ERP stands for “enterprise resource planning”; it’ purpose is to standardize, streamline, and integrate processes across a wide range of business functions. Essentially, ERPs help manage business process and finances by integrating all necessary processes into a single system. Legacy systems may run into problems sometimes because it is often hard to keep everything running at a fast and efficient pace. Also, there may be issues with security since all the data is in one place. As companies begin to expand and try new technologies, legacy systems are slowly becoming outdated or incompatible with new technologies. I liked this resource (https://www.bairesdev.com/blog/7-problems-with-legacy-systems/) if you want to learn more about legacy systems.
CRM stands for “customer relationship management”; its purpose is to manage a company’s interactions with current or potential customers. A CRM system can span across an entire enterprise’s infrastructure, and CRM systems can link up information about current or potential customers. CRM software should be viewed more as a strategic process to understand customer needs rather than a platform. Salesforce is one of the world’s most trusted and used CRM platforms. In Max Labs, we designed a software for Riley to keep track of all her potential investors, including contact and company information, meeting notes, investment amount, and past and future meeting dates. We keep designing our platform to be more efficient for storing information, and our data could be accessed from all users in the company.
CRM and ERP are different in the sense that CRM focuses on sales force automation and converting leads into contacts while ERP aims to coordinate the process of producing and delivering products to consumers. ERP manages financial information about sales. CRM keeps track of the contacts who ordered the products. ERP and CRM serve different purposes but ultimately work towards a shared goal: to increase company information organization.
Hi Sophie, thanks for your response! I thought what you mentioned about legacy systems was really interesting. Do you think it will eventually be so costly to keep legacy systems running that they will be phased out altogether, or do you believe that advents like APIs can keep legacy systems relevant in the new age of IT? Also, do you think that it’s more dangerous, security-wise, to have all your data consolidated in one place, or to have your data spread out in various centralized locations? I would initially think the former, but I know with IaaS and SaaS there are additional security concerns, so I was curious as to your thoughts!