ERP Interfaces for Your Industry

Technically we work with the same building blocks everywhere: SAP integration, Dynamics 365 shop integration, inventory system integration, DATEV integration and, for more complex landscapes, a middleware. The projects differ mainly in which data the leading system can deliver and which rules have to apply before handover to the shop. The setup fixed price starts at 1,490 € net per connection and is fixed bindingly after a free system analysis — regardless of industry.

In wholesale, price determination is the actual project. One article can simultaneously carry a list price, a customer group price, a negotiated contract price and a quantity scale — and the shop has to show exactly the price the ERP would charge on the order. Add to that assortment approvals per customer and orders that arrive not from the shop but from procurement portals. How we map this is described on the ERP integration for wholesale page. In practice this means the shop does not calculate conditions itself but queries the valid price for the logged-in customer at runtime. That costs a few milliseconds and prevents the most common complaint in B2B trade — an order confirmation that differs from the basket shown. At the same time, assortment approvals can be managed without extra maintenance in the shop because they come from the same source as the prices.

In manufacturing, variants and bills of materials dominate. A configurable product exists in the ERP as a rule set, in the shop as selectable options with price and availability impact. Technical data sheets, drawings and spare part lists from PIM or document storage are added. To avoid maintaining the logic twice, rule ownership belongs in the leading system; the shop queries it. Details are on the ERP integration for manufacturing page. The benefit shows most clearly in the spare parts business: when bills of materials and successor relationships come from the ERP, a customer finds the right part for a machine without searching the catalogue. That noticeably reduces enquiries in inside sales and makes an assortment sellable online that would be hard to serve by phone.

In specialised trade, the physical store and the online shop meet. Stock sits in branches and in the central warehouse, customers expect click-and-collect and reliable availability. Technically that means keeping stock separate per location, mapping reservations cleanly and writing orders back into the point-of-sale or inventory system without duplicate entry. More on the ERP integration for specialised trade page. The real gain is that branch staff and online sales see the same stock. Reservations from the shop block the goods at the location, collections are booked in the point-of-sale system and flow back as a movement. Without this feedback loop you get exactly the situations that lose customers for good: ordered goods that are not there on collection.

For food and beverage, regulatory requirements are added. Batches and best-before dates have to remain traceable until delivery, allergens and nutritional values belong on the article by law, and packaging sizes create their own units of measure. The shop becomes an extension of inventory management. The requirements in detail are described on the ERP integration for food page. Operations also gain a solid documentation trail. When batches are passed through from the goods receipt posting to the dispatch notification, a traceability request can be answered at short notice: which customers received a particular batch. Answering that question manually takes hours in our experience — and is time-critical in a serious case (project experience).

In fashion and textiles, the variant structure is the critical point. An article consists of a matrix of sizes and colours whose stock levels move independently. Season changes bring large data volumes in a short time, and returns have to write stock back immediately so that an item is not sold twice. How we connect matrix, assortment change and returns logic is shown on the ERP integration for fashion and textiles page. The commercially decisive factor is the speed of the write-back. Every day a returned item sits unsellable in the system is a lost selling day in an already short season. If the return posting in the ERP immediately increases shop stock, the same item goes back on sale in the same week instead of waiting for the next reconciliation run.

In electronics and technology, data depth decides. Technical attributes, compatibility lists, serial numbers and documentation duties such as CE, WEEE or RoHS information belong on every article. At the same time assortment turnover is high, prices change frequently, and successor articles have to be linked cleanly. Details are on the ERP integration for electronics and technology page. For the shop this means filterable technical attributes instead of prose, maintained successor relationships instead of dead ends, and serial number tracking that assigns warranty cases without a query. The effort lies less in the transfer than in the structure of the data — which is why such a project regularly starts with an inventory of the attribute models in the ERP or PIM.

However different the data models are, the basic questions repeat in every project: which system owns which data field? At what cadence is data synchronized? What happens when a transfer fails or arrives twice? And how does it become traceable why a price or stock level looks the way it does in the shop? We clarify these questions before the first line of code — they drive the effort more than the choice of shop system. We work with Shopware Community Edition as an open foundation, so you retain control over data and extensions.