I have a current customer that is going through an upgrade and is looking to possibly synchronize sales force with ERP. Has any one done this before and maybe gives some pros and cons of doing so? Maybe tips/tricks?
I know that you do this all through company configuration and then use the sales force synchronize to update ERP. I have not used sales force before so beyond the information you can get from PDF’s or the help guide that is all I know.
The main reason why they want to use salesforce for their CRM is the ability to blast emails out of that program easily than ERP. Is there a way that ERP can do this currently?
We are currently integrating Salesforce with E10. We decided the Epicor integration was limited, so we are working with a Salesforce partner to plug into the Rest API’s for data transfer.
Salesforce is awesome and huge so I would try to get an idea of what the people using it will be trying to accomplish. What are the problems they want to solve in order to consider it a success? A small implementation can easily run a few hundred thousand to implement if you are not careful with the scope.
If all they want to do is to manage outbound email marketing I would absolutely not use Salesforce for that but a tool designed for that. You can see a bunch of them here: https://stackshare.io/email-marketing
We are currently working on a Salesforce integration using a company named Jitterbit (I believe they are an Epicor partner). We haven’t set up the integration yet but I have done the training on their Harmony tool and it seems very user friendly. It connects to the Epicor REST API. Seems to be quite customizable as far as integration frequency and even lets you transform data within the integration.
Buyer beware here. You cannot spend enough time doing your homework on how you want to do your integration. It’s a combination of in-house knowledge and/or bandwidth. It’s expensive to switch integrators, in both time and money. Trust me I know, we are regretting not spending money and time upfront figuring this out. I’m not advocating anyone… Only that you evaluate your internal resource capabilities and capacity along with your implementation timelines. We took what we thought was an easy road from a third party integrator for sales force and we only want to hang ourselves from our own shortsightedness at this point
I wish I could like this post a dozen times. Integrations are tough even when you know how you want to integrate but add in the fluid requirements of a sales team and these become a very expensive nightmare.
And this applies to other integrations other than Sales Force but this one tend to be very insidious.
Absolutely Rob!! Mark and I are on the same page here, you need a thousand likes for that post.
Depending on how you’re going to do the integration with either REST, Integration Services, Replication or combination you need to plan, plan, plan, then test the heck out of it.
10.2.x.x has an integration for Sales Force that you can look into as well.
If you’re just doing this for campaigning you may want to look at DocStar. DocStar is magnificent and will cover many departments like AP, AR, Purchasing and Sales. I like to find solutions I can expand that will help multiple departments.
When doing the initial Sync between Salesforce and Epicor, how did you get all the records to merge over? I’m currently testing out the integration to set up a plan for our go live, and it seems to only pick up New or Updated records after its initial run.