Modernize Your B2B Commerce from Your ERP in 5 Steps

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a business software system that gives companies complete visibility and control over multiple aspects of their operations, including e-commerce, supply chain, accounting, procurement, and much more.

ERP evolved from MRP (Material Requirements Planning), helping companies track inventory and materials from a centralized system to improve efficiency and productivity.

Over time, technology and innovation have evolved to meet the needs of internal users. Systems such as SAP ERP and Oracle ERP became monolithic structures that allowed different departments to communicate and share data and information across an organization.

Despite the relevance and continued use of legacy ERP systems, these monolithic ERPs are no longer enough as customers and e-commerce continue to evolve.

• Not suited to a multichannel approach

Traditionally, ERP systems were built for internal organization and information sharing, not for modern sales across multiple channels such as web, mobile, and other AI- and IoT-enabled channels. Today’s multiple channels require transformative, next-generation modernization to meet new demands so a business can scale.

• Too dependent on interconnected modules

Many e-commerce ERP solutions rely on multiple layers of modules to connect and send data to and across different systems, often within a monolithic setup. That means if one part of the system fails, the entire system is affected, requiring significant time and resources to fix. Let’s look at how businesses can transform their ERP into a modern e-commerce solution.

By unifying your business under a single, centralized view, syncing your data across platforms and new sales channels while automating labor-intensive processes, you’ll be ready for the future.

Moving from a traditional ERP to a headless B2B e-commerce solution can make the difference between success and failure for your business. Meeting customer expectations and delivering a rich, consistent experience is no longer a “nice to have” — it’s a matter of survival. Businesses need to adapt and evolve their digital commerce model. Fast.

Step 1: Assess your ERP’s current capabilities

Before transforming your ERP system into a modern e-commerce solution, you need to assess what your current ERP can actually do. For example:

• What data is being collected in your business systems?
• How is that data shared across the company?
• How does each department manage that data?
• How does each department use that data to gain better insights?

Reviewing the most important data for your business and industry — such as customer, inventory, and supplier data — helps you identify inaccurate information or gaps in your system. It’s important to assess how much pressure you’re putting on your ERP.

When you ask your ERP to do more than it was designed to handle, problems start to appear. These issues can lead to system slowdowns, poor performance, and other inaccuracies that directly affect the customer experience, such as incorrect stock information or shipping details.

Step 2: Identify the key issues

Companies often identify issues in their ERP and try to work around them by making adjustments and customizations to a system that wasn’t designed for them. The result is greater pressure on resources and system inefficiency caused by feature creep. It’s essential to identify and analyze the main issues in your ERP. You need to determine where information is incomplete or inaccurate and how it is managed, so you can build a clear understanding of what your modern e-commerce system needs to do and automate.

Key considerations for identifying the main issues:

• Where are you entering data manually?
• Where is your data inaccurate, and why?
• Where is your data incomplete?
• Which transactions go wrong, and why?
• What are your customers’ habits?

These questions will inevitably bring more clarity to your implementation gaps, day-to-day operations, communication, and training. Companies that connect their ERP system to a modern e-commerce platform take the pressure off their ERP. All e-commerce activities are streamlined and automated, reducing the strain on your resources.

Step 3: Focus on organizing your data

As you analyze and review the key issues, you should also identify where inaccuracies and misinformation are most concentrated in your data. That department and system should be your priority when upgrading processes and integrating new e-commerce solutions.

The benefits of headless commerce:

• Migrating your ERP system to a headless B2B e-commerce solution will help ensure data consistency across departments and sales channels.
• Headless solutions are designed to automate and streamline manual tasks and processes, eliminating errors and inaccuracies. This allows your team and your customers to receive and share real-time data.
• If your business struggles to maintain accurate information across suppliers, sales channels, and your ERP, headless B2B solutions can help automate and streamline consistent product information instantly from a single place, without relying on a multi-layered backend system.
• With consistent, real-time product information shared across all your sales channels, the customer experience will be richer and more consistent, while you reduce human error and manual work.
• Headless B2B e-commerce also enables accurate order management and real-time inventory information, enriching the customer experience by keeping them informed in real time about whether a product is available. In addition, your business will be able to take proactive replenishment actions.

Step 4: Decouple your backend and frontend

ERP is a back-end system that makes it harder to adapt to additional, newer channels without adding stress to the system.

Delivering a consistent customer experience is becoming more difficult in B2B e-commerce, as customers expect the same buying experience they get in B2C. By decoupling the backend (your ERP) from the frontend using headless software and microservices APIs, you can connect to and access channels beyond the online storefront while still delivering a consistent customer experience.

With a headless e-commerce solution, customers can enjoy a consistent experience across all sales channels, see stock status, place repeat orders, or take advantage of promotions. On your side, your team can track and manage their orders, all in real time.

Step 5: Test, train, and learn

Integrating an ERP into modern e-commerce isn’t an instant fix, and an effective implementation strategy goes beyond the technical installation of the software you need. To get the most out of your new B2B e-commerce solution, you need to go further and plan for the ongoing practices you’ll need to put in place after launch.

• Test your system

There are always setbacks during integration, but you can’t reduce delays by skipping testing phases. Yes, it may help you bring launch dates forward and “meet” deadlines, but if an under-tested system causes problems later on, it will slow your progress far more than it would have at this early stage. Make sure your data flow is fast and efficient, and that your modern e-commerce ERP solves the issues you identified before integration.

• Train the right people

Your new headless e-commerce solution will only be as effective as the people using it. No matter how revolutionary your new system is, if the people responsible for using it don’t know the software, your business will suffer. If you’re not using a SaaS model, where the vendor takes on all usage and maintenance responsibilities, you need to take the time to train your team so they’re ready to use the system as soon as it goes live. This can consume a significant share of the project’s resources and budget.

• Protect your data security

The digital era is also the era of cyberthreats. The more personal information online servers contain, the more vulnerable companies are to malicious attempts at data theft.

An ERP system requires large volumes of data to be synced across multiple platforms, making it a valuable target for anyone looking to harm your business. From the moment you start integrating your B2B e-commerce platform into your new ERP, you need to consider every measure you can take to protect against potential attacks.

Always keep a few key considerations in mind:

• In your existing ERP system, how is data shared and used across your organization?
• How is data shared across the organization today?
• How many feature extensions have you made to your existing ERP system?
• How do you manage inventory and product information across all channels?
• Which department has the most inaccurate data, and why?
• What are the main issues with your current ERP system, and how can they be solved?
• How much visibility do you have into customer orders and requests?
• How does your business strategy align with your digital ambitions?
• How do you plan to evolve your ERP toward modern e-commerce?
• How much internal capacity do you have for your new B2B e-commerce project (IT, marketing, sales)?
• What return on investment do you expect over the next 3 years?