What is the difference between Intranet, ERP and CRM?
I'm in an internship and have been given a project to develop an application for a warehouse. I googled for solutions I found some systems like Intranet, ERP and CRM.
I don't know what is the best solution and I don't know what is the difference between those three solutions.
What is the best one to use for my application and what is the best system to use?
p.s : I can't use the openERP system.
Answer
Intranets are internal company websites used to share information between colleagues or to serve specific internal business needs, such as internal ticketing systems for the IT Support teams, etc.
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management systems are used for storing and tracking information about your current and potential customers. It could be integrated with other systems, such as your sales systems, to give a single view of that customer, i.e. show any interaction the customer may have made (telephone calls, meetings, previous sales etc). A very popular online CRM used by a lot people at the moment is SalesForce.com, for example.
It sounds like you need an ERP system, or Enterprise Resource Planning, which could integrate a whole bunch of different systems and bring in things like manufacturing, sales, customer data, finance etc. BUT this is no small task and I think as an intern you will struggle A LOT with this.
That said, what exactly does this application need to do for your warehouse? How big is your warehouse, how many products are you talking about/sales turnover/how fast do products move? DO you have to develop this yourself or do you just have to make some recommendations? Normally ERP system implementation will take a lot of planning, a lot of previous experience and a lot of people to implement, and normally very costly!