EP102 ERP Ain’t Easy: How to Take the Pain Out of B2B Ecommerce Integrations
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[00:00:00] JOSHUA WARREN: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Commerce Today. Today's episode is all about ERPs, specifically ERP ain't easy. Decided to get back to some more casual roots with this title. And it's really about taking the pain out of B2B e commerce integrations. It's actually inspired by a new client that I have that a B2B business that is really struggling with their ERP and ERP integration, and really got me to thinking about how there's so many different ways that people look at their ERP and integrate into their e commerce stack.

[00:00:36] JOSHUA WARREN: Some of those ways are more painful than others. And some of those ways seem to be more efficient than others. So that's why I wanted to chat about with y'all today. So obviously ERPs, enterprise resource planning systems, they've really gotten away from that name. I feel like there's businesses of all sides using ERPs for all sorts of things, but typically pricing, inventory, order management, accounting, things like that will live within your ERP.

[00:00:59] JOSHUA WARREN: [00:01:00] And. It really matters a lot because I have seen some poor ERP integrations that require a lot of manual work. You have your finance team taking printouts or PDFs of orders, keying them in, that sort of thing. That's not good. Also, I have seen actually ERP integrations that are so bad that it doesn't Holds back what is possible in the e commerce platform where new features, new ideas aren't implemented because of the amount of time basically it takes to update the ERP integration.

[00:01:27] JOSHUA WARREN: If the ERP integration is really brittle or hard to work with. So. We're going to chat about that today and really why getting a solid ERP integration is so important for a successful B2B brand. Um, obviously it's important, can be important for B2C as well for our retailers that are listening, but really B2B, I mean, your pricing catalogs, your per customer pricing and catalog data, things like that.

[00:01:50] JOSHUA WARREN: Typically for a B2B brand live in that ERP and make it even more complicated than the retail case. I've seen so many cases where systems are disconnected. So [00:02:00] either there's no inventory updates or inventories updating maybe once a day or sadly once a week between e commerce and your warehouse operations or your, your just distributors, other channels that you're selling through.

[00:02:14] JOSHUA WARREN: And that obviously isn't good, especially when you're a B2B'er and you have people that are depending on you. We have a client that sells pipe fittings to the industry and they have lots and lots of pipe fittings and those are very important. When something breaks on a job site and they need to be able to replace it, or when there's a really big project where a whole lot of pipe is being replaced all at once.

[00:02:35] JOSHUA WARREN: If they need 200 of this very specific pipe fitting and they place an order to be delivered to that job site the next day, they need to know they're going to get all 200, that you're not going to go to your warehouse to pull those. And then suddenly you discover, Oh no, there was a, an order that hadn't synced through yet for 20 of these that are already shipped out.

[00:02:53] JOSHUA WARREN: They're not actually in here. Also your customers just feel it when your systems aren't talking together very well. So there's. Order [00:03:00] delays. If orders are requiring some manual processes to be synced across, if prices are inconsistent or those stockouts that I already mentioned, and really very first question to ask when looking at an ERP integration might be one that you don't expect, especially from an e commerce expert and not an ERP expert is.

[00:03:19] JOSHUA WARREN: Do we need this ERP? Are we using the right ERP? And I've actually had e commerce projects get delayed by a year or more because I start out with that question and I say, wait, before we do a lot of work integrating this ERP or improving this integration, Is this even the right ERP for you right now? And in some cases I have found that people are in ERPs that are way too big for them, that are just way too complex.

[00:03:43] JOSHUA WARREN: And that's actually increasing their cost, increasing their integration costs, the complexity, the frustration. And so by stopping and saying, wait, do we even need this ERP can be actually a really good place to start, but assuming that you need your ERP, or you have been told you are not allowed to even [00:04:00] suggest changing ERPs, which I have Heard that many times as well.

[00:04:03] JOSHUA WARREN: You need to start with a goal and you need to decide, okay, what does success look like? And I think a really good example of that is some companies need real time, like literally real time is instantaneously as possible inventory sink. Others you might be able to get away with syncing every 15 minutes, every hour, that sort of thing that can completely change the architecture of the integration between your ERP and your e commerce platform.

[00:04:28] JOSHUA WARREN: So really important to decide that. Also deciding, do you want to automate literally everything or do you want to automate say the 80 percent of things that Take the most time and not worry about that last 20 percent and really setting those goals can help whomever is doing the integration between your ERP or e commerce platform, pick the right solution for you.

[00:04:49] JOSHUA WARREN: And then speaking of picking the right solution, there's a lot of different approaches. There's a lot of different tools. There are systems that are an iPass, which is an integration platform as a service. And actually [00:05:00] there's one called calm that I've worked with quite a bit. And if they already integrate with your e commerce platform and with your ERP, that might be, you might be able to skip the rest of the episode and use them because they can definitely shortcut a lot of this time and cost.

[00:05:15] JOSHUA WARREN: However, you still need to decide, is that the right approach for you? And especially looking at. It's rare these days. I would recommend a really monolithic extension based approach. And what I mean by that is say you're using Adobe commerce. There are extensions you can buy that integrate with a number of ERPs.

