Sage 200 Magento Integration
Magento is one of the world’s most popular eCommerce platforms. According to Hivemind’s eCommerce market share analysis, Magento has 26% of the eCommerce market share of 56,000 eCommerce sites surveyed in the Alexa top one million.
Purchasing habits by both consumers and businesses expect an online presence which means that an organisation has to adopt an eCommerce solution to stay competitive. As powerful as Magento is, by offering a feature-rich environment for its users, there is still a common disconnect between the information held within Magento and Sage 200.
A disconnection of data between Magento and Sage 200 means that administration tasks and repetitive bi-directional data entry are increased as sales rise. In turn, this brings added pressures on an organisation. As many eCommerce professionals can recognise, repetitive bi-directional data entry detracts from a company’s objectives, can contain errors and create process bottlenecks further down the line.
How to Integrate Sage 200 and Magento
The only way that individual departments and management can obtain a clear view of essential data, such as orders and stock levels, is by automating the eCommerce workflow between Sage 200 and Magento. However, data integration between Magento and Sage can often be limited or, in some circumstances, non-existent. This means that manual monitoring of data entry and any associated events must take place when an order is placed through Magento.
It is possible for an IT department to focus heavily on bespoke development projects to achieve Sage 200 Magento integration. However, this approach can often be extremely expensive and time-consuming. In many instances, it makes commercial and financial sense to review products that can easily sit in-between Magento and Sage 200 to automate order processing and practically any associated business process.
Eight Sage 200 Magento Integration Scenarios
A well-structured and implemented Sage 200 Magento integration solution can enable businesses to automate the flow of data between a variety of business applications. Integrating an eCommerce store doesn’t stop at the initial integration. The Magento order management process extends much further than order synchronisation. Here are eight of the most common Magento Sage 200 integration scenarios that, once automated, can significantly reduce order processing and fulfilment costs.
Synchronisation of sales orders from Magento, telephone and offline orders into Sage 200
This is one of the first areas that companies look to automate. Unfortunately, many do not take into account orders that happen outside of Magento. Adding telephone and offline orders into the equation reduces order processing costs and provides full visibility of up-to-date stock levels.
Automatic Transfer of Online Payment and Transaction ID’s to Sage 200
Magento and your payment gateway hold a wealth of customer and transactional information that needs to be reconciled with Sage 200. This is normally a manual data entry process increasing order processing errors and exposing you to financial risk. Automatically transferring online payment and transaction IDs into Sage 200 ensures that an order is only dispatched when payment has been received, allowing employees to concentrate on other tasks.
Automatically Place Orders with Courier Services
Once orders have been manually rekeyed in Magento and Sage 200 your employees now have to manually place each order with a preferred courier service. Automatically extracting orders from Sage 200 by dynamically identifying which orders need fulfilling, depending on the business rules you set, automatically placing an order with the most economical/suitable provider and automatically printing the labels for your dispatch team to process will reduce order processing costs and significantly decrease order-to-dispatch times.
Automatically Update Magento with ‘Complete’ or ‘Shipped’ Status
Data also needs to be pushed up from Sage 200 to Magento. Normally it’s another manual process to update Magento with order statuses that have been updated in Sage 200 including ‘Complete’ or ‘Shipped’. Magento Sage 200 integration provides the opportunity to automatically extract data from relevant sources and push that information straight back into Magento, completely eradicating employee data entry.
Real-time Inventory Level and Reorder Point Notifications (Email and SMS)
The effective management of inventory levels can often be the difference between being able to fulfil an order or not. Stock adjustments, negative allocations, shelf life dates and products not being allocated a web category can all mean that staff are constantly looking for data changes. Dynamically monitoring all your product lines and business applications for data changes and automating a business notification by email (and automatically attaching related documents) or SMS message reduces exposure to financial risk, optimises stock management and enforces best practice.
Automated Creation and Distribution of Purchase Order Requisitions
Manually monitoring and reporting on stock data changes can be a difficult, near impossible, task for employees – unless of course you have created real-time inventory level and reorder point notifications. Automation can be used to monitor your business software for key data changes to assist in identifying potential issues before they become a problem. This enables you to automate the creation and distribution of Purchase Order requisitions to ensure that stock levels are at a constant level to reduce the risk of running low on high in demand stock.
Purchase Order Workflow Authorisations
Authorising the purchase of additional stock for many is still a manual process which is slow and open to errors. In some instances, large purchases can require multiple-levels of authorisation. This can result in manual communication being pushed around an organisation. Establishing an automated workflow authorisation process which presents employees with the decision provides 100% piece of mind and records a complete audit trail of purchase decisions made.
Automated Customer Communications Based On Order History
From time to time it’s necessary to run ‘unplanned’ email marketing campaigns. Factors such as slow moving stock or pressures to cross sell or upsell all mean that more email campaigns need to be processed by the marketing team. Having a complete data view of a customer’s purchase history, interests and preferences by bringing this information together enables the opportunity to automatically serve specific website content and email communications tailored to the individual’s profile.
Achieving ROI and Future Proofing Sage 200
Rather than trying to manage a wide number of systems through a number of bespoke integrations, which can be complex and can expose a business to high risk, utilising one, centralised platform for all integrations will provide better control, make integrations easier and reduce integration costs.
Magento integration with ERP with a dedicated integration platform provides a stable and fully functional solution. A dedicated integration platform will push and pull data between various systems providing each department with the relevant information when it is required.
Having the ability to integrate Magento and Sage 200 with other business applications and automating business processes will cut costs and provide the opportunity to reallocate employee resources to more essential tasks, as well as deliver a future proof environment.
For more information on Sage 200 Magento integration services and how to automate repetitive manual housekeeping tasks, download the Magento Sage 200 integration brochure below, or alternatively call us on +44 (0)330 998 8700.
