Your eCommerce business has hundreds of moving parts. When a connection is missed, or a duplication happens, it can cause a cascade of issues that reach from your front- to back-end, interrupting your logistics and shipping processes, leaving customers dissatisfied with their experience, and causing general havoc that can be costly and time-intensive to repair.
The answer is to have a single point of truth (SPOT) which organizes your IT infrastructure and acts as the final authenticator of information. When you have a SPOT, that one system acts as a master data controller for all your business data, a type of trusted hub which is capable of powering and informing all of your other systems.
Using a SPOT is a tested, proven business practice that was developed thanks to the increasing trend of cloud technology adoption. Information systems design and theory are used to aid in the creation and implementation of a primary source of accurate information, to which all software and personnel in your company can confidently refer at any time from anywhere in the system.
Using Your ERP as Your SPOT
Brands that run on eCommerce rely on a vast network of interconnected systems to perform well and achieve success in the online space. Businesses amass and must manage enormous sets of data received from touchpoints including:
- Point of sale systems
- Online customer interfaces
- B2B and B2C eCommerce systems
- Customer service and sales management platforms
- Warehouse and shipping vendors
If you don’t designate one specific data source as your SPOT, or you designate the wrong data source, your entire system can be compromised by a single incorrect entry. Many companies try to get around this issue by siloing their data in a repository to isolate it form the rest of the organization, but this can make it impossible to fully leverage your data to make informed business decisions and plan next best actions.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) can become your most powerful tool for data trust across your organization. Instead of siloing your data or trying to monitor and verify the same data over and over in different systems, your ERP integration becomes your SPOT, ensuring data passing back and forth between the front- and back-ends of your business is trustworthy and accurate. If data is introduced from another source and doesn’t match, your ERP can flag it and your systems can defer to your SPOT to maintain integrity of your systems
Having a solid ERP integration prevents critical data issues that can impact accounting, customer experience, logistics, inventory, and more. Since your ERP becomes established as your entire company’s SPOT, all of your departments can access accurate information through spokes leading from the hub, and each endpoint will have the same validated data.
Choosing the Right ERP Integration
With the right integration, your ERP will be established firmly in the center of your IT infrastructure, and all essential data will pass through it, making it your data controller. When you use the Pixafy erpCommerce™ solution as your SPOT, your entire business workflows and systems can be trusted to have the correct data at all times.
Utilizing erpCommerce™ means that you’ll be able to:
- Eliminate redundancies between systems, since your front- and back-end can communicate in real time for order fulfillment and tracking.
- Maintain a tighter control over your inventory, with instant systemwide updates when an item goes out of stock or levels of available stock drop low.
- Analyze receipts, cost variances and revenues for high-value business intelligence that can help improve sales and boost the bottom line.
Is your business ready to leverage our erpCommerce™ solution for a Single Point of Truth? Contact us today to get started.
