid-sized companies and retailers need a complete eCommerce solution to handle their single or whole chain stores.
With advanced functionalities such as customized reporting, multi-dimensional inventory management, receivables management, advanced purchasing and more, you can be sure that your company can handle the record-aspect of your business. Microsoft Dynamics eCommerce integration can also ensure that specialty merchants have an automated and complete POS and online retail solution.
