Manufacturing

Manufacturing · integration with the industrial ERP

SellioCRM is not an ERP: it does not invoice and it does not schedule production. What it does is hand the order to your ERP safely: it validates before sending, sends with no risk of duplication, records the confirmation with the ERP reference, and flags any discrepancy between the two sides instead of pretending everything matches. The connection to SAP and NetSuite uses your own ERP credentials and is configured in Settings → Integrations.

In manufacturing, the CRM and the ERP share the same sale, and nearly every integration problem comes from one of three things: an order sent with information missing, an order sent twice, or the two systems saying different things about the same order with nobody noticing. The Manufacturing vertical takes on all three head on.

What stays on each side

SellioCRM handles the commercial front: the account and its plants, product configuration, the quote with a frozen price, approval of exceptions and the order ready to produce. The ERP handles the rest: invoicing, production scheduling, accounting stock and logistics. The CRM does not invoice, does not issue tax documents and does not move stock. When it shows availability, that is a mirror of what the ERP reported, and the distinction is explained in the article on availability and ATP.

From quote to order

An order is born from a quote. When you create the order from it, the CRM copies the lines with the amounts already frozen, inherits the currency, the incoterm and the total, and ties the order to the originating opportunity and account. The order starts as a draft, with its ERP status marked as pending.

Validation before sending

Before it leaves the CRM, the order goes through a check that returns a list of blockers. With any blocker open, the send is refused, and the refusal is recorded with the reason. The possible blockers are:

No lines: the order has no items.
Zero total: the order value is not positive.
Credit: the customer does not have credit available for this order.
Invalid configuration: some configured line did not pass the product rules.
Address: the address required for delivery is missing.
Documents: required documentation is missing.
Export compliance: screening blocked the order and no override is on record.

Refusing before sending is deliberate. An incomplete order that reaches the ERP becomes rework on both sides and, often enough, a phantom order nobody can cancel.

Sending without duplicating

Sending is idempotent. The CRM computes a stable signature of the order content, with the total and the lines, and compares it with what has already been sent. If the same payload has already been delivered, the new send does nothing and records that it did nothing: the ERP does not receive a twin order because of a repeated click or an automatic retry. If the order has already been accepted by the ERP, any new send also does nothing.

Once sent, the order moves to Sent to ERP and the attempt counter goes up. That is not acceptance: the order is only considered accepted when the ERP answers.

Confirmation and discrepancy

When the ERP answers, the confirmation enters the CRM with the decision, accepted or rejected, and the reference of the document created on the other side. Only then does the order become accepted, and the ERP reference becomes visible to whoever serves the customer.

After that comes the part most integrations skip: reconciliation. The CRM periodically compares the status it holds with the status the ERP reports. When the two disagree, the order is flagged as discrepant and enters a correction queue, with both values recorded side by side. A discrepancy becomes an alert, never silence.

Example: Andrade Metalworks closes a quote worth USD 84,000. The first send is refused with the credit blocker; the exception goes to the Approvals tab and the sales director approves it. The next send goes to the ERP; a repeated click on the same button produces nothing but a record that the payload had already been sent. The ERP confirms with its own order reference, and the order becomes accepted. Two weeks later the ERP reports the order as cancelled while the CRM still holds it as accepted: the order is flagged as discrepant and appears in the correction queue.

The trail

Every send, every refusal, every confirmation and every reconciliation becomes a row in a history that only grows, with the direction (leaving the CRM or coming from the ERP), the action, the status, the external reference and the message. When somebody asks why that order is the way it is, the whole answer is right there, in chronological order.

Connecting SAP or NetSuite

The connection to large ERPs is set up in Settings → Integrations, under the ERP category, and it uses the credentials of your own environment: the ERP is yours, the license is yours, and SellioCRM simply talks to it. The connection is bidirectional: the CRM sends accounts, contacts, opportunities, orders and invoices, and receives ERP events back, such as a paid invoice or an updated order, through an inbound endpoint protected by a shared secret. Repeated events are recognized by their external identifier and are not processed twice.

The integration stays inert until it is configured and enabled: with no credential, SellioCRM talks to no ERP at all. Besides SAP and NetSuite, the integration catalog carries other management systems, and there is also a generic send to an endpoint of your choosing, for when your ERP is not on the list.

Prerequisites and limits

The Manufacturing vertical has to be turned on in Settings → Verticals for orders and the trail to exist.
Configuring the ERP integration requires account administration privileges; credentials are stored encrypted and are never shown again.
The industrial order does not have a tab of its own on the Manufacturing screen today: it is operated through the integration layer and the approvals.
The CRM does not issue tax documents, does not schedule production and does not move accounting stock.
Reconciliation flags the discrepancy but does not pick a side: the correction is a human decision, made with the trail in hand.

💡 If an order is stuck, look at the blocker list first. In practice, most of the orders that "the ERP never received" never left the CRM, and the reason was written there from the start.

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