2. Data Integrity and
Business Systems
Integration
Case Study: Using Informer to achieve and maintain data
integrity in ERP to CRM integration
3. Who is the Presenter?
• Jesse Owsley, MBA
• Adjunct Economics Instructor, Drury University
• Epicor ERP and BI Analyst and Consultant
• MIS Manager, Elk Supply Company
• MIS Project Manager, Southern Supply (Current)
4. Purpose
To examine a specific case study to demonstrate general
capabilities of Informer in order to help you find ways to
bring value to your enterprise with Informer.
5. Who is Southern Supply?
Southern Supply is a family of manufacturing and
distribution companies headquartered in Springfield, MO
6. How do we use Informer?
• ERP
• Distribution
• Manufacturing
• CRM – Tour de Force CRM (TdF)
• WMS – Total Warehouse Logistics (TWL)
• Proof of Delivery (POD)
• Ecommerce System
• Document Management System (MaxRecall)
• Imported Data in Informer 5 Workspace
7. Case Study: ERP to CRM Integration (1)
• SMC is a distributor of electrical and automation and other
industrial products to manufactures and other industrial
customers
• SMC employs teams of outside salespeople and technical
specialists to sell complex and highly configured products
• SMC is a long time user of Infor SX.e ERP and Tour de Force
CRM
9. Use Case: ERP to CRM Integration (3)
• Over time, everything has become more complex:
• The Technology Environment
• Customer Requirements
• More Technically Complex Sales
• Complex Kitting (Manufacturing Processes)
• Evolution of ERP and CRM capabilities
• Evolution of more complex roles for Team Members
10. Use Case: ERP to CRM Integration (4)
• The result is a number of variances and exceptions in the
integration resulting in Out of Balance issues between ERP
and CRM
• It’s time to review the integration and make it sing again!
11. Set up for Success!
• Upgrade SX.e ERP to up-to-date release
• Upgrade Tour de Force CRM to up-to-date release
• Train SX.e ERP users on new release
• Engage with Tour de Force Professional Services to train
users on Best Practices
12. Three Step Iterative Process
• Discovery and Analysis of Problems
• Dashboard Alerts to identify problems
• Ad hoc queries to investigate causes
• Corrective Action
• Corrective Training/Process Fix
• Data Cleansing
• Ongoing Alerting
• Emerging Problems (Admin knows FIRST!)
• Data Conflicts (Solve problems BEFORE they happen!)
19. Three Step Iterative Process Result
• Discovery and Analysis of Problems
• Corrective Action
• Ongoing Alerting
• Organically grows a self reporting data integrity model to
help you stay in <3 with your data
i my
23. Thank You!
Case Study: Using Informer 5 to achieve and maintain
data integrity in ERP to CRM integration
Editor's Notes
With Southern Supply about 5 years
We will show you how SMC uses Informer to solve data integrity problems which affect integrations between various business systems.
To be clear, any time I refer to ‘Informer’ I am referring to release 5.
We will examine specifically the work we have done with our ERP to CRM integration in order to demonstrate Informer’s general capabilities to help manage similar instances.
The case study is specific but the application is general.
Informer 5 user for about one year.
Informer 4 user for four years = ‘Old Informer’
We are continually finding new ways to employ Informer 5.
I have more examples that I have formerly and currently report from but that’s all the room I have on the slide.
UPS Worldship, Infor Storefront, Website database, & cet.
SMC is one Southern Supply Company
Use Informer for a variety of reporting needs for just that company
ERP is great for the distribution side
Maintaining pricing
Managing inventory
Processing Sales Orders
TdF CRM is great for
Sales Funnel Management
Sales Force Administrator
Analytics and Reporting
We integrate Sales Order, Customer and other data from the ERP to the CRM daily
The problems are not specific to us or specific to this integration - this is everyone’s experience.
As a BI consultant with Epicor, I have worked with hundreds of businesses throughout North America and every one experiences the same issues.
Not airing any dirty laundry
Tech Environment – new tools, mobile,
Customer – Their other vendors and our competitors are doing new and innovative/disruptive things
Technically complex sales – we sell technology – it doesn’t sit still
Kitting – the verticals we’re in are doing more manufacturing to bring more value added to sales
ERP and CRM – how much have yours changed in last 10 years? New capabilities/New UI
Our users are crossing roles to meet customer requirements
The Macro situation was ok, even pretty good. Let’s say we’re 99% accurate. However, if you have 100,000 sales transactions a year, how many issues does that leave to discover and resolve every day?
Questions:
Why don’t invoice totals match
Why don’t costs match?
Why don’t I see this order I placed yesterday?
Why is a sale to another division reported on my division sales?
Disruptions:
Sales Managers time chasing problems and manually compiling reports
Sales People trying to know where they are relative to targets
Lots of time from everyone including admin tracking down and addressing problems
Overall loss of confidence in business systems and in reported numbers
Prior to digging in hard on the reconciliation we upgraded everything and did user training to set ourselves up for success.
Set up dashboard to find all exceptions that are happening on a daily basis
This is ENORMOUSLY more efficient than previous manual process of comparing ERP to CRM!!!
Let me paint a picture
Manual process – compare reports, drill down, in a complex, dynamic environment – just ‘no’ – that’s a full time job in itself and swimming upstream - in shark infested water - with lead weights – at night – in a hurricane - just ‘no’
before = YIKES!!! – after = ‘Ahhh…’ DJTWTAT
This is a particular strength of Informer to be able to easily report from two or more data sources
Look at last line – invoice 4002753-0
It’s helpful to view data in the ERP when a problem is identified
However:
ERP is not set up for database analysis – it’s set up for the application
Have to drill around to multiple screens and the info you want may not even be displayed
The CRM shows the same information in completely different formats
That’s great – that’s what it’s supposed to do
But that doesn’t aid in reconciliation – data is presented in such a way as to be consumable by the user, not for reconciliation purposes
I can use Informer to look directly at the database tables
See the important fields
See lots of info on one page that would be multiple pages on the ERP
Ability to do calculation to help in analysis
I can customize the way it looks for the purpose of reconciliation
As a problem condition is identified, corrective action can be put in place to prevent issue in future:
Training (helps a little)
Set up data validation/require fields and so on in ERP where possible (helps going forward)
Identify records for data cleansing in existing data
As each item is discovered which causes problem in the integration, it is added to a Master dashboard
Take the work already done and just monitor the condition automatically going forward
Automatically refreshed and automatically presented on the ERP portal when Admin or other selected user logs in
Show only the alerts relevant to the user
A great relationship is worth protecting
Make an investment in your relationship with your data
This makes me so happy, I want to cry
Work with Vendor to make changes to the integration in test environment
Informer lets us compare the data from three different data sources!!!
Easily see how data is affected by programming changes
Simple sorting and filtering on calculated columns makes an overwhelming task very manageable
Example – after making the first set of changes to the integration, we had 152 exceptions outside of tolerance in a dataset of something like 100,000 records. We asked the vendor to make a specific change and as soon as it was in place, the dataset refreshed automatically we I could immediately see that we had only 75 exceptions that were out of tolerance in that same dataset.
Is made a previously overwhelming analysis almost trivial.
