5 Things to Do Before You Connect Your E-Commerce Site to an ERP

Peter (00:11)
And welcome back to the ABCs of ERP and beyond the podcast all about enterprise resource planning systems and how they shape the way businesses operate, grow and succeed in the modern world. And today we are talking about more and more about what companies are facing as they try and scale. know that the way of the world is going with being online. So connecting your

e-commerce site to your ERP is what we're going to be talking about today. It's not just about pushing web orders into a system. It's about being right. means about synchronization of inventory, accurate product data, cleaner logistics, and really the ability to grow and expand your business onto the digital space. And I cannot do this without my fellow co-host, Nirav Shah. Welcome back.

Nirav Shah (00:58)
Reporting for duty sir. Happy to be here again and talking about ERP and all the different ways it touches business. And this topic in specific, talking about e-commerce and how e-commerce companies could prepare themselves or should prepare themselves to integrate to an ERP.

There comes a point in time I think in every e-commerce businesses life that they realize that they're outgrowing all the know the bandages that they put put put in place to manage their their their website manage their accounting manage their inventory manage you know

the customer service, all that stuff. At certain point, the business just can't sustain any longer with put together piecemeal solutions that don't talk to each other at that end of the day. this episode in particular, which I'm seeing more and more when we're looking at prospects and prospects are coming to talk to us is that

Peter (01:46)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (02:04)
these e-commerce companies are realizing before it gets too late, you know, that they need to integrate to an ERP system. But that comes with, right, not just, hey, we need an ERP system. Let's go. Let's just integrate and everything's going to be good and well. These companies don't really fully grasp or understand the groundwork.

that needs to be done before even like even selecting an ERP system, right? And then what happens after you select an ERP system, right? I think today, you know, we'll talk about the precursor of selecting maybe an ERP system for the most part.

Today is going to be the top five tips to prepare an e-commerce site to integrate into an ERP system. there's a lot, believe it or not, Peter, there's a lot of planning that goes to this. And we always encourage our prospects to take the time properly and analyze, evaluate. There's an internal component. You ask yourself questions of what you've done and why you've done it and what you want to do moving forward.

Peter (02:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think this is really interesting one because when we talk about moving onto an ERP, if it's your first ERP, if you're coming from accounting software, Excel spreadsheets, pieces of paper in the warehouse shop floor whiteboards, it's quite a difference in the physical world moving onto an ERP, moving onto that single source of truth, as we say. For an e-commerce platform,

there's not so much that physical change that you notice because you might be in a position where your single source of truth for most of the business is the backend of the e-commerce site, is the Shopify admin area. And then for the finance team, it's their accounting software, whether it's kind of a simple Sage or QuickBooks or something, that's it. It's not really a load of disparate systems. So when we talk about an e-commerce,

site that you have where you're kind of managing inventory, you're managing the data, you're managing orders in that backend system, then we say, okay, guys, let's integrate that into an ERP system. That's slightly different from say a manufacturing business or just a straight distribution business. So point number one that we want to talk about here is the why, the why behind it. So

Nirav Shah (04:01)
Mm-hmm.

Peter (04:21)
Point number one or tip number one, clear goals of the ERP implementation. So why would we even consider ERP

Nirav Shah (04:30)
Yeah, and you know like I think the very first one is that Everyone is running in their own Island right they're looking at their own set of data without being able to see across the business what's happening right that goes from Orders to demand planning to creating purchase orders to what's in your warehouse to you know, how is that impacting in? Shipping and invoicing and what's happening with the financials? So, you know, there's almost like

everyone's like an individual project manager almost in a sense. And they're just juggling and managing data from all these different sides without actually creating better efficiencies in the warehouse floor instead of trying to be better upfront on customer service issues or look at better rates for shipping, being able to find vendors or get vendors that will...

Peter (04:59)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (05:16)
you know, give you better price margin and price breaks, right? For things you have to buy. So instead of doing all these other things that are adding that that's going to add value to the business, instead you are just managing Excel files. You're managing manual reports coming out of your ERP, right? So one of the goals is what do you, know, what do you want to sync? Right? Do you want to sync orders? Right? So somebody else on the other side could see orders correctly on the warehouse floor.

