Your customer information lives in Salesforce; your product information lives in an ERP system, such as SAP. But, these systems don’t talk to each other. When a customer orders your product, how can you fulfill orders? On top of it all, you need to migrate to SAP S/4HANA — will that serve as an opportunity to solve some of your integration problems?
Sound familiar? It should. We surveyed 800 global IT leaders for our 2020 Connectivity benchmark report, and discovered that enterprises have an average of 900 different systems, but that only 28% of those systems are integrated. While nearly every enterprise is undertaking digital transformation, 89% of IT leaders say integrating data silos is an obstacle. What’s more, the average transaction touches 35 different systems, with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems often acting as the hub for most of these transactions.
ERP as the digital backbone of businesses
Across virtually every industry for almost 30 years, ERP has been at the foundation of the business. ERPs act as the system of record or data master for most of an organization’s data and transactions, containing important customer and business information across most essential business functions in finance, human capital management, enterprise performance management, and supplier relationship management.
SAP accounts for a bulk of the ERP market share, with 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touching an SAP system. SAP’s flagship on-premise ERP, known as ERP Central Component (ECC), is quickly approaching its end of maintenance in 2027 (extended from 2025), and as a result, customers are beginning to migrate their applications, processes, and data to SAP’s next-generation solution, SAP S/4HANA Cloud. As customers embark on this challenging, multi-year journey, they face entirely new integration challenges.
Expanding beyond ERP
With the explosion of best-of-breed solutions across every industry, today’s tech stacks expand far beyond ERP. IT budgets are increasingly allocating for SaaS apps to drive differentiated experiences. Companies increasingly rely on modern CRM systems to act as a system of engagement, where employees prefer to do their work. IDG reports that 73% of enterprises have at least one application or a portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the cloud, with almost half of cloud computing budgets allocated to SaaS apps (48%).
To meet business requirements, employees need real-time access to accurate data on any device in order to make timely and sound business decisions. Without proper ERP integration with CRM and SaaS apps, employees are forced to pivot between systems, sometimes requiring customers to talk to multiple departments, and often self-service is unavailable. And employees are just as frustrated as customers with these legacy experiences.
How do you optimize integration?
Connecting these systems together is crucial to delivering the connected customer, partner, and employee experiences that bring digital transformation. MuleSoft enables businesses to quickly build integrations that synchronize data and automate transactions between ERP and Salesforce. Customers integrate 66% faster on average, using out-of-the-box connectors and templates for common ERP systems like SAP, Oracle EBS, NetSuite, and more. Benefits also include up to 3x faster order provisioning and fulfillment by automating workflows across systems.
For customers migrating to SAP S/4HANA, MuleSoft offers a new SAP S/4HANA Cloud Connector, which automates and operationalizes core business operations related to financial accounting, controlling, and materials management, to sales and distribution, and customer service that are now moving to the S/4HANA environment.
Integrated CRM and ERP allows businesses to:
- Create a single view of customers, prospects, partners, and employees.
- Increase productivity through business automation.
- Bring in multiple data sources to fuel BI through enterprise-wide analytics.
- Improve user experience — no more switching between applications.
Ready to get started with Salesforce and ERP integration?
In this demo, we will show you how to easily synchronize data between Salesforce and SAP S/4HANA, the brand new cloud edition of SAP. Once the data is synchronized, organizations can automate business processes like order-to-cash process, refunds, and returns.
