Spreadsheets have ruled Earth for too long—business must embrace the cloud

Independent retailers already tend work across multiple sales channels, including a mix of retail and wholesale, arm’s length and face-to-face, and perhaps including sales agents visiting clients in the field. This is typically handled by an awkward mishmash of technology that’s accreted over time to fulfil each function, and can sometimes still rely on transferring data using paper documents.

Here’s where integrated CRM can have a huge impact, combining a wide range of marketing, sales and, ideally, fulfilment and logistics functions in one system. Not only are there time savings and a reduced risk of error, but everything becomes accessible to everyone, including users on mobile devices. It’s easy to support functions like point-of-sale transactions, taking payments instantly from customers through plug-in credit card readers.

And it’s when all your data is going into one system that you can really start to make sense of it, generating real-time information – business intelligence, in the jargon—that enables smarter day-to-day decisions.

The whole shebang

CRM typically brings together what are referred to as “front office” processes, but we’ve already touched on the need to integrate those with the back office—accounting and administration. Putting the whole lot together brings us back to ERP, today’s buzzword for complete business management solutions.

All of the vendors we spoke to for this story do ERP, though not all are wedded to that term. SAP’s Business All-in-One and Business One, Sage’s X3, and Microsoft’s Dynamics Nav are all examples of ERP solutions, and IBM’s Porter acknowledges that accounting systems, “whether you call it ERP or something else,” will be “at the core” of any SME as it scales.

Integrated ERP solutions weave accounting, distribution, manufacturing, and customer-facing operations into a single platform which can then generate real-time analytics and alerts to actively keep your business running, from updates on which products are selling best in which channels, to reminders of which invoices need chasing. These can be targeted directly to the relevant teams and individuals, avoiding many of the communications challenges and bottlenecks that can arise as a business grows.