Inventory is inventory hard for your front end to see at the end of the day, right? Is that invisible that you want to actually make that more viewable to not only your customer maybe, but someone in the front office?

Better logistics. And this is a big one. This last point that I have here is expansion into the Omnichannel. All right, is one of the goals for you to not only stay on Shopify, for example, but you also then want to move into micro marketplaces like

Maybe eBay, because you're an automotive distributor. eBay is huge for automotive distribution. Maybe you ought to do Pinterest, or Etsy, because you do something more niche, to have product for a certain group or demographic or something like that. Amazon, you want to expand and reach the whole broader audience around the world. You want to go on Amazon. once you decide that you want to expand, it's just not expanding.

just on that side, but how are you going to take in those orders? How are you going to go ahead and maintain that? How are you going to understand where most of your revenue is coming from? How is your back end team going to know? How are you going to make sure? Does it matter for them to know where that order is coming from? You just have to have little better efficiency in fulfilling higher volume of orders now, instead of fulfilling an order by order basis.

Peter (06:52)
Mm hmm.

that also applies to if you are using 3PL I think also the ability to see these orders, where they're coming from, how they're flowing through your business, especially when we talk about, you know, the logistics side of it, as you were saying, it's crucial, right? Especially when you can't physically go and check the stock all the time. You know, the ability to better track that within

Nirav Shah (07:07)
Thank

Peter (07:15)
DRP as well. That's huge.

Nirav Shah (07:17)
Yeah, yeah, I've, you know, from the customer base that we've taken live using, you know, Shopify and having disparate systems, the common kind of denominator that I've always seen is that people have just got so frustrated that, you know, they're looking at Shopify at their orders, then they're maybe looking at finale, you know, manually to see if there's enough inventory to fulfill it, right? And then if there is inventory,

Peter (07:37)
Yep.

Nirav Shah (07:42)
Then they have to look at a third system like a ship station or something they have to go fulfill the order from there print the picks fill the order from there then they have to go into Shopify and mark that orders fulfilled maybe right and then they have to go to an inventory system to mark that inventory as consumed at then they manually right and it just becomes so much you're having like literally three screens up and There's a frustration in the user's faces and and then here's a funny part you're going to get into a demo and you just show them

Peter (07:45)
Yep.

Nirav Shah (08:10)
Here's an order from Shopify. I'm the customer. created it. It goes right into the ERP system and there's inventory and I just went ahead and shipped it. It did like two or three transactions at once. Like, my God, it's like groundbreaking to them, right? But it's understandable that you got to that point because you're growing the business. The business has kind of now come to a point where that's no longer sustainable.

Peter (08:17)
Yeah.

Nirav Shah (08:33)
So so when you get to that point have clear goals You know why doesn't make sense for us to go into an integrated into an ERP system What are the top four or five items that we do daily that take up 75 % of our day the 80-20 rule Peter right? You're a big proponent of that and and and know that you know if you could solve No That's right exactly right, and then you know right at certain point 80-20 all right am I spending

Peter (08:34)
Mm-hmm.

I my work life and my home life by it.

Nirav Shah (09:02)
80 % of my day, which could be 20 % of my work if it was done in ERP system at the end of the day. And once you come to that realization, now you can say, how do we want to solve these issues that we have currently in our business? And then how is an ERP system going to help me to really ⁓ turbocharge the whole operations?

Peter (09:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. All right, tip number two, my favorite subject. I don't know, I get kicks out of doing this stuff. But tip number two, it's all about data cleaning, clean up your eCommerce site. my god, this is the biggest tip. Surely, the pain if your site is not clean, and you bring all the crap into your ERP system. So ⁓ let's break it down. What particular areas when we say

Nirav Shah (09:30)
Hahaha!

my gosh. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter (09:50)
in your site. What do we actually mean? What are we looking for when we're talking about you know the data?

