CRM vs ERP: Understanding the Differences
While the entire organization will come to rely on both ERP and CRM systems, the fundamental difference between ERP and CRM is that ERP is primarily for financial data and the finance department, while CRM is customer data used by the sales and customer service departments. The former is commonly referred to as the back office, and the latter is the front office.
Some ERP systems
include a CRM component, while others do not, but CRM software systems do not
include ERP components. For example, Salesforce.com is not an ERP system
because it does not handle transactional data. It may access order history or
invoices, but that data is brought in through an integration with the ERP
system.
ERP and CRM are both
business applications that store and analyze data in a relational database.
Both are delivered either through a traditional on-premises model or through
software as a service (SaaS), where the vendor manages the software in its own
data center and customers access it through the cloud.
While NetSuite and
Salesforce.com, the two pioneers in SaaS ERP and CRM respectively, got their
start around the same time, CRM systems were quicker to move to the cloud
because the systems proved simpler to build and businesses were initially wary
of putting financial data in the cloud.
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