ERP Integration

ERP Integration

Note: this product has been developed and is being supported by a partner developer.

With the ERP Integration extension, orders placed on your Magento website are automatically imported into your ERP system while product updates made in ERP are transferred in real-time to your web store. The fast synchronization process is flawless, which allows to handle up to thousands of orders and stock updates every day.

Benefits of ERP - Magento integration

Flexibility
The Magento ERP Integration extension can be integrated with almost any ERP solution, thus, if you change enterprise resource planning software, you can continue using this extension after setting the integration with your new ERP. This integration software is becoming the de facto way of integrating Magento with and ERP system, as it is so easy for the ERP supplier to integrate towards it.

Data synchronization
All key data (products, prices, stock, orders, customers, etc.) is synchronized automatically between both systems.

Security
If the Magento installation is running on https/SSL, the data between the ERP system and Magento will also go over this encrypted connection, making the data synchronization and transition between ERP and a Magento web store absolutely anonymous and secure.

Reliability
The information provided by the ERP system will be received by the website (and vice versa) right as it was given. Any error occurred initiates a warning email sending. Updates from ERP to Magento are queued up in Magento, making sure no data is lost.

Independence
Due to the independence of Magento website and ERP system, any breakdown occurred at any side does not influence the other.

What data is synchronized?

Products
When a new item (simple or configurable) is added to the ERP system, it is automatically transferred to Magento. The product SKU, name, price, description and stock is taken from ERP and can be later edited in your website backend. Also any other fields from the ERP system can be extracted and updated/imported into Magento as long as the ERP supplier is able to extract the data into the product CSV format.

Images
The ERP Integration extension continuously checks and updates all new images from a dedicated folder where the ERP system is running over to Magento. This feature supports both exact SKU filenames (i.e sku.jpg) and multiple product images using sku_1.jpg (main image), sku_2.jpg, sku_3.jpg, etc.

Stock/Price Updates
Stock and price changes made in ERP can be automatically and continuously sent to Magento keeping your website information up-to-date.

Online Orders
New orders are imported from Magento to the ERP system and then order statuses are updated back from ERP to Magento. The integration supports fetching orders, invoices and credit memos from Magento.

What are the technical aspects of the integration?

Integration components
The integration extension consists of two main components - a specially developed and optimized "Web service" on the Magento side and a Windows/Linux Client binary - navimage.exe & navimage.ini - which takes care of transferring the data between Magento and the operating system where ERP is running. Using this client is optional as some ERP suppliers just integrate the Navimage Web service directly with the Magento side, making the integration 100% live.

Technologies used
The Magento - ERP integration is realized through a combination of a Web service, XML- and CSV-files.

* Support of operating systems where ERP is running: Windows/Linux/UNIX
* Data interchange format: JSON / XML
* Data transfer methods support: Direct POST to/from Magento, locally on ERP operating system, FTP to/from Magento (requires FTP-server setup on Magento side)

IMPORTANT! Customization required on the ERP side
This software does NOT integrate directly into the ERP system. The ERP provider needs to implement the option to read/write the required files/data to/from the ERP system, which are transferred either using the included Navimage client or directly to Magento (see above). An experienced Microsoft Dynamics NAV developer would typically spend 2-3 days to automatically extract product data, and another 3-4 days to handle order import. You need to talk to your ERP supplier and show the full integration documentation. Then you'll get a price quote from them to estimate the total cost.

Open source
The software is 100% open source, making it easy to customize.