Nirav Shah (09:54)
Yeah, think sometimes,

yeah, so I think sometimes, right, e-commerce site like any other database could get full of junk, right? You have people coming in and out and, you know, nothing was really actually formalized and how you create SKUs or what type of tags are against your customers' items. Customers missing addresses, for example, right? People are just adding things on the fly.

Peter (10:03)
Mm-hmm

Nirav Shah (10:19)
Right without making any sense of like, well, how do we go ahead? Yeah, you know I know people are doing that. They're really not doing that, you know, but it's A thing right and it's like I said any like any other database it's look at taking a strong look at your data because if you have that, know, if the data is not that you don't trust already, right that you having to manipulate after the order comes in

Peter (10:22)
Surely not. Surely not.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yep.

Nirav Shah (10:41)
higher chances are that you're gonna continue doing the same thing, even no matter how good an ERP system is.

Peter (10:45)
Yeah.

What do we mean when we say data though? Because I would then say, well, yeah, it's easy to go, data, master data, but specifically, what are we talking

Nirav Shah (10:50)
Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, it's like your skew numbers, right? Applying logic to that, that makes sense. Maybe by categories of items. Making sure you have parent-child relationships properly put together. Like, if everything's a skew, maybe you have an opportunity to create like matrix structures, for example, right? You sell a jacket online, but you sell five different variations of that jacket in different sizes and colors and patterns and stuff like that. Well, then maybe look at some additional functionality and...

and create a better user experience by using variants, right? That you would then maybe try to bring into the ERP. Standardizing your taxonomy. This one probably is up to date, more likely than not for most e-commerce companies, but it's the whole navigation. Like, do we have our products under the right subcategories and categories? So when people navigate through, does that make sense, right? Images, unit prices. What about shipping zones?

Peter (11:33)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Nirav Shah (11:44)
It's really easy to slap a shipping zone because, we got this new customer and they were giving them some special shipping. Let's put a new shipping zone in. But should you have really done that? Should you have maybe instead given that customer a coupon code or a promo code by using an existing on that shipping zone? Because now you're managing all these additional zones that are just stuck in your database. We payment methods.

Peter (11:53)
Hmm.

You're promotional price. Yeah.

Hmm.

Nirav Shah (12:06)
just credit card right now, but what about like other credit options, not just maybe Shopify payment, but maybe there's PayPal, maybe there's ShopCash, right? There's gift cards, right? Do you wanna take some of that? Right, and how do you manage that moving forward? So, you know, a lot of decisions have to go into, well, what does our e-commerce site look like? How do we make sure this data is the way we want to transact? We want our customers to transact that way.

Peter (12:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nirav Shah (12:34)
So it's not confusing to them before we go and integrate to an ERP system.

Peter (12:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nirav Shah (12:40)
So, you know, there's a lot of decision points that go into it.

Peter (12:43)
Yeah, yeah. And this is setting you up for success because it's so easy to go, ⁓ my God. it's like, it's not well for the vast majority of people, it's not fun to comb through all of this stuff. Make sure you've got an up-to-date picture for everything. you know, there's a lot of time spent in cleaning up the data. Well, not necessarily just cleaning up the data, but also finding missing data and populating, you know, the

the data that you might have just, that's fine, it's blank. Not often is blank data ever a good thing in the world of ERP. ⁓ And data validation as well. Maybe your e-commerce site is using a coding type for states or a different way of categorizing geographical locations or this or the way the phone numbers are.

Nirav Shah (13:12)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, right.

Peter (13:33)
are categorized like there's so much to it that when you bring that into your especially if you're already in an ERP that you kind of don't want it to be completely different or in a different naming convention. So there's a whole load of stuff where you might actually have the data but it still needs to be checked. Does it align to the good data I've already got in the ERP because especially if you're you know in a position where you've got an e-commerce site but you also are already transacting in an ERP.

Nirav Shah (13:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Right.

