Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning software are business management tools that overlap in certain areas but are completely different in their core functionalities. Although unique in what they do, real-time integration for managing the business (ERP) and managing its customers (CRM) can significantly increase an organization’s overall efficiency and profitability. By streamlining both data processes, a fully integrated software solution can make handling the customer interactions on the front end and managing the company’s business processes on the back end a seamless operation.
By providing an accurate cross-departmental view of the enterprise in real-time, automated testing can identify potential bottlenecks across all workflows and platforms. That way, marketing personnel can see an updated customer purchase history, and the shipping department can see the discount code entered by a sales associate.
Managing Front End Activities
Customer relationship management software provides the system processes for managing a company’s interactions with both its current and potential customers. CRM systems use enterprise data to consistently improve on answering customer queries, monitoring marketing efforts, managing pipelines, evaluating prospective markets, tracking sales, and launching new consumer campaigns. Software and system updates are constantly being developed to incorporate all aspects of the experience to keep customers happy and coming back for more. Most CRMs support the entire process of identifying new prospects and engaging with them as potential buyers during all phases of the sales process to ensure they become a repeat customer. Automated test management allows organizations to quickly test enhancements, fixes, and patches prior to migrating them into production.
Managing Back End Tasks
An organization’s enterprise resource planning software accommodates the rapid sharing of information needed to efficiently manage business processes by maintaining a real-time view of organization-wide operations. ERPs use a company’s internal data to manage tasks like order placement, inventory management, billing, shipping, tracking, accounting, and information regarding important supply chains. Software and systems updates are developed as needed to better manage back-end office activities such as distribution processes, supply chain management, improving financial data, facilitating better project management, reducing redundancy, and standardizing business processes. The rapid sharing of accurate enterprise data allows departments to be more proactive in identifying, forecasting, and planning for issues before they become a more costly problem.
Scalable Solutions to Fit Your Business Needs
The most obvious advantage of applying an automated test suite comes from the time saved in not having to enter data manually as well as receiving much faster feedback on regressions. Listed below are some of the tangible and intangible ways that increased testing coverage across CRM and ERP applications can provide enhanced value:
- Centralization of Data – The absence of accurate data sharing leads to a lack of organizational oversight since the enterprise is not effectively managing its corporate assets. Moreover, information is more easily accessed and correctly updated as a single step in one location.
- Group Collaboration without Silos – Data silos lead to inconsistent group data collections that overlap with other departments but in the end lead to wasted resources and less productivity among key interoffice groups. Integration allows for the rapid sharing of standardized information.
- Less Data Duplication – Duplicate data produced by departmental overlap can cause headaches for enterprise employees due to inevitable inconsistencies. An integrated software solution delivers accurate customer centric and essential business management information without duplication.
- Ordering, Quoting, and Inventory – From marketing to the shipping department, integrated CRM and ERP data improves departmental efficiencies and saves time. Customers can order, sales reps can quote prices, inventory and shipments are managed in real-time.
- Real-Time Forecasting – It is critical for most organizations to have real-time visibility of customer interactions on the front end and the management of business’s processes on the back end to make accurate and lucrative forecasts of daily cash flows.
Automated testing does take programming time to create each script. However, since automated testing can be re-run as many times as needed, its added value increases each time it is run to gather feedback on a data project. In addition, the company’s investment in automated testing solutions often pays off with the increased confidence a business has in its latest application.
Integration Testing for Data Critical Applications
Without question, automated testing has value, but not all integrated tests are created equal. Nonetheless, automated testing that validates system changes scheduled for release (or re-release) should be treated with great reverence. After all, user acceptance testing is the last line of defense for an organization or enterprise before the release of each software launch (or relaunch). It initiates the final stage of the software development life cycle and should only be performed after the developers have thoroughly tested the new code. Moreover, an automated testing suite must be well-designed to accurately capture user-defined requirements in a verifiable and consistent way. This is important in creating a safeguard for identifying potential problems.
Mycelium Software can provide a META regression testing suite that will evaluate your system to ensure that previously recorded processes are behaving consistently, as well as automatically regression test all previously registered scripts. It achieves this by combining the data required for the test script execution, with the workflow processes identified in your execution plan. META then performs impact analysis on the pre-and post-test script iterations, to identify any change in the outcomes. Utilizing automated test management, enterprise organizations can significantly increase test coverage to recognize problems that might otherwise go unnoticed and increase the quality assurance of modifications before they are promoted to production environments.
At Mycelium Software, we understand that automated test management is an infrastructure issue and not just a project issue. Please contact sales@myceli.com, or call 1(904) 473-4959 for more information about our META automated testing for detailed impact analysis with zero programming and no hidden fees.
