Quoting, channel pricing and aftermarket service nearly always happen somewhere outside the ERP, in spreadsheets and inboxes that nobody planned to depend on. We move that work into Salesforce and wire it back to the system of record, so your ERP keeps the job it is good at.
A distributor discount applied from memory. A bundle quoted without its spare-parts kit. A price that was superseded in March and is still sitting on somebody’s desktop. None of these ever surface in a report, because the loss never had a line to appear on.
We put the rules that govern a quote into Salesforce and point them at the ERP. Price categories come from the system of record rather than a rep’s recollection. Configurations your plant cannot build get refused before they reach a customer. Equipment that needs a consumable asks for it. Your ERP carries on doing the thing it is genuinely good at, and the commercial team stops rebuilding pricing by hand every time somebody asks for a number.
Nobody is migrating Syteline, Syspro, Epicor or Deacom, and we would talk you out of it if you suggested it. The ERP owns cost, inventory, invoices and the audit trail. What it was never built for is the messy commercial work that happens before an order exists: configuring a machine with its accessories, applying a channel discount, producing a proposal somebody is willing to sign.
So we mirror the ERP into Salesforce on a nightly schedule, read-only, upserting on the ERP’s own identifiers so a re-run is always safe. On one recent build that is roughly 880,000 rows in about thirty-five minutes. Then we build the quoting, channel and service layer on top of data the finance team already trusts, and write back only where the business genuinely needs two-way traffic.
Four points in a manufacturer’s cycle account for most of the lost time and nearly all of the lost margin. They are rarely the parts anyone complains about.
Worth asking for
Every one of these came out of a real build. None of them were on the original requirements list.
Add a coding printer to a quote without its ink and the quote asks about it. Equipment sold without the thing it consumes is recurring revenue that never shows up as a loss, because no report has a column for it. The same logic covers filters, blades, nozzles, test strips and spare-parts kits, and it costs a morning to build.
In distribution almost nobody cancels. They just stop ordering, and the rep finds out two quarters later. Store the average days between orders on the Account, compare it against days since the last order, and a quiet customer raises its own hand while the relationship is still worth saving.
Most ERPs report last cost, which leaves out duty and freight. Quote against that and your margin is overstated by exactly the amount tariffs have been moving all year. Carry duty and freight as their own fields on the product and the lot, and gross margin starts meaning what finance thinks it means.
A nightly ERP sync that dies quietly is worse than one that fails loudly, because the reps carry on quoting off three-week-old pricing and nobody knows. Log every run as a record, keep the rejected rows, and schedule a morning heartbeat that raises an alert when nothing reported overnight.
If you sell ingredients, components or packaging, you win the specification at one company and receive the purchase order from three others. Standard CRM has no concept for that, so it usually lives in a free-text field, which means the spec-in knowledge walks out when the rep does.
Field reps do not type up visit notes, so the activity data in most manufacturing CRMs is fiction. An Agentforce action turns a spoken summary into a structured report, competitor and price included, and creates nothing until the rep confirms it. Decline, and nothing is written, and the draft never counts toward anyone’s numbers.
Your ERP stays where it is. These are the places we most often have to meet it, and what we do at each seam.
Products, pricing, inventory and invoices come from here and nowhere else. We mirror them nightly and read-only, keyed on the ERP’s own identifiers so a failed run can simply be run again.
Syteline Syspro Epicor Kinetic Deacom Infor NetSuite
Bundles, option groups, exclusion rules, and the pricing procedure that turns a price category plus a channel discount into a partner price. Where a third-party configurator owns the detail, we mirror its output into Salesforce so it finally becomes reportable.
Revenue Cloud (CPQ) Infor CPQ Configure One Tacton
Customer-specific catalogs, your distributor’s own part numbers rather than yours, order and invoice history, and a two-level user model so their administrator manages their own people instead of calling yours.
B2B Commerce Experience Cloud
Work orders, appointments, technician hours and signed service reports, with the photographs attached to the record that gets billed. Specialty tooling tracked as Assets so a missing fixture has a history.
Salesforce Field Service ServiceMax
Invoice lines drive commission records and up-to-four-way splits. Margin gets measured against landed cost, materials plus duty plus freight, rather than the ERP’s last cost.
Accounting Seed QuickBooks Sage NetSuite
Live rate shopping at checkout, labels printed from the record, and proposals generated from quote data rather than retyped out of it.
UPS ZenKraft Conga DocuSign
Walk us back through how it was priced, what the ERP contributed and where the number moved along the way. Half an hour is usually enough to find the leak, and you will know either way.
