ERP ecommerce integration
Clarity ecommerce™ with ERP
ERP (enterprise resource planning) software is a vital tool for collecting and storing data on all aspects of your business. From managing inventory to accounting processes to HR resourcing, ERP platforms provide the information you need to streamline processes, increase your margins, improve cash flow, and drive growth. When combined with a powerful solution like Clarity ecommerce™ with Clarity Connect™, your ERP can leverage the full power of integrated ecommerce to address your customer’s evolving needs.
With years of experience working across industries, Clarity’s platform is suited to numerous verticals, including manufacturing, retail, services, distribution, and the public sector. Robust security features keep customer transactions safe as they are pushed between your public-facing storefront and internal ERP. A scalable and extensible solution, Clarity ecommerce™ grows along with your company without sacrificing speed or performance.
Clarity ecommerce™ with Clarity Connect™ successfully integrates with:
Don't see your preferred ERP listed here? Let us know. Clarity is constantly updating its integration offerings.
Clarity Connect enables the following integration capabilities for ERPs:
When organizations assess the benefits of an ERP integration to their ecommerce website, there are several key factors to consider. Below, is an outline of recommended considerations and steps to complete:
Security
This is always a major concern for two-way integrations. ecommerce platforms and public facing storefronts typically have complex security constraints. Clarity has developed a middle ware layer called Clarity Connect that allows customers to securely push data to the Clarity Connect middleware that interfaces with ERP APIs. This allows data to go past the company firewalls, and isolate the data that needs to be sent and received from the public facing storefront. Clarity connect dramatically reduces the surface area for a potential security issue and creates an intermediate clearinghouse confirming data is securely pushed and pulled between the internal ERP platform and the external ecommerce storefront.
Performance
ERP instances are usually secure and housed in a different physical location than the public facing website. Without a middleware layer, this would potentially cause major lags in data load times and other performance metrics. Clarity Connect enables a rapid load time and intelligent refreshing of the externally facing data to reflect internal updates in real time. By effectively pushing updates on a real-time basis, details that would otherwise take minutes to load on the site now load within milliseconds as they're cached on the external interface. In addition, specific customer data that needs to be pulled from the ERP system in real-time is pulled in dynamically using AJAX loading techniques to dramatically improve performance.
Shipping and Freight
Due to the nature of Clarity's past projects we have extensive experience with not just the standard UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL and other standard carrier integrations for shipping costs and package tracking and returns but we also specialize in helping setup and configure the pick list and label printing, scanning and implementation of the physical packing stations and picking process to improve internal workflows as well. In addition to being able to provide support for the actual order management and processing of orders for different carriers we also specialize in working with freight carriers to automate the quotes, pricing, bill of lading setup and processing, obtaining customer specific pricing, and dynamically providing freight shipment status as well.
Taxes, Customs and Duties
Many companies operate abroad, but few currently operate with fully automated processes for their international transactions. Clarity delivers in domestic taxes and integration with internal ERP tax tables, custom tax tables, and setting up external API integration but also offers extensive specialization in international taxes, customs and duties as well. Specifically, Clarity delivers customs and duties integration to dynamically pull this information from the ERP platform or enable third party integration for this component as well to pull the most up to date customs and duties data in real-time for global payments and ordering.
Quotes and Workflows
In addition to managing and placing orders, many business find their processes run smoothest with a streamlined human interaction to facilitate the process. This can apply for all orders or orders within a certain segment of business. In either case, Clarity Connect is able to pull in the ERP's sales order documents and help streamline the quoting workflow. In addition to helping with notification e-mails and embedding quotes, Clarity's ERP Sales Documents integration directly pulls quote status and allows the ERP system to trigger workflow steps. This reduces the chances of human error. Alternatively, some clients prefer a simple web interface for their sales team. This allows sales team members to focus just on their quotes and orders, instead of logging into the ERP system to manage this data. Connect’s middle ware tool updates your ERP system seamlessly.
ecommerce integration to Line of Business (LOB) Applications
Most mid-large sized businesses integrate several, if not dozens, of LOB applications to streamline their workflows. In addition to ERP ecommerce integration, Clarity offers full customization capabilities to tightly integrate other LOB applications such as order fulfillment tools, support and ticketing tools, CRM and service tools, email and newsletter/marketing applications, etc.
Timeline and Risks
As a final consideration, we highly recommend a full internal audit of the prioritized list of requirements as well as an external review by an expert, like Clarity. This is vital to ensure your desired outcome. In addition, it's critical to establish timeline criteria if there are hard deadlines. Setting clear objectives for prioritized deliverables with clear contingency plans will help smooth the process significantly.
Clarity and ERP integration
ERP integration has the ability to boost your ERP and ecommerce operations to new heights. Clarity is an expert in helping deploy over 600+ successful projects, and optimizing clients’ processes. To learn more about how your team can take full advantage of your ERP software, please speak to a Clarity consultant today.