The single biggest driver for delivering real estate technology projects on time and within budget hinges on one key element: seamless integration with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. As real estate organizations aspire to deliver digital and user-centric experiences, scalable ERP and Salesforce integrations become an imperative, not a luxury.
Why You Should Integrate Your ERP with Salesforce
Whether you use Yardi, MRI, RealPage, or JD Edwards, we can all agree those systems excel in the core functionally in and around accounting. However, they lack a user-friendly and robust customer relationship management (CRM) solution, like Salesforce. While it’s tempting to invest more in your ERP to function as a CRM, poor user experiences lead to low adoption, and code-heavy customizations are costly and result in significant technical debt during ERP upgrades.
Instead, our clients have found success integrating their ERP with Salesforce. This robust, yet manageable approach, allows you to optimize your tools and technologies while providing teams with a cohesive data landscape across systems. Your ERP acts as the system of record for property, lease, tenant, and rent data, while Salesforce acts as the front-end operations platform for customer data and sales and service workflows. Not only does this provide your fundraising, transactions, asset management, leasing, and property management teams with a connected platform and more time to build valuable relationships, it also enables them to run the business more efficiently with trusted data. In this integrated Salesforce and ERP experience, there’s no “admin” or duplicate data entry for teams or swivel chairing between systems.
So how does an organization realize the benefits of an ERP and Salesforce integration? One way is to leverage MuleSoft’s comprehensive platform, featuring APIs and pre-built connectors to various third-party systems.
MuleSoft: The Scalable Integration Solution
MuleSoft has been named a 2024 Leader by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant™ for iPaaS and Magic Quadrant™ for API Management. Its scalable, API-led architecture allows each integration to become a reusable building block to support real estate organizations right now and in the future. Think of it like assembling LEGO pieces, where you can extend the structure or reuse pieces seamlessly. One example is as follows:
- Bring your property and tenant data into Salesforce and systemically keep it in sync with your ERP to reduce redundant data management efforts across your teams, driving consistency and speed in integrated reporting.
- Bring your lease data and summary accounting data into Salesforce (e.g., rent, lease expiration, AR balances, etc.) tied to the properties and suites to inform and enable your sales team, highlighting opportunities and risks.
- Enable your sales teams to automate Salesforce renewals and opportunities related to leases, tenants, properties and suites. When your team closes deals, you can automatically push terms from the transactions and leasing opportunities into your ERP for accounting and forecasting purposes.
Integrating this data and building upon the leasing LEGO pieces saves your development team valuable time, ensuring data accuracy and integrity across systems. In return, this helps your leasing agents in expediting deal closures and delivering immediate ROI. MuleSoft’s APIs and pre-build connectors contribute to the ROI by speeding up time-to-value.
Taking the First Step Toward Integrating Your ERP and Salesforce
At Fortimize, we bring over a decade of experience building connected Salesforce and Data & Analytics solutions for real estate organizations. As you begin internal implementation conversations, or look to advance ongoing ones, we recommend the following to build a solid integration foundation:
- Define your integration roadmap and KPIs.
- Start small with a MVP project to support one interaction or workflow.
- Build with reusability in mind. Package your data and capabilities together.
- Track your KPIs on build, service, and delivery to see where you have bottlenecks.
Continue reading about this topic with our whitepaper, Integrating Salesforce and Yardi for Real Estate Firms.