[00:05:34] JOSHUA WARREN: And that was the state of the art five or 10 years ago of how people were integrating their platform with their ERP. I have found those typically tend to be encrypted extensions. So you don't have access to the source and they can become very brittle over time. So while that was kind of state of the art before now, I really recommend stop and look at something more modular.

[00:05:53] JOSHUA WARREN: I've been talking a lot lately about composable commerce, and I know there's a lot of different ways to interpret what that means, but [00:06:00] really I would look at. What is the most lightweight way to integrate your e commerce platform and your ERP? And depending on what APIs your ERP has and what APIs your e commerce platform has, that can be something like iPaaS.

[00:06:14] JOSHUA WARREN: That could be something like some small components. We used to call it middleware. Seems like no one wants to use that term anymore, but just some simple ways to integrate between those two. And again, just really think about if you're going to use an extension, if you're going to use something that's more monolithic, Not only can that be more brittle and cost more in the long run, there are, I've seen cases where if the ERP integration breaks.

[00:06:37] JOSHUA WARREN: Orders can't be processed or orders can't be accepted even. So really think about how tightly you're coupling or combining or connecting your ERP with your e commerce platform. Another thing to look at is standardizing your data formats. And I don't just mean Excel versus CSV. I have seen cases where one system stored units of measure.

[00:06:58] JOSHUA WARREN: As only whole numbers [00:07:00] and the other system was using decimals. This was actually someone that was selling the materials to make candles. So waxes, melts, things like that. And in one place you could have 1, et cetera, ounces. But in one of the other systems, you can have 1. 5 ounces. And when that got sent over to the system that didn't accept those decimals, suddenly 1.

[00:07:22] JOSHUA WARREN: 5 ounces, it just truncated it to one ounce. That was a problem. So definitely look at how your ERP is, especially treating your inventory quantities and how your e commerce platform is. That might be an area where you do need a little bit of extra code to smooth between those two, or you might need to make a decision that again, you need to change either the ERP or the e commerce platform before you go much further.

[00:07:45] JOSHUA WARREN: One of the other things that we like to do at Creatuity is however you design the solution, however, you're looking to integrate your ERP or e commerce platform, building some reporting, building some logging and some tracking. Just so again, let's [00:08:00] say you've decided we're going to sync our inventory in real time and you go set out to do that.

[00:08:05] JOSHUA WARREN: And you get that done every once in a while, there might be a delay. Something might go a little bit slower, maybe instead of real time, it took five minutes. If you don't have the right kind of logging in place and the right observability and that system to see how that sync is going, then you're not going to know, you might not even know that delay occurred until someone complains and you're not going to know why it occurred.

[00:08:25] JOSHUA WARREN: So having that. Extra layer of reporting and observability can be really important. so we actually have a few case studies on the Creatuity website about ERP integrations and e commerce platforms. Actually, one of the most common ERPs that we integrate with is Epicor Eagle. Hopefully most of you actually haven't heard of that one.

[00:08:44] JOSHUA WARREN: That's an older ERP. It uses a very, very dated programming language. It also uses a very dated file format for integrations and transferring data. It is used by a few different brands we've worked with, including Rural King and Family Farm at Home. [00:09:00] And we were able to integrate that into Magento. We've actually refined our approach to integrating Epicor Eagle into e commerce platforms throughout these projects, and.

[00:09:10] JOSHUA WARREN: Now we really do it through that more composable approach. We don't inject anything into the Magento or Adobe commerce site to actually power that integration. All of that is done through some, again, the term we don't use anymore, but there's some middleware and through different composable components that keep those two platforms in sync.

[00:09:29] JOSHUA WARREN: And so. Really that looks like building out some connectors and wrappers and composable pieces that really understand the Epicor Eagle file format and how to ingest files from Eagle, send files to Eagle, all that fun stuff. And then we have another set of components that just really speak Magento and Adobe Commerce really well.

[00:09:50] JOSHUA WARREN: So thanks to those components, it was really easy to connect them to each other and get that ERP integration running. I'm very happy to report that as even humming along [00:10:00] nicely here. I'm recording this during the holiday season and their inventory is sinking great between what's available in their stores and what's available.

[00:10:08] JOSHUA WARREN: To buy online for pickup in store. Thanks to the fact that wasn't a big monolithic integration, but more composable one. So I've talked a lot so far about composable commerce, and I really feel really strongly about composable commerce. You're going to see a lot more for me in 2025 about it. I am basically shifting my thinking about e commerce.

[00:10:29] JOSHUA WARREN: Really into two areas. And that is how do we make this a more composable, more modular, more lightweight approach, and how do we better incorporate AI to make this more efficient? I always have to mention AI. It is my favorite subject. Composable though, it can be so powerful because let's say you go out and you buy a module for your e commerce platform that integrates your ERP to your e commerce platform.

[00:10:52] JOSHUA WARREN: First of all, that's only going to get you that one e commerce platform and that one ERP. Let's say you change ERPs [00:11:00] later. You got to buy a whole new system to integrate the two. Or let's say you change e commerce platforms. Again, you're buying a whole new extension to integrate the two. It also can be so much more brittle and you're stuck with whatever that extension happens to integrate.

