Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Subsystem

The CRM subsystem in ERP.net is used to manage customer relationships and other front-office activities of a company.

General concepts and processes

The main process in the CRM subsystem is:

Activity → Opportunity → Offer → Sales Order → Invoice Order → Invoice

Activity - generic activity, related to a party. Includes support for calendar appointments, reminders, questionnaires, etc. Can be used to represent appointments, scheduled meetings, visits, contracts and just about any generic document.
Opportunity - sales opportunity, with expected revenue and probability. It does not have detail line items.
Offer - sales offer (quote), with line items. It allows optional selection of some of the items, which the customer has accepted.
Sales Order - sales order from the customer. The main sales document. All documents before it are optional. The sales order initiates the logistics and financial processes, related to the sale.
Invoice Order - an order to issue an invoice. This is an internal document, which is used to track the invoices, which we have to issue.
Invoice - legal and financial document, finalizing the sales process.

The above diagram shows only the CRM part of the whole process. The full process involves many different modules of the ERP system.

There are many modules in the CRM subsystem. They are used to manage the different aspects of the CRM processes:

Contacts and tasks - calendar appointments, party definitions, etc.
Pre-sales - Opportunities management, quotation, etc.
Sales - Sales Orders, customers, etc.
Invoicing - Invoicing process management, invoices and BI.
POS - Manage point-of-sale activities in physical stores.
Marketing - Marketing campaigns, activities, distribution channels, etc.
Distribution - field sales, salesperson targets management, etc.
Pricing - price lists management.
Bonus Programs - bonus programs management.
Promotional Packages - Product bundles management.
Product Configurator - create products based on specs for job shops (made-to-order and engineer-to-order environments).
Products - manage products master data - products and product measurements, codes, variants, channel, pictures, groups, etc.