Peter (14:01)
You don't want to kind of clash. You want the two to of blend seamlessly in and then let the ERP handle, right? This particular sales order type is a web order. You don't want it to be completely different, you know, and have to manage it differently. The whole idea of this, right, is bringing in the e-commerce site back into that single source of truth. You don't want this kind of completely different thing jammed into the ERP. So it's data cleaning, but it's data validation across all of it. It all needs to be checked.

Nirav Shah (14:29)
Absolutely, absolutely. And understanding, well, you have not only customers, but what if you're also starting to do business on the B2B side? Now you have companies. What do you do with payment terms, right? How are you managing credit, extending credit to customers and stuff like that? You got to think of it that way. It's not just what you're doing now, but how are you setting up your e-commerce site for future growth at the end of the day?

Peter (14:39)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nirav Shah (14:51)
And what

the ERP system that you select be able to support that future growth for you, right? Whether you're do, you know, single site multiple sites different Omni channels things like that So you want you want to be very, you know recognize that early on in this project that that you know that your site might need some you know, some additional You know updates on it before you integrate

Peter (14:55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yep, tip number three, getting onto the geeky side of it, choosing the right connector. There's multiple options here. There's multiple ISVs as well. ⁓ There's some native stuff, like big tip here, choosing the right way to connect your e-commerce site to your ERP.

Nirav Shah (15:23)
Yep.

Yeah, is, know, Obviously, the first two points are huge. This is like right there. You choose the wrong connector. It doesn't matter how much, you know, work you've done on your e-commerce site or, you know, clean the data, understand your goals, but the wrong connector can set you back like 10 steps. ⁓ cause it could limit your growth. could limit what you could actually do and have your back office team see, you know, that type of stuff. So.

Peter (15:55)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (15:56)
finding the right connectors is really really important to make sure it's gonna bring the data that you're capturing in Shopify forward into the ERP. ⁓ The first one obviously, yeah.

Peter (15:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and

different types of data, different types of connector, right? If we think about some ways you can pull and push data in batch, or you can pull and push data real time. That's very different. I've seen it before with something that's been set up and the company's expecting real time when an order's placed to expect to see it within a couple of minutes in my ERP. Then we find out, no, we batch process it every 24 hours.

Nirav Shah (16:11)
Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Peter (16:31)
Like it runs

at 2 a.m. and then it loads all of your things. Well, that's a day. And we know we've had these conversations before with the e-commerce world and the way that Amazon is pushing the service of online shopping. People expect it next day. So if you choose a connector that batch processes stuff and it runs during the night, there's a day, gone. So you can't really start to offer, if you're used to offering next day service or next day delivery on your e-commerce site.

Then you've chosen a connector that works on batch processing. That could massively increase the delivery time to your customers without you even knowing from just choosing the wrong connector.

Nirav Shah (17:05)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Right. Right. Exactly. And not all connectors are made equal, folks out there. If anyone thinks that just because there's an e-commerce connector out there, let's, yeah, yeah, yeah. know, that any, you know, it's a Shopify connector. Let's just plug it in, right? Or it's a big commerce connector. Let's plug it in. Not all connectors are equal. It's important to understand. Yeah, we got a lot of different types here.

Peter (17:13)
And that needs to be on a t-shirt.

All right, so what types of connectors have we got?

Nirav Shah (17:31)
So the first one is native connectors like from Shopify or BigCommerce or WooCommerce where they've kind of created their own connector / open API models in essence where even their connector operates like in like a mini ERP in the backend that they've even kind of developed, right? Like into like maybe into like a QuickBooks or you know, something like that, right? But you know, there's that option.

Peter (17:50)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (17:57)
If you're a small enough e-commerce and maybe ERP is too big for you right now but you want to start streamlining maybe go down that route and look at some some e-commerce connectors that help you keep your data organized for the operations. Then you got some full some what we call IPaaS middlewares integration platform as a service which these are full blown out ⁓ flows and integration points.

Peter (18:13)
Yep.

