Why Do You Need to Integrate ERP With Agile PLM?
The benefits of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) are known to everyone. Both of these systems help enterprises operate with more efficiency, organize critical information, and improve their bottom line. You can make them even more useful by integrating them.
The main difference between these two systems is that ERP manages different business functions like Accounting Tax Management Software and ordering. It focuses on the financial side of things and helps businesses in organizing finance-related records. PLM, on the other hand, manages a product through its lifecycle. It serves as a platform that manages your product through its whole lifecycle and organizes all the information. When you use these two together, your businesses processes become more efficient and streamlined, helping you enhance revenue.
Why You Need to Implement Both PLM and ERP?
Product Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Resource Planning deal with different business needs. But the processes they support are closely related, and it’s quite beneficial to integrate them. Communicating with each other, both systems make the other more valuable and accurate.
You can manage the design of a new product in the PLM. When the product is ready for production, all the information related to the product will be in PLM solution. The data is then transferred to ERP to manage the resource involved in the production of the product. If there are any changes during ERP processing, the information passes on to the PLM.
By integrating ERP and PLM, you ensure that they have the most up-to-date information in real-time and the same data as well. It is crucial because a change in one program affects the other one. If there is incorrect data in your ERP software, you might end up ordering the wrong item and too little or too much. There will be a gap in the records, and managing processes will become costly and difficult.
Benefits of Integrating ERP With Agile PLM
PLM and ERP are two crucial systems of any company having their own benefits. But their integration not only helps you take full advantage of both but brings some powerful benefits of its own.
- Improved Efficiency
Integrating the two software enhances productivity and efficiency, resulting in enhanced revenue. Real-time information transfer between them means that you’ll always be aware of what’s going on and plan accordingly. When there is detailed information regarding business operations at your fingertips, you can easily identify the areas for improvement.
Your employees can also save a lot of time and improve productivity, and they won’t have to enter data multiple times. Integration takes over the repetitive tasks and initiates automatic data transfer and updating. Employees can have more time to polish other skills.
- Better Customer Satisfaction
Process improvements, error reduction, and enhanced efficiency that results in integration thus lead to happier customers. Although these two manage the internal processes, their coordination helps in fulfilling customers’ orders quickly and accurately.
As most of the tasks get automated, employees can spend more time helping customers, improving products and tasks, and fulfilling orders more precisely. You can also use these programs for product testing and managing customer care to create better products.
Once you are familiar with the benefits of integrating ERP and PLM, you can also opt for integration CRM. By this, you can improve the usefulness and accuracy of the information in the CRM software for strengthening relationships with your customers.
- Cost-Effectiveness
One of the valuable advantages of this integration is the cost-saving accompanied with it. As the data transfers back and forth automatically in these programs, so there are fewer chances of errors. You need to input the data just for once. It transfers directly to the other system and makes more accurate predictions. Combining them also eliminates the chances of inconsistency existing between these two systems.
The enhanced accuracy means that you can place purchase orders with more confidence. You can avoid wastage of money on unnecessary supplies and prevent shortage that causes delayed deliveries of orders. When you have all the data in one place, you get a clearer picture of your business operations. And you can conveniently identify areas where you can potentially reduce costs.
- Improved Collaboration Between Departments
There are different employees of multiple departments who need to input data into the business systems. If employees upload slightly different data or don’t have access to each other’s data, miscommunication and confusion might occur. It leads to lost revenue, unnecessary costs, and mistakes.
Integration helps you keep everyone on the same page and ensure that all employees have access to the same data. It is particularly important while tracking changes. If there are any last-minute changes, all the affected parties must know about the change as soon as possible. With integrated PLM and ERP, the information gets updated automatically. You can also access the history of the changes to understand better how your processes and products are changing over time.
The integration facilitates communication and information sharing between departments. The collaboration between departments leads to business growth and innovation. When one department has access to another department’s data, they can better understand the role in the company as well as the overall operations of the business. The information help departments to perform better and be more productive.
Conclusion
PLM and ERP both are necessary for your organization to provide a ‘single version of the truth’ and limit errors of re-entry. The idea of this collaboration is to achieve optimized results while keeping track of several other business aspects. An organization can save a lot of time and money while improving customer satisfaction and accuracy with this integration.
If you want to integrate your PLM and ERP software, you can consult a well-reputed vendor like Xavor Corporation. Xavor has an innovative tool, ‘xEngine,’ that performs fast, secure, and easily deployable integration for any enterprise system. The tool works according to your organization’s needs and offers a tailor-made integration solution with a wide range of adapters.