Dependable CRM and ERP Operations for an Industrial Equipment Manufacturer

#The starting position

Manufacturers that run both their CRM and their ERP on the Salesforce platform gain a great deal: customer, order, financial and project information in one place. They also take on a particular kind of risk. When configuration and data problems build up, they do not stay in one department. A broken record in the CRM can stop an invoice, and an ERP issue can leave sales teams looking at the wrong figures.

The manufacturer in this engagement ran Salesforce alongside Certinia for its ERP and professional services processes. Over time, both environments had accumulated problems: configuration that no longer matched how the business worked, automation that conflicted, data that had become inconsistent, and ERP-related issues that people had learned to work around. Each problem on its own was manageable. Together they made the systems unreliable, and the business spent effort compensating for them instead of using the platform to run better.

For an equipment manufacturer, the stakes are concrete. Orders, service work and project billing all pass through these systems, and any delay or error in them reaches customers and cash flow.

The goal was clear: make the enterprise CRM and ERP dependable again, without disrupting the business that relied on them every day.

#What we delivered

01 Multi-month cleanup and troubleshooting

We ran a structured cleanup of the Salesforce and Certinia environments over several months. Recurring problems were investigated to their causes, conflicting or broken configuration was corrected, and administration was brought back under control.

02 Data integrity fixes

Data problems were identified and corrected so records were consistent and connected correctly. Because CRM and ERP share data, this work had to consider how a fix on one side would affect processes on the other.

03 ERP-related issue resolution

Issues in the ERP processes were diagnosed and resolved, so financial and operational work could proceed without the workarounds people had built around them.

04 Change management

Every change was managed: planned, communicated and released with care, so users knew what had been fixed and could rely on it. In a remediation, this matters more than it might seem, because people need to know when it is safe to stop using a workaround.

05 Ongoing support and production maintenance

After the cleanup, we continued with ongoing support and production maintenance, keeping the environment stable as the business continued to make changes.

#Why remediation is harder than it looks

Fixing an org that the business uses every day is different from building a new one. Every change lands on live processes, real users and real financial data. A fix that is correct in isolation can break a downstream process nobody remembered depended on the old behavior.

Three principles guided the work. First, diagnose before changing: every recurring problem was traced to its cause, because fixing symptoms only moves them. Second, fix from the data up: configuration and process fixes are fragile if the data underneath is inconsistent. Third, change in controlled steps: each fix was released deliberately, with the ability to confirm it worked before moving on.

The platform made a fourth principle essential. Certinia and Salesforce share data and automation, so every proposed change was considered from both the CRM and the ERP side. A change to an account or opportunity field might be harmless to sales and significant to finance. Understanding both sides is what allowed the remediation to make things better without creating new problems.

#What a structured remediation looks like

A remediation of several months needs structure, or it becomes an endless stream of fixes. We approach it in four phases.

Assess. List the known problems, the workarounds users rely on and the areas of configuration and data that look risky, and agree priorities with the business, usually starting with whatever affects finance and customers.

Stabilize. Address the issues causing the most disruption first, so the business feels the benefit early and the team earns trust for the deeper work.

Clean up. Work systematically through configuration, automation and data, removing what is broken or redundant and correcting what is inconsistent.

Sustain. Move into ongoing administration, support and production maintenance, with change management for every release, so the environment stays healthy.

Throughout, communication with users matters. People who have built workarounds need to hear when a problem is fixed and when they can return to the standard process, or the workarounds will continue long after the cause is gone.

#Signs an environment needs remediation

Organizations rarely decide one morning that their Salesforce and ERP environment needs a remediation program. The need builds slowly, and the signs are easy to normalize. These are the ones we look for.

Workarounds have become procedure. People export data to fix it in a spreadsheet, keep a side list of records that must not be touched, or follow an unwritten sequence of steps to make a process complete. Each workaround marks a problem the system no longer handles.

Reports need a translator. When numbers have to be explained, adjusted or cross-checked before anyone trusts them, the data underneath is inconsistent.

Small changes feel dangerous. If adding a field or changing a picklist value requires days of nervous testing because nobody knows what depends on it, the configuration has outgrown its documentation.

The same issues return. A problem that keeps coming back after being fixed is a symptom of a cause that was never found.

Finance and sales disagree. On a shared CRM and ERP platform, a persistent disagreement between what sales sees and what finance sees is usually a data integrity problem crossing the boundary between them.

Any one of these signs can be lived with. Several together mean the business is paying a steady cost in time and confidence, and a structured remediation will usually return more than it costs.

#How we delivered it, end to end

Delivered by our team. This work was delivered by members of the SynconAI team during earlier enterprise delivery work, and the approach is the one we use for org remediation today.

Investigate causes. Recurring issues were traced to their sources before changes were made.

Fix data integrity. Inconsistent and broken records were corrected with the ERP implications in mind.

Resolve ERP issues. Problems in the financial and operational processes were fixed so work could proceed normally.

Manage change. Releases were planned and communicated so users could rely on each fix.

Maintain production. Ongoing support kept the environment stable after the cleanup.

#The decisions that mattered

Remediate rather than rebuild. Fixing in place reduced risk and preserved the existing investment.

Consider both sides of every change. Treating CRM and ERP as one system prevented fixes from creating new problems.

Stay on after the cleanup. Ongoing support stopped the environment drifting back into the state it had been rescued from.

#What changed

#What we would tell a manufacturer in the same position

If your CRM and ERP share a platform and both have become unreliable, start with the data and work upward. Trace recurring problems to their causes, fix in controlled steps, and think about finance every time you change a sales field. Most of all, plan for what comes after the cleanup, because an environment without an owner will drift back to where it started.