11. Data-Sharing Tools
Sales, customer service, and even customers want to know the status of
an order and whether a payment has been received. Production line and
inventory managers want to know the latest sales forecast. To answer
these needs, CRM software vendors opt to build native Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) hooks into their software, or to seamlessly integrate with ERP systems via third-party “hook” software from companies
including IBM and webMethods. Data synchronization, which is important for data sharing, includes mobile data synchronization from multiple
field devices (increasingly wireless), as well as enterprise synchronization
with multiple databases/application servers.