Nirav Shah (18:19)
You're not building these API connections manually, but these are kind of we call like Celigo or a Boomi or other IPAAS' that are out there. Celigo is probably the biggest one in this particular space. So, you know, Celigo integrates, you know, you have Shopify to Business Central, you have Amazon to Business Central, right? You have...

Peter (18:34)
Mm, yeah.

Nirav Shah (18:43)
You have WooCommerce to Acumatica, right? So these are all pre-built kind of flows or connection points that you have. And they're pretty plug and play. Like you add it and then like, let's see if you want to map some other field in the table, right? Like you have the whole full access to the Acumatica database and you have access to your e-commerce site database and tables. And you could kind of do your own mapping with the fields that you're using there. So that's a pretty popular one. We've done that.

Peter (18:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (19:12)
For multiple customers using Celigo actually And and and their support is phenomenal. I do have to say that ⁓ So that's also a good good option if if you feel like any native connectors aren't gonna be a good fit And then you got the other side of it the native connectors by the ERP publisher ⁓ Like Acumatica for example has their own Shopify connector, so it connects your Shopify side pulls data There's you know directional syncs whether you want to do

Peter (19:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nirav Shah (19:40)
Import or export or bi-directional at the end of the day And different entities that that it connects with business central has their own Shopify sync Connector as well So, you know, they all kind of do the same thing So, you know, maybe that's that's one where you start at the ERP side say well which ERP system is gonna be your growth for the for the future and then you know connect that to your e-commerce site and Then the and then the final one here. Yeah

Peter (19:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, I would say go for the native one.

Go for the native where it's available. It's gonna be, well, I hate to say it, but it's probably gonna be better supported. ⁓ It's probably gonna be more of a seamless connection. You know, it's within the same thing. Like we've seen this at Summit this year, at Acumatica. They had Shopify on stage. So we know that these ERP platforms are wanting to build these partnerships with

Nirav Shah (20:09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

yeah, ⁓ yeah, yeah.

Peter (20:32)
the big e-commerce platforms out there. So native connectivity is probably the most, well, I would say the safest or at least stable. you know, it's gonna be, once it's kind of in, yeah. Especially when we're talking about different connectors, API endpoints. If one shifts, like one company shifts, you're have to reassess your mapping. Like if it's a native one, it's kind of looked after by them.

Nirav Shah (20:42)
Yeah, you're stable. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. Exactly.

Exactly, yeah, and especially with the multi, know dual upgrades that happen per year, right? It just happens naturally. You don't have to worry about doing a whole separate upgrade with your with the third party ISV You're dealing with one vendor at the end of the day one throat to choke FYI, right? ⁓ Which especially something so Intimate together between your e-commerce and ERP, you know, I it's always preferable that you have something that is Very native

Peter (21:01)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nirav Shah (21:21)
in the product, for sure. And then the other side of this, right, outside of going there, is a custom built API. Where, you know, there is no native connector from the e-commerce site, there's no middleware available, the publisher doesn't have a connector, then you custom build it, right? So one we've recently done is we did it in integration from Lyft, which is kind of an ERP system slash order order management system, more or less, e-commerce site.

Peter (21:27)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nirav Shah (21:48)
really, really specific to the print manufacturing industry. you take orders from there and integrate them into the ERP to do the back end manufacturing and fulfillment of that order. And that's where we all custom built the APIs, all of them. Everything from master tables to the sales were header lines and invoicing and sending shipment information back and.

Peter (21:58)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nirav Shah (22:13)
tracking number information back and inventory custom, totally custom built, obviously the most expensive option at the end of the day. Right. And I would say that should be your last approach if you can, you know, literally are so unique that you can't find anything that would have to be your last approach.

Peter (22:18)
Yep. Yeah.

Yeah, and there's a huge world out there. As soon as you look at RESTful APIs, it's great that the world is your oyster but also that's huge to try and get through and work out and build out. Think of the developer hours that could be used just doing that.

Nirav Shah (22:34)
Yeah, that is.

