In the business-to-world world of commerce, e-commerce is often the new kid on the block. But companies that learn how to properly tie it to their back-end business operations software realize significant benefits.

A recent study commissioned by e-commerce software provider Intershop discovered that 94% of B2B e-commerce decision-makers who have integrated their e-commerce site with an order management system (usually housed in their enterprise resource planning, or ERP system) are seeing positive results like fewer lost orders and better customer account tracking.

Clearly, e-commerce needs to fit into your ERP data management strategy. But is it a two-way street? Is there anything you can do to optimize your ERP data for e-commerce? And can you simplify your ERP data while still offering e-commerce content and features personalized for your customers?

Yes! In fact, if you allow the needs of a personalized e-commerce store to inform your ERP data structure, you can improve your business processes as a whole. You can achieve better efficiencies for e-commerce, and for your other sales channels. In this article, we’ll look at some considerations for structuring your ERP data for e-commerce. But first off, a general rule: Keep it simple.

Tools that enable great complexity tempt us to believe we need complexity. But rather than putting technology first, you should put business needs first. Engage complexity that meets your business needs, and leave out everything that’s unnecessary.

With that in mind, what’s the sweet spot for ERP data as it relates to e-commerce? It’s to simplify ERP data to enable e-commerce personalization.

The need for ERP data simplicity becomes painfully clear when you add personalized e-commerce as a sales channel. Things can get tricky.

Traditionally, your customer service representative has gone into your ERP to manage orders. If you bolt on an e-commerce site that isn’t integrated to your ERP with real-time data, you’ve just doubled the complexity of your CSR’s job. Now your CSR has to log in to the e-commerce site for web orders, while logging in to your ERP for all other orders.

Why not centralize and synchronize? The CSR’s job gets easier, and the customer gets a consistent experience of seeing personalized content across all channels. That’s because the data showing the state of their account (orders, contract pricing, and so on) lives in one place—the ERP system—from where it can provide accurate information across selling channels.

You don’t want to display different data for available products, contract pricing, and credit limits across multiple platforms! That’s a customer relations nightmare. Worse, the personalization problems multiply with each new platform that requires heavy data maintenance to stay accurate.

Also, you shouldn’t force your customer to look in multiple places for order history and tracking. Chances are, your ERP allows each customer to have personalized choices about which location they want to ship to, what carriers they prefer to use, and so on. All that is already personalized by customer in your ERP. If those rules are centralized, you should leverage them in an omnichannel world, including e-commerce and mobile commerce.

But what happens when the same user needs an account in multiple selling channels?

You may set up divisions to separate B2B from B2C customers, or to separate one market segment from another. But some customers need to buy in more than one market. Each time you duplicate a customer in a new division, your data (and your data maintenance needs) proliferate. It’s a multiplicative effect. It’s expensive to maintain, and it’s potentially confusing for the customer if they have to manage multiple logins.

What’s the solution? Consolidate divisions and product lines as much as possible.

IT departments should consolidate divisions and product lines to better serve their customers and the bottom line. The fewer divisions, the better—and one division is best, especially for e-commerce.

Sometimes companies build out multiple divisions in their ERP, based on geography, product lines, and so on. For some companies, this division strategy is absolutely necessary. For others, this strategy can become an expensive proposition that doesn’t earn its place in the budget. Multiple divisions are often a pain point in data maintenance, and they can become a headache for e-commerce integrations.

What about products that are excluded from certain sales channels?

You may not want to make every product available to every customer. This may be based on geography, sales channel, or some other dimension of the customer record. Strategies for dealing with this may differ for different ERPs; however, if at all possible, you should manage these exclusions in your ERP without resorting to multiple divisions.

Leverage your ERP’s tools for internal reporting.

Some companies build multiple divisions in their ERP to facilitate internal financial reporting that doesn’t go to auditors. The business need is real, but you should question the use of multiple divisions as a solution. Rather than solving this problem by creating multiple divisions in your ERP, why not use an internal-only financial reporting tool? This allows you to maintain a single division/product line in your ERP.

If your ERP doesn’t include this functionality out of the box, you may be able to engage custom development to create it. Depending on the complexity required, this solution may be cheaper than trying to get your personalized e-commerce store to play well with multiple ERP divisions.

Realize that complexity = higher maintenance costs.

Sometimes, complexity is unavoidable. If you really need to engage multiple divisions, then do it—but realize that your maintenance costs will increase.

For example, in an ERP e-commerce integration, how will you serve ERP data in the e-commerce store (or stores)? There are only two options—batch updates, and real-time integration via web services. A well-architected solution will use some mix of the two to accomplish requirements at a cost that makes sense for the business. That could mean serving product attribute data via batch, but using real-time integration to display contract pricing and to post e-commerce orders to the ERP.

All good. But when you add multiple ERP divisions to this equation, your e-commerce data sync gets a lot more complicated. That means higher costs.

The Bottom Line

Your ERP system isn’t going anywhere, and B2B buyers’ e-commerce expectations will only continue to grow. As you research ways to get your ERP and e-commerce to play well together, remember the importance of simplicity. When it comes to data structuring in your ERP, don’t be afraid to “kill your darlings”—your unnecessary or redundant data divisions—if that’s what your business needs dictate.

George Anderson is the communications manager at Corevist Inc., an Inc. 5000 company that integrates SAP business software with B2B e-commerce platforms. He has published articles and guest blogs on many business topics and writes science fiction on the side. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.