Educational Institutions like schools, colleges, and universities have started to invest more into the software tools like CRM and ERP to manage their administrative matters, management, and additional tasks related to the running of schools. Post-pandemic saw more such institutions switching to either model for increasing efficiency. But, which one is more effective for an educational organization is still a topic of discussion. In this blog, we will look at both and discuss why your school should invest in ERP solutions rather than CRM system.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the software tool used to handle all the customer data and the interlinkages between them to provide proper tracking, manipulation, and interaction. It can be used to maintain relations with various stakeholders, particularly individuals like suppliers, customers, sales service, and others.
All the contact information, service issues, and queries are located at a central location. It is beneficial for smaller and medium-sized businesses as it is more cost-effective.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a broader way of doing all CRM functions. ERP is a software tool that takes upon greater tasks like maintaining interactions with customers, human resources, potential leads and queries, accounting and finance management within an organisation, and converges the flow.
It can handle all types of business- be it small, medium, or large enterprises. ERP software can be either installed on devices or work in the cloud and can be customized according to the business or organization’s needs.
Both CRM and ERP are responsible for improving the overall business profitability of the customers and maintaining an overall flow between the data stored within them.
Differences between CRM and ERP
While Customer Relationship Management is termed a front office tool, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is termed a back-office tool. The front office is responsible for maintaining customer relations, resolving problems, and talking face-to-face with stakeholders. In comparison, the back office is responsible more for tedious tasks like transaction issues, managerial issues, and multiple folds of things within it.
Following are the differences between the two software tools in terms of functions for educational institutes:
- Cost– The cost of ERP is higher than CRM, as it provides a broader set of functions and caters to a higher client base within the organisation. Nevertheless, neither of them has a small investment per se. Compared to ERP, CRM is cheaper and can be adapted by small businesses looking to make more profit with smaller investments.
- Operations– ERPs are made to tackle tedious processes like financial transactions. Educational institutions have too much on their plate, including fee management of students, salary disbursal of staff members, and expenditure on infrastructure management, which ERP easily tackles compared to CRM, which generally maintains information and processes them.
- Data security– The work of CRM is not expanded much to maintaining data security but instead keeps students and other related data in accessible forms. As educational institutes handle a lot of transactional data, security must be critical for any chosen software. ERP helps not only in maintaining and updating data but also in securing them.
- Management– CRM is suitable for managing general information and monitoring year-over-year progress among students. ERP can help understand the students’ pain points and establish resolutions, communicate them to appropriate stakeholders to redress, analyze their response, and manage the overall feedback mechanism.
Why do educational institutions prefer ERP?
Post pandemic world has seen a paradigm shift in the way businesses used to handle themselves. Every educational organization wants to optimize its functions and be future-ready. ERP solutions help schools to:
Optimize academic and administrative operations
Inquiry, enrollment, admission, managing fee operations, assignments, hostel administration, library management, and more are all part of an educational institution’s academic and administrative operations.
A solid ERP system will allow for the effective and efficient management of all academic and administrative functions. It focuses on delivering real-time results while also increasing overall productivity.
Managing stakeholders
It is critical that educational institutions employ technologies that can assist all stakeholders in managing their grievances, problems, and demands.
An ERP system can focus on bringing complete digital transformation to institutions, leading to managing all grievances, problems, and solving the needs of any stakeholders, including students, parents, faculty, and even higher authority or entity.
Data tracking, storage, and security
At any educational institution, a variety of duties, documents, files, updates, and other items must be monitored, saved, and protected effectively.
An ERP system can give total data protection and administration for any type of data, information, or update. It can track, manage, store, and secure all data.
Optimal ROI
Any institution’s primary focus is on return on investment (ROI). Institutions must implement software or technology that allows them to manage their ROI completely.
An effective ERP system can help institutions manage all of their operations by automating and streamlining the entire institute’s operations, lowering operational costs, and focusing on complete ROI development.
So, if you want a scalable and efficient ERP solution for your educational institution, then eduTinker is the right solution for you. It feature laden to support your school/ schools and get the best ROI. Check our website for more details-www.edutinker.com
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