Customer relationship management (CRM) subsystem
The CRM subsystem in ERP.net is used to manage customer relationships and other front-office activities of a company.
General concepts and processes
The main process in the CRM subsystem is:
Activity → Opportunity → Offer → Sales order → Invoice order → Invoice
- Activity - generic activity, related to a party. Includes support for calendar appointments, reminders, questionnaires, etc. Can be used to represent appointments, scheduled meetings, visits, contracts and just about any generic document.
- Opportunity - sales opportunity, with expected revenue and probability. It does not have detail line items.
- Offer - sales offer (quote), with line items. It allows optional selection of some of the items, which the customer has accepted.
- Sales order - sales order from the customer. The main sales document. All documents before it are optional. The sales order initiates the logistics and financial processes, related to the sale.
- Invoice order - an order to issue an invoice. This is an internal document, which is used to track the invoices, which we have to issue.
- Invoice - legal and financial document, finalizing the sales process.
Note
The above diagram shows only the CRM part of the whole process. The full process involves many different modules of the ERP system.
Modules
There are many modules in the CRM subsystem. They are used to manage the different aspects of the CRM processes:
- Contacts and tasks - calendar appointments, party definitions, etc.
- Pre-sales - Opportunities management, quotation, etc.
- Sales - Sales orders, customers, etc.
- Invoicing - Invoicing process management, invoices and BI.
- Marketing - Marketing campaigns, activities, distribution channels, etc.
- Common concepts - Concepts related to pricing, line discount determination, etc.
- Client Center - a single platform to engage with customers
- POS - Manage point-of-sale activities in physical stores.
- Distribution - field sales, sales person targets management, etc.
- Product Configuration - create products based on specs for job shops (made-to-order and engineer-to-order environments).
- Products - manage products master data - products and product measurements, codes, variants, channel, pictures, groups, etc.