A UI developer colleague of mine said something recently that made me pause. “New graduates focussed in online marketing are coming into this environment with a challenging bias,” she said. “It’s like how graphic artists are biased toward Photoshop because that’s what they learned on. But the marketing bias is worse since these bright, young entrants have been focused on Word Press, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google, which are platforms more than tools.”
It made me wonder, how do I explain the importance of tight integration with a back-end system and the role eCommerce can play in developing better, context-sensitive, more accurate sales?
To be fair, fresh-faced marketing graduates understand how important it is to take advantage of as many new online promotion mechanisms as possible. They know that the possibilities are endless and today’s Facebook could (though unlikely) become yesterday’s MySpace. It must be very hard to keep up with the evolution of online marketing.
Recently, I took a call from an amazing client of ours that wanted me to talk to his company’s marketing and sales team. For years, the finance group, the IT group, the sales group, and the executive team recognized their ERP system (Dynamics NAV Business Central) as the master of all business data and process. But after hiring some new marketing teammates, they were finding it difficult to justify why their ERP centric philosophy was so important to them. The argument is easy to make to the finance team, manufacturing team, distribution folks, etc. But how do we frame the reason why it makes sense to keep NAV (and Nav-to-Net eCommerce) in play for marketing strategies whenever possible.
Let’s start by pointing out that, without fail, NAV Business Central customers share at least this one common trait. They all chose NAV Business Central because NAV / BC lets them implement modifications or configurations that enable their own “business IP” as a system. Every one of these customers thinks they are special and have a unique way of leveraging their honed business process, and NAV /BC lets them do it, while other solutions either cannot or are too expensive. These customers can add components and ISV solutions to NAV / BC, and for the most part, it is understood that their “business IP” will stay intact.
So how do we explain how important it is to leverage the ERP and in particular our customer’s business IP to the new generation of marketing folks that grew up on so many disparate platforms and technologies? I started with a Venn diagram:
The approach ignores the data sources and the discussion of which database should be the master of the data, which I will reserve for another discussion.
As the diagram shows, a comprehensive eCommerce solution should take into consideration more than the ubiquitous platforms. Our approach is a more holistic view of the important interrelationship between the presentation layer, the site functionality and the back-office business processes that live inside the ERP.
Consider how many possibilities are lost when one implements a solution without that blue circle. And the features mentioned in there is only a small subset of excellent examples. These are features that are either completely driven by, or substantially benefitted by a tight integration to the back end ERP.
So the argument I’m making is that it’s just not enough to spit out a price list from the ERP and import that into one of the run-of-the-mill platforms. Whether it’s Nav-to-Net or another vendor’s product, investigating how well these three areas are balanced and tuned to deliver a truly integrated solution should be of great interest.
NAV-to-NET™ is a popular web solution created by Digital Vantage Point. We’re here to make you fall in love with technology again by offering powerful web stores that are fully managed from within Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP. Contact us for a website that will help you slay the giants.
Talk to us about your eCommerce concerns. We’d love to help! [email protected]
For more information:
www.dvp.net | Watch Demo (4 Min. Video) | Omni-Channel E-Commerce (4 Min. Video) | Nav-to-Net Customers
