In the x-as-a-service economy, your success is inseparable from your customers’ success. Recurring, consistent, and positive customer relationships drive loyalty and future earnings. Every team—from sales and marketing to finance and accounting—now has the responsibility to foster the positive interactions that ultimately drive your success.

But if front-office (sales, service, marketing) and back-office (finance, supply chain, HR) teams operate independently, your business is likely finding it hard to deliver the best outcomes for customers and grow its top and bottom lines. Oracle has invested heavily in integrations to enable Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP to connect to any CRM system from any front-office provider. However, if your ERP and your CRM solutions live on completely different clouds, your IT team may be spending extra resources managing integrations and asynchronous upgrade cycles. And if that’s happening, your CFO, CRO, CMO, and CIO may all be looking at different views of the business. There is a better way. Start by asking these questions:

1. After deals close, how easy is it for the entire business to use your customer data in the ongoing relationship?
Using mismatched ERP and CRM systems gives different teams access to different information (role-specific views of the same information are better). Often customer-facing, operations, and finance teams are working from different customer files, contract histories, and records of asset ownership. So no two departments have exactly the same information or understanding of the data. Addressing this improves the speed at which you can bring on new business and increases the likelihood of delivering good customer experiences. 

2. Can your finance leaders enhance invoicing and accounts receivable to generate faster payments and working capital savings?
Invoicing and accounts receivable suffer when everyone—from field sales to back-office staff—has an incomplete view of customer data including billing information, payment terms, shipping address, etc. Typical workarounds depend on error-prone, manual processes like importing spreadsheets. Addressing this issue can improve the company’s margins, working capital position, and cash velocity.

3. How long and how many people does it take to close your books?
Mismatched CRM and ERP systems make it difficult for finance and sales leaders to see what tasks remain in month-end close procedures, understand sales opportunities that remain open at quarter close, and forecast future business accurately. Inaccurate or disparate information makes more work at reconciliation too. Addressing this issue lowers sales operations costs, improves financial forecasting, and frees teams to focus on more strategic, finance transformation initiatives.

4. Are you regularly chasing contracts, order confirmations, or other crucial information for billing? 
Billing is one of the most important intersections of front- and back-office systems—disconnected solutions complicate the consolidation of data needed to run subscription, value-based, usage-based, and other billing models. Often, this means that sales and finance teams devote staff to error-prone, manually-driven reconciliation to determine what customers owe and when. Addressing this issue reduces sales outstanding, billing errors, and customer disputes.

5. Are you able to support complex use cases (e.g., multi-element arrangement or revenue allocations)?
Accounting has become more complex as standards such as ASC 606, IFRS 15, and AASB 15 determine how and when we can recognize revenue. The burden of connecting siloed sources of information about opportunities, orders, contracts, projects, and invoices makes it more difficult to support product-based revenue models, SaaS models, bundled, and/or usage-based contracts. Addressing this issue can speed the rate at which you recognize revenue and boost confidence in financial forecasts.

6. Do you have a global view of your business, or are you crippled by your big data “gold mine”?
It is difficult to capitalize on information generated throughout the customer lifecycle without a full audit trail of customer data, starting with the original opportunity and going all the way through to sales invoices, debits, and credits. Without it, CFOs, CROs, and CMOs lack insights and granular reporting into customer churn and risk areas, and they may miss the potential for new opportunities. Addressing this issue improves collaboration between executives based on a shared, more accurate understanding of performance data.

7. Have you automated sales-to-finance processes to help your field and back-office teams work more effectively together?
Accounting transactions that are disconnected from your CRM prevent you from automating repeatable, predictable tasks. This slows billing cycles and collection notifications, plus it weakens your control over approval processes and revenue recognition. Addressing this issue reduces revenue leakage and leads to a faster month-end close.

8. Can your finance and operations teams easily launch new products?
Salespeople’s job is to say “yes” to customers, but they often hear “no” from finance teams constrained by systems. Separate sales and finance systems make it more difficult to deliver existing services to new markets, bundle new products and services in creative ways, and develop completely new offerings. Product launches are hamstrung by the need to reconcile and interpret financial, customer, product, order, contract, and billing data. Addressing this issue accelerates the introduction of new products and can improve management of the entire product portfolio.

9. Are your financial and customer data passing securely between systems?
Data jumping between multiple cloud applications from multiple vendors is harder to secure. Similarly, users jumping between multiple cloud systems creates opportunities for bad actors. And as the number of systems grow, cloud monitoring and observability become increasingly challenging. Reducing the number of vendors providing applications can reduce vulnerabilities and improve your organization’s security posture.

So how did you do? You may be thinking: “Not that well, but we’re not making changes after building integrations between Oracle ERP Cloud, CRM technology, and a bunch of marketplace apps.” Yet it doesn’t cost anything to at least evaluate the advantages of a different approach—for the benefit of your business, and your customers. Unified ERP and CRM cloud applications from Oracle allow you to reduce the number of process and data disconnects (to say nothing of licensing fees and other IT expenses) and provide too many benefits to ignore.

Related posts you might like

 

Get more information link

If you’re an Oracle customer and want to get new stories from The Fusion Insider by email, sign up for Oracle Cloud Customer Connect. If you’re an Oracle Partner and want to learn more, visit the Oracle Partner Community.