Construction CRM vs ERP: what is the difference?

What a construction CRM actually does

CRM stands for customer relationship management. In construction it holds the enquiries you have received, the tenders you are pricing, the clients and architects you deal with regularly, and the history of what you quoted and whether you won it.

The job of a CRM is to stop opportunities being forgotten. A contractor who prices fourteen jobs a month and wins three does not lose the other eleven because the price was wrong — they lose a good number of them because nobody followed up.

• Enquiries and leads, with who owns each one
• Tenders in progress and what stage each has reached
• Clients, architects, quantity surveyors and their contact history
• Win and loss records, so you can see what you actually win

What a construction ERP actually does

ERP stands for enterprise resource planning, which is a poor name for what it does. In construction an ERP runs the delivery of work: the bill of quantities, the programme, what has been ordered, which subcontractor is doing what, how much has been spent against the budget, and what has been certified and invoiced.

The defining feature of an ERP is not the list of modules. It is that the modules share one set of data. When a variation is approved, the value should reach the budget, the forecast and the application for payment without anybody retyping it. Software where each module keeps its own copy is a collection of tools, whatever it is called.

• Estimating and bills of quantities
• Programme and sequencing
• Procurement, subcontractor packages and orders
• Cost against budget, valuations and applications for payment
• Health and safety, quality records and handover

Why the join between them is where money is lost

The expensive gap is not inside the CRM or inside the ERP. It is between them. A tender is priced in one system and then retyped into another to become a live job, and the assumptions behind the price — the rates used, what was excluded, what the programme assumed — do not make the journey.

Six months later somebody asks why the job is losing money against a budget nobody can trace back to the tender. The answer is usually that the budget was never the tender; it was a retyped version of it.

This is the practical argument for one platform rather than two good ones: not that integration is impossible, but that the thing most worth carrying forward is the reasoning, and reasoning is exactly what does not survive a re-entry.

Which one does a contractor need?

A contractor who is mostly chasing work and pricing it needs the CRM half first. A contractor who has plenty of work and is losing money on it needs the ERP half first. Most established contractors need both, which is why they are increasingly sold together.

Pinnqle is built as both, with the same records underneath, across five plans from forty-nine pounds a month to nine hundred and ninety-nine. It covers seventy-eight modules in total and works in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, with compliance sets and terminology that switch by country.

Common questions