Yeah, I'm telling you this one is a lot of hours that we've spent on it to do it. I probably couldn't even tell you the number of hours, but it's a lot of hours that we spent to do it. It's working really well. know, the client's really happy, but it's been a big mapping. You spend so much time just mapping fields, literally mapping fields, right? Because there could be one business central field and then that could be like five fields on the other side.

Peter (22:48)
Hmm.

Nirav Shah (23:08)
that holds that same data on the lift ERP side. Like it's just, it's crazy. It's crazy. So yeah, know, choosing the right connectors is good. It's probably one of those ones. The more, the more important elements to this whole project is to make sure you have the right connector. That means that you're going to have the right ERP system.

Peter (23:18)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yep. Tip number four, this is just as important. I would say that this is the most important one. I mean, how are you supposed to choose between this testing, testing, testing, testing. We know from ERP migrations, one of the most crucial stages is testing user acceptance testing and just the technical testing of whether it works. So what's your kind of sub tips within the tip of testing?

Nirav Shah (23:29)
you

Yeah, keep especially when it comes to e-commerce Always have like your customer hat on like how is a customer gonna put in an order, right? What's the customer journey at the end of the day, right? How are they gonna handle? How do you handle exceptions when the customer just does something that you don't expect them to do on the e-commerce site, right? Always keep thinking of that

Peter (23:55)
Yeah.

Nirav Shah (24:08)
And because any exceptions or things that you don't take on are ultimately going to go into the ERP as errors, right? Or they're going to be stuck. And then you have to manually clean them in the ERP or manually clean them in your e-commerce. That thing is really synced to ERP and could create confusion and delayed orders at the end of the day. So it's really important that, you and e-commerce is a very fast moving, fast paced industry.

Peter (24:18)
Mm-hmm

Nirav Shah (24:36)
There's zero time for errors, right? Two day shipping, same day shipping, right? That order has to come in from the e-commerce site straight to picking and shipping almost the same day. So you need to test that, right? Test the volume of orders. Try to do a stress test. If you get 400 orders a day, try to put in 400 orders a day. And how do you process those 400 orders a day in the ERP, right? Because it could potentially slow you down if you just feel like, oh, if you're integrated, we're good to go. But what about?

What happens at the back end? How do you logistically get that order from sales or entry to picking, shipping, invoicing? So timing of order changes. An order comes in, customer pays something. Yeah.

Peter (25:11)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

You kind of need to brainstorm, don't you? Brainstorm all

of the things the customer could do or ask for. So things like canceling an order, trying to change an order, or even if you've got a notes box. What if a customer goes, please ship this together with my other order? Can you see that in the ERP side? Do you actually get to see any kind of free type text that they might have put on something? What happens if they go to cancel the order on the e-commerce site?

Nirav Shah (25:26)
Yeah.

Right.

Peter (25:40)
and it's already in shipping status in your ERP. Because the e-commerce site might go, yep, thank you, Mr. Customer, this order has been canceled. Does it actually push anything back to your ERP? Yeah.

Nirav Shah (25:47)
Exactly.

Alright, right. Yeah, otherwise you're be

fulfilling an order that the customer didn't expect, right? For free.

Peter (25:55)
Yeah. And the e-commerce site could have

already handled. Yeah. And that's already the e-commerce site could have already sent that email out saying, thank you. Confirmation of cancellation. it might've already triggered the payment, the refund back, but your warehouse team still see an active order and ship it. And then your ERP tries to invoice it and then it doesn't match against canceled order on the e-commerce site. my God.

Nirav Shah (26:14)
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly right.

God,

accounting, I'm getting a headache already.

Peter (26:25)
This is your world, it's not even my world!

Nirav Shah (26:27)
talking about credit memos, first thing I said I think it was clearing accounts. I'm like, oh my god, oh my god, or returns, clearing accounts. But yeah, no, you're right. You're right, Peter, exactly.

Peter (26:35)
It's one of those things.

If someone's going to find something that doesn't work, it's not going to be your team. It's going to be the customer.