[00:11:13] JOSHUA WARREN: If it, if there's parts of your ERP that you don't use. But that extension expects it to be populated, suddenly you have overhead of syncing data between your ERP and your e commerce platform that you're not even using. So that's where you build it in that composable way, like I mentioned earlier, the case study, by building it that way, let's say in the future that client wants to move to Shopify.

[00:11:33] JOSHUA WARREN: Now, Our code that talks to Epicor Eagle doesn't change at all. It's just, it's now connecting to our code that is designed to talk to Shopify. So that composable approach makes these systems much more interchangeable, lowers your total cost of ownership. And I think, I think really in the next year, people are going to start looking beyond the e commerce platform and that's a whole other separate episode.

[00:11:56] JOSHUA WARREN: But basically what I mean by that is. You shouldn't be [00:12:00] making decisions based on your e commerce platform. E commerce platforms pretty much almost become a commodity at this point. You should instead decide. What does your business need? And how do you build that in a way that no matter what e commerce platform you're using in the future, what ERP you're using in the future, your e commerce tech stack shouldn't have to be completely replaced just because you're changing one component.

[00:12:20] JOSHUA WARREN: Also already mentioned AI, but I do this more composable approach to ERP integrations, because it gives you some points where you can insert AI into the process. There are some clients that we work with that don't have a PIM to manage their product data. They just have an ERP. In those cases, when we are pulling product data in and out of the ERP, when we have this composable approach, it's so easy to add a component that uses OpenAI's APIs to improve your product data or to Catch certain things, especially if you're working in a regulated industry, you can even just have the AI layer or component searching for certain keywords, searching for certain things that might cause [00:13:00] a regulatory or compliance issue for you later.

[00:13:03] JOSHUA WARREN: You don't have to go out and buy a system for that. You don't have to go out and buy an extension for that. That is literally something that just another component that we add in to this system. So that is a composable commerce and ERPs, just some really practical steps. I always like to make it. The whole reason we call this commerce today is I want it to be something you can apply to your business and to your roles in e commerce director today.

[00:13:25] JOSHUA WARREN: So if you are sitting at a B2B business right now, you're the e commerce director or More often than not, the poor director of marketing or director of it. That's also a director of e commerce, but probably isn't paid for having two director roles. I would first sit down, look at your current ERP. Look at your current e commerce platform.

[00:13:43] JOSHUA WARREN: Like I mentioned, first figure out, is this even the ERP you want to stick with, or do you have some challenges with the ERP, but assuming you're good with your ERP, look at what's working and what's not, and if they are already integrated. Is it working well? Are there pain points or their frustrations? If they're [00:14:00] not already integrated, what are the most important things that you need to accomplish in that integration?

[00:14:05] JOSHUA WARREN: Then look at your biggest pain points and figure out, let's say you want real time inventory sync, but you're using an extension that is encrypted code and they only provide inventory syncs every 30 minutes. Chances are you're going to have to change your integration to fit that. And again, that's a reason I would recommend away from these more monolithic extension based integrations.

[00:14:27] JOSHUA WARREN: However, if it's something simpler, Hey, we just need the order data order tracking data to flow back into our e commerce platform. Really no matter what type of integration you're already using, it's, that's a really good place to start with a lightweight composable solution for syncing from your ERP into your e commerce platform.

[00:14:44] JOSHUA WARREN: So. That's where, you know, my team at Creatuity or anyone that's really familiar with this approach to composable commerce and headless software can come in and can build just that piece for you. So. That's what I would do. I would look at what you currently have, [00:15:00] find your biggest pain points, figure out, is this going to require a complete wholesale change of how this integration works, or is this a piece where someone can come in and just improve this one component?

[00:15:10] JOSHUA WARREN: Definitely don't assume you're stuck. I have talked to so many people that have said, I was told that this extension is the only way to integrate between ERP. So we're just stuck. We just have to accept what it offers. That was the case maybe 10 years ago. But there are so many more options. Now there's services like iPass, there's companies like Creatuity that can come in and build a more composable connector.

[00:15:34] JOSHUA WARREN: There's even more and more ERPs that are moving towards GraphQL support, where you can actually then very easily integrate that into an e commerce platform. If it's also speaking GraphQL. So please don't assume you're stuck. If you want to reach out to me, I do free 30 minute e commerce consulting and problem solving sessions.

[00:15:53] JOSHUA WARREN: You can find a link to that on my LinkedIn to book that time on my calendar. Love to chat with you. No sales pitch, no [00:16:00] pressure, just to make sure you understand what your options are and you get to the best place possible with your integration between your e commerce site and your ERP. Thanks for listening or watching as always.

[00:16:12] JOSHUA WARREN: I am looking for guests to come on commerce today. If you're interested, just please reach out to me. I have a scheduling link. I can send you where you can even pick the week and the time that you want to record, and it's a lot of fun. And again, my name is Joshua Warren. I'm the CEO of Creatuity, and you can find me on LinkedIn as Joshua Warren with the Creatuity Gold background behind my headshot.

[00:16:33] JOSHUA WARREN: Hope you're having a great week and I will talk to y'all next week.

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