Magento ERP Integration: what you need to consider

Magento - shaping e-commerce operations

It's an open source content management system dedicated to e-commerce web stores. The building blocks are, MySQL , RDBMS, PHP and Zend Framework. Basically, it offers two different platforms: a community edition, which is a free gift to the world of e-commerce and an enterprise edition which is a paid for and thus, features a lot for functionalities.

Every single day, more than 1,000 merchants step into the world of Magento and embrace the magic of it to launch or upgrade their e-commerce business. Magento connect houses with more than 5,000 dedicated extensions developed by users across the globe and it has already seen a staggering four million downloads. Simply, it's an authority.

With Magento, an e-commerce website owner can play with various integrated services such as themes and template design, extensions development, etc. of their respective e-commerce websites. Moreover, it offers the integration and management of more than one domain in real-time through a single admin panel.

Microsoft Dynamic NAV- it's ERP

What's your cup of tea? Accounting and finance? Supply chain management? Operations?

In every way, you need an ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution and more than 100,000 companies believe that Microsoft dynamic NAV is the answer. Technically, it's that essential part that your business needs to stay on the road to success. Moreover, if you want to grow with a benchmark level of efficiency then it's the linchpin.

Need for this integration

Growth is a necessary evil when your system outgrows the functionalities offered by the supporting tools. Integration of an array of smarter tools then becomes the only way out from this inevitable situation. Admittedly, growth is a natural phenomenon, but only when there is a set of growth supporting elements within it. Otherwise, it's lifeless.

This integration previously was a demand from both users' group. Microsoft dynamics NAV users were looking for this to happen as they needed a better e-commerce platform for showcasing their wide range of products to their customers and on the other side, Magento users were looking for a benchmark business process tool with ERP prowess.

Business owners and clients, who were using Magento, demanded this integration for various reasons:

• Integration of payment gateways.
• Integration of a catalogue generation system with enriched inventory management.
• Integration of a healthy order management system.
• User-friendly design.
• Smarter database information processing or tweaking.

The chief idea was to combine the smart product displaying feature of Magento with the smart business processing of an ERP system to assemble the bests of both. To harness the best shopping experiences for the customers it needed to offer them a bagful of discounts, which is pretty popular among Magento base e-commerce platforms, with an enhanced back-end system to process tons of users' requests without slowing the other functions of that website to a crawl.

Challenges neutralised

Clients' specific challenges were analysed and the respective solutions were established during integration. According to the priority level they are

• Creating a live shopping portal which can process millions of user requests without slowing down the processing of the website
• Establishing an easy and an intelligent navigation system for users to make them fly through the products
• Safe and secure data transfer and smarter user database management.
• A two-way management system to handle customers on one hand and processing the discounts and special offers to the retailers and wholesalers on the other

The final answers from integration

In the product management system it has imported ERP based products from Dynamics NAV to Magento which can update products or items automatically. In the customer management system, it has the ability to import contacts from Dynamics NAV to Magento and vice versa with an auto-update functionality.

Where the order management system is concerned, it has the ability to execute the following quickly:
• Sync orders from the both platforms
• Update orders
• Display sales history of orders to customers

Mconnect has shown its brilliance in the catalogue and inventory management systems too. It can update stock data in real time, create and maintain different category structures and implement them. Moreover, it can connect multi-Magento websites to Dynamics NAV, look over all the payment, shipping and taxation methods and schedule business owners according to their different needs. Lastly, with Mconnect, clients can reduce overall cost of integrated business operations for handling a sizeable e-commerce store and, thankfully, still hold ultimate control over constantly transforming products and customer trends.