Nirav Shah (26:42)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, 100%. 100%. So test it with real life scenarios as much as possible. It's almost like an ERP pilot test for your e-commerce. Document, document, document at the end of the day. Even though this may seem like it's just an ERP project, this is very much so as well an e-commerce project. If you're doing ERP implementation. Yeah, exactly.

Peter (26:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, this is two systems. You're testing

two systems now, you're testing your e-commerce site and your ERP, do the two work together? You know, if you're doing an ERP implementation, you're just testing the ERP. Does the order processing work in the ERP? Does the shipping work in the ERP? Does the AR work in the ERP? With this, is, does the order processing still work in the e-commerce site? Does that then also work in the ERP?

Nirav Shah (27:10)
Yeah.

All right, right, exactly, exactly.

Peter (27:28)
you kind of do got double testing. Once it's set, it doesn't, it won't feel like you're managing two systems, but you do need to test both, both sides of it.

Nirav Shah (27:31)
Yeah. You're good. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. Like how do you handle sales tax? Right. What if the customer, you know, is ordering from a place that, you know, we just got nexus. What is that going to come over correctly? Right. All that type of stuff. yeah, test, put the, keep the customer hat on as much as you can when you're going through this journey.

Peter (27:46)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Imagine if you've got an e-commerce site where a particular product line is drop shipped. Does that order come into your ERP as a drop ship?

Nirav Shah (27:57)
Yep.

Peter (28:00)
this has to work.

Okay, technical hat off, people hat back on. Tip number five is people management. This is a change management topic for this tip. So there's a few things here, which we already know. UAT is probably linked to training of end users.

Nirav Shah (28:03)
Keep our hat back on.

Yeah.

Peter (28:21)
But I would say this is, it's kind of like tip one where we said we've got the clear goals of the ERP integration. We should also have clear goals of our team. Who's now going to be responsible for, you know, managing exceptions or looking for, or fault finding or, resolving any issues any extra training that might need to happen. So how...

Nirav Shah (28:46)
Yeah.

Peter (28:47)
would we break this down? So tip number five, we just got focus on change management. But what do we actually need to do when we talk about focusing on this?

Nirav Shah (28:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's just constantly thinking about, well, what you've put together, what you've implemented, e-commerce to ERP, that's like the phase one, to get it going at the end of the day. Now, what is phase two? How could you now continue to bring more value to your customer on the e-commerce side, which is going to streamline your orders and make it for faster delivery on the ERP side?

right, ⁓ is understanding that it's not like a set it and forget it type of thing. Because you have this thriving successful ERP e-commerce business, now it's time to really kind of get this plane really up in the air, right, and get into cruising altitude and faster to your customer. So who's going to support the integration, number one. Number two is as you need more functionality,

Peter (29:21)
Yeah.

Nirav Shah (29:43)
the publisher, whichever connector that you got, is it gonna be able to support it. And obviously that comes up also in one of our previous steps that we talked about points is to make sure you get the right connector, but updating the functionality. Don't stay kind of stagnant, what I would say, and think of this as, know, customers, this is really gonna set you apart if you do your backend operations really, really well to get more sales from your customer. So keep focusing on that.

Peter (29:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yep. Yep. Very good. Top five tips we probably could have done with 10 like we could have easily have done 10. But if there's if there's five, these are these are big hitters. All five of these are massive, big, big things to consider. I think that is it because otherwise we'll just keep going.

Nirav Shah (30:14)
And yeah, for sure.

Peter (30:25)
but these

Nirav Shah (30:26)
Yeah.

Peter (30:27)
were definitely the top five. So set clear goals for what you actually want the integration to achieve. Clean up your e-commerce data so you're not importing crap. Choose the right connector. Test real customer journeys, including all of the weird, wonderful things, how returns, all the changes, cancellations, et cetera. And don't forget the people side, as we said. Train your teams. So really the integration sticks, right? Because you want this for the long term.

Nirav Shah (30:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter (30:52)
And Nirav I think you've got one more pro tip as you go live. So you can sneak in a sixth. I'll let you sneak in a sixth.

