In the e-commerce era, customers expect far more access to information from their suppliers. A supplier can save admin costs by letting customers capture their own orders online. But local ERP implementers disagree on how willing South African companies are to let their customers into back-end ERP information.

More clients are demanding self-service websites that enable their customers to do their own ordering, check the status of their orders and get self-service quotes with delivery dates, says Martin Robinson, sales manager of SAP Business One implementer Bluekey Software Solutions. “They don’t want to phone or fax or e-mail. More accurate and up-to-date information is a lot easier to do yourself, by entering the information into a supplier’s website, rather than having someone recapture it on the supplier side,” says Robinson.