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Salesforce vs ERP. What suits better for your business and development teams' needs?

With this article I start a series of publications with the purpose to explain some of the biggest system integration confusions that caused businesses to waste thousands of dollars on solutions that didn't match their initial expectations.

Confusion #1: Salesforce vs ERP. What is the main difference from the business implementation perspective?

Root cause:

On its website, Salesforce describes itself as "a customer relationship management solution that brings companies and customers together". ERP's (Enterprise Resource Planning) definition is "software that's is comprised of powerful and strategic business process management tools that can be used to manage information within an organization".

At first glance, it may seem that Salesforce is a bit "narrowed" solution. In reality, this is one of the most popular myths. Let me explain why in a simple way.

Salesforce is not a just a CRM as they describe themselves. Generally, Salesforce is an automated company's front end and ERP represents back end automation.

Many companies tend to integrate Salesforce with their own ERP systems. I find this complimentary approach to be the most effective. Indeed, SF offers multiple solutions for business tasks: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, eCommerce Cloud, etc.

We also should remember that SF is also a platform "force.com" where by using a programming language (Apex) you can implement a wide range of functionalities. Many companies do this by including those solutions that were previously associated with ERP systems. There are multiple reasons and I will gladly elaborate a bit more going forward.

The key point here is to overcome a widely known stereotype that Salesforce is sort of a "narrowed" solution with no development space for a skillful developer.

Integration aspect:

SF is naturally more linked to the business than demonstrated by other competitors. For example, it is open for such technologies as IoT, AI. Nevertheless, in order to see it, you should be able to dig deeper into its subject related field. This could be one of the biggest potential challenges for your team.

The reason for this is some may think that SF provides a relatively low entrance level.

Confusion #2: Low entrance level. Apex is easy. Got familiar with Apex syntax? It may seem simple at first glance only. The thing is that while Java has acquired a large amount of frameworks already, Salesforce is just moving towards this direction. The complexity of SF development in Apex can be roughly compared to programming in JavaScript. However, if you still believe that JavaScript has a low entry point, then you absolutely right about Salesforce development entry point as well.

Advise to a key decision maker: prior to making a decision to proceed with either SF or ERP or both, request a thorough evaluation for: current goals, future expectations, development team capabilities and their appetite to work within the specified framework. As it turns out, the last aspect causes a huge amount of project overspending and launch delays