Creating trusted connections between the NetSuite, Salesforce, or Microsoft platforms through supply chain system integration can be a great opportunity to strengthen your business, decrease costs, and improve value. If systems are ignored and left disconnected, they can increase expensive manual processes and limit access to timely, accurate, and immediately useful information, resulting in disorganized decision making.

The importance of integrating supply chain systems

Integrating two systems with data and processes that complement each other increases efficiency, improves productivity, and has a positive financial impact. For example, key business processes, like moving invoice information between the ERP and the CRM, can create a bridge between operations and sales, while integrating information from the warehouse offers added insight into order fulfillment, capacity, and informs planning decisions. Common features that facilitate integration between NetSuite, Salesforce, and Microsoft include:

Salesforce and Microsoft integrations:

• Microsoft SharePoint and Teams enhance document management and retention.
• Single sign-on (SSO) Salesforce integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) enables your users to be automatically and securely signed-in to Salesforce with their Azure AD accounts. This feature reduces time spent signing into different systems and adheres to multifactor authentication (MFA) requirements to keep accounts secure.
• Salesforce and Power BI help visualize key metrics. These include your sales pipeline, best accounts, and KPIs, and reports in which you can explore details of each aspect.
• Salesforce and Microsoft Teams drive innovation and optimize collaboration on accounts, opportunities, and projects through Power Apps and Power Automate.

Salesforce and NetSuite integrations:

• Maintain master records by entering all your customer, contact, inventory, and pricing data in one system. This allows an integrated Salesforce and NetSuite solution to keep everything synchronized automatically.
• Enable your sales team to look up product availability and know more about their supply chain status prior to walking into important client meetings.
• Keep your sales, operations, and finance teams on the same page with real-time integration of sales transactions, such as customer quotes and orders.

Microsoft and NetSuite integrations:

• Power BI and NetSuite can publish key metrics. These contain top customers, top-selling products by category or region, and current sales estimates compared to actuals and the prior year. This feature can also supplement your monthly financials with visual reporting for revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), and gross margin by revenue channel or business unit.
• Capture comments that are posted to the Microsoft Teams Praise App. These can synchronize with SuitePeople’s performance management system, so that data is in one place for reviews, saving time.

Using Microsoft as the identify provider (IdP) for integrated supply chain systems

An extremely popular option for system integration is using Microsoft as the identity provider, (IdP). An identity provider takes care of creating and handling identity information while securely supplying authentication services to applications. These providers protect against bad actors that may try to get into your systems. A Microsoft IdP can also replace native options for managing usernames and passwords for Salesforce, NetSuite, and other systems. Some additional reasons for business leaders to consider using Microsoft as their IdP include:

• Forrester named Microsoft Security a leader in seven Forrester Wave categories.
• Forrester conducted a study showing that customers who deploy Microsoft Azure AD benefit from 123% ROI.
• Gartner names Microsoft Azure AD as a leader for the fourth year in a row.
• Users can enable SSO across applications and avoid having to remember separate usernames and passwords for individual systems.
• Most companies and individuals already use Microsoft’s services, such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams.

If you do not have these systems or you do not fully configure or integrate them, you could be missing out on financial benefits and opening your business up to potentially irreversible damage to its reputation or financial standing.

Whatever your situation may be, Citrin Cooperman’s Digital Services Practice is available to help. Our experienced professionals are able to implement NetSuite, Salesforce, and Microsoft from the ground up, build integrations between your systems, and protect your business by using Microsoft as the IdP.

To learn more about supply chain system integration and how our team can help, reach out to your Citrin Cooperman advisor or info@citrincooperman.com.