Choosing your management software: key functions
What is an erp? The boundary between the different ranges of management software is not clearly defined, and remains an eternal expert debate.
This simplified analysis, which cannot claim to be exhaustive, has the merit of shedding light on the key functionalities of business management software packages.
Functionalities of a sales management application
Sales management software enables you to manage three vital business functions:
- management of the sales cycle: from drawing up quotations or sales proposals to customer invoicing, via order tracking and delivery.
- Purchasing process management: to manage replenishments and supplier orders.
- stock management: i.e. goods movements, as well as inventory and stock valuation functions.
In more general terms, sales management software can be considered to focus on sales processing, while purchasing and inventory management are seen as auxiliary elements for optimizing these processes.
Features of CRM software
The role of a Customer Relationship Management tool - or CRM software - is to gather and process information about a company's customers, with a view to optimizing the company's sales performance.
The three main components of a CRM tool are :
- Sales Force Automation (SFA), which brings together all the tools needed to improve sales productivity. Activity tracking (events, tasks and agendas), customer and prospect management, and sales recording and tracking.
- Marketing campaign management (Enterprise Marketing Automation or EMA), which provides the functionality needed to communicate with customers.
- support management (Client Service Support), which brings together the tools needed to improve after-sales service and customer assistance.
Ultimately, GRC/CRM focuses particularly on increasing sales. Support is identified as a means of building customer loyalty and improving customer knowledge, while marketing is designed to feed databases ultimately intended for the sales force.
ERP software features
Enterprise Resources Planning, or ERP, is an integrated software package designed to bring together the company's main functions and process them in a single database, thus facilitating and accelerating the flow of data between ERP components.
The basic functions of an ERP are purchasing and sales management, then inventory and logistics management, and finally accounting, finance and human resources management.
ERP therefore takes care of the entire sales process, from quotation to invoice. As we shall see, however, these functions can also be managed by entities other than the ERP itself.
Each type of software has its own functional scope, and the boundary between ERP, Sales Management and CRM is not obvious. In fact, the terms are often confused, sometimes even by professionals.
Read other articles by the same author:
- How to produce a quality inventory?
- Invoice follow-up: how to follow-up on a customer
- E-commerce accounting
Article translated from French