Nirav Shah (30:57)
I do. Yeah, yeah, sneak and a sixth, exactly.

Yeah, this is good. A customer actually did this recently. And I thought this was brilliant, right? For regular ERP implementation, we always tell our customers, hey, just let your customers or vendors know that you're kind of going through this software upgrade and that if there is an issue with the shipment or something, that they kind of have a little bit more patience with you guys at the end of the day. So a customer of ours just says that they got live on Shopify to Acumatica Integration.

Peter (31:20)
Mm-hmm.

Nirav Shah (31:25)
And right there on their Shopify site, they had a banner they put up right there at Go Live saying something along the lines of that they started and moved to a new accounting inventory system. They don't expect orders to be delayed, but in case there is an issue or a delay, please bear with them. I thought that was brilliant at the end of the day. I think that shows a couple of things that if I'm a customer, like they're investing in their future, they're investing, you know, this is where I'm buying this from, they're investing in their infrastructure, right? I think that's awesome.

Peter (31:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Nirav Shah (31:53)
Number two, is resolving any frustration upfront. Something that were to happen that first week and they can't get an order out like that day or something like that, like that customer already knows. It just reduces the stress level. So that is your platform to your customers. And I think it makes a lot of sense where you also advise them or give them insight into what you're doing in your business so they understand.

Peter (32:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nirav Shah (32:17)
and our patient with you. I thought that was huge.

Peter (32:18)
Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. We did that for the UK, the UK site. made sure the customer service team or anyone that was emailing out like purchasing team to vendors. We got hold of, of course it was easy because we were doing master data cleanup at the time. We said, right, let's just do a mail shot to all of our customers and go guys as of 1st of July, we are changing onto a new ERP system. We did it for a few things. One to help with people being a little bit more flexible and

Nirav Shah (32:32)
Yeah. Yeah.

Peter (32:44)
accommodating and patient with that changeover just in case anything went wrong. But also we said, documents will change. We know the world of cybersecurity is always kind of, you know, the fight between scammers and hackers versus legit people. It's always that tug of war, right? So we kind of said, look, when we change, documents will change. So we gave them an example of what our invoice will now look like, what our order confirmation will look like.

Nirav Shah (32:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter (33:10)
So they knew that it wasn't gonna be a scam because if I suddenly get a document that looks different, it's from probably a different email address. The PDF looks completely different to what I'm used to for the last decade of receiving invoices from that company. I might flag it for spam and not pay it. So it's one protecting us from an AR standpoint, but also...

Nirav Shah (33:13)
Right.

Yep.

Exactly.

Peter (33:29)
from them so they understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. Because at the end of the day, it's an improvement. When we say technology, yes, there's going to be improvements for you in terms of there might be cost savings or more streamlined processes, cetera, cetera, growth opportunities, but also for the customer, right? They do get a benefit of it and might be able to fulfill orders better. You might have more capacity so your lead times might be reduced or something if your flow through is much faster.

Nirav Shah (33:32)
Yeah.

Peter (33:55)
Yeah, I think this is a huge tip and it's great for number six. Almost could have got in there in number five, but letting your customers know ahead of time that this is happening. ⁓ Pro tip. And that one's for free, along with the other five. We haven't charged for any of them.

Nirav Shah (33:58)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Pro tip. Pro tip.

That was so frigging...

Correct.

Peter (34:17)
⁓ just as we do at ABCs of ERP and beyond. So if you're just finding us for the first time, this podcast goes out every single, ⁓ what we record every single week, we publish every two weeks on every major podcast platform as well as YouTube. And we do do it completely for free. It's a bit of fun. We're spreading the message of the stuff that we, we love talking about what we do day to day. So if you've just stumbled across us, make sure you like us subscribe.

tell your friends, push it on LinkedIn, all those cool stuff. So with that being said, Nirav, thank you very much.

Nirav Shah (34:51)
Yeah, thank you.

Peter (34:53)
enjoy the next two weeks and I will catch you on the next episode.

Nirav Shah (34:53)
Absolutely.

You got it,