For more and more organisations operating business-to-business (B2B), eCommerce is becoming an increasingly important sales channel. Indeed, analysts from Frost & Sullivan predict that the B2B online retail market will reach $12 trillion in worldwide sales by 2020.
Like business-to-consumer (B2C) eCommerce retailers, they are concentrating on delivering an excellent customer experience online to help differentiate themselves from their competition.
And their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is playing an increasingly pivotal role in the process.
In his article, The Increasing Role of ERP in Customer Experience and B2B eCommerce, Justin King argues that the complexity of the ERP system represents on the key differences between B2B and B2C eCommerce when it comes to back-office systems.
For the majority of the process and discrete manufacturing businesses that we deal with, their ERP solution is at the very centre of their business.
The article quotes a report written by IDC Manufacturing Insights on behalf of Epicor which surveyed industrial machinery and equipment (IME) manufacturers. They found that:
- Most IME manufacturers find that traditional ERP systems don’t fully support their need for fast and timely access to information or the need to further improve collaboration across business functions
- Nearly 40% of all IME manufacturers surveyed believe the ERP is vital as the platform that connects the back office and front office
- Nearly 85% of large IME organisations with 5,000 employees or more indicated that their ERP is a vital platform for delivering a good customer experience
- IME manufacturers have come to realise that providing superior customer experience has to be one of their top initiative
- Leading IME manufacturers will be looking for a flexible ERP system that includes or easily integrates more customer-facing functions able to provide more timely information and that enable more collaboration.
King points out in his article that:
“Many of the B2B features that exist on websites today are really just about making ERP functions customer facing”.
You only need to look at the integration of Stream, Proximity’s order, delivery and transport management application with Infor LX and BPCS ERP systems to see evidence of this customer facing approach.
By using the same data, same platform and same business logic as the existing LX or BPCS application, Stream is able to harness the power of the ERP and extend functionality to provide self-service sales order management and proactive notifications to organisations B2B customers and internal users where collaboration was not possible before.
Stream has added an intuitive application that is accessed via web, tablet or mobile device by internal users (customer service staff, on the road account managers and field-based sales staff) and customers alike.
Customers are able to enter, view and manage their own orders through Stream’s web-based self-service customer portal. These are then validated by the manufacturer’s customer services team and then added automatically to their Infor ERP application.
This type of integration helps to deliver ‘more transparency into the ERP’, which King describes as the secret of good B2B eCommerce – giving customers more and more access to complete self-service.
Posted by Paul on 26th February 2015.