Integrating ERP With Social Media

INTEGRATING ERP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA -- Over the past years, organizations have been looking for ways to integrate social media in their ERP software applications. This integration needs to work both ways. You need to be able to search conversations and other social media data quickly so you can determine who said what to who and when they said it. ou also need to be able to link any object in the application freely with social media conversations

However, not much success has been reported. It is only over the last four years that we’ve started seeing social media elements being robustly integrated in ERP software applications. Over the past four years, as software development companies such as SAP and Salesforce.com were busy trying to figure out how best to integrate social media tools and data into their applications, something funny happened.

Most of the social integration done in the past was disconnected from enterprise apps. For example, a company could start a forum or a wiki page to provide collaboration opportunities to their employees. However, after the conversations on the social platforms, employees had to leave and return to work on their enterprise apps.

Social media had already made its way into the enterprise, and many employees were already combining social media information into their everyday enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes. The way I like to think about this is along the lines of the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials: your chocolate got into my peanut butter. But, in this case, your social media data got into my ERP system.

Challenges of Integrating Social in Enterprise Apps

While social integration is a welcome step for organizations looking to improve efficiency and customer service delivery, there are a few challenges that must be overcome.

For example, there is the expected resistance of employees with regards to the new technology. If the management does not support and contribute to the efforts of the integration team, the organization can see lower adoption of social integrated solutions by employees.

There is also the notion that social integration will eliminate the manual work that employees usually do. While this may be true to some extent, employees are the ones that are ultimately in charge of the financial success of the company. Just because you have a social tool does not mean it can replace the work of your employees.

Community managers and senior management play an important role in encouraging employee engagement. However, as more young people who’ve grown up with social media sites enter the workforce, the need for training is practically eliminated especially for social tools that are modeled after similar platforms like Facebook.

Social media data are already intermingling with the various modules and departments associated with the ERP system, but it’s happening in an incoherent fashion. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Many ERP developers may have jumped the gun a bit, creating a solution for a problem that didn’t exist yet.

They were three to four years ahead of the common populace using social media in a daily manner with their work and tried to integrate access to social media tools and data into the systems without knowing how people were going to use them. It’s difficult to predict all the possibilities for how social media is and will be worked into our daily work and personal lives.