Making Microsoft Dynamics 365 a “one-stop-shop” application

About the Customer

The customer is a leading construction products distribution company with over 180 locations across the United States and Canada. The company specializes in the supply of commercial construction and residential building trades. With an aim to help its sales reps and brand managers take informed strategic decisions, they wanted to include all the necessary information in a single hub rather than having its users switch between numerous applications. Microsoft Dynamics 365 was selected as a “one-stop-shop” application surfacing data from multiple locations.

Business Challenge

The customer contacted Brillio to enhance the functionality of Dynamics 365 to better fit the needs of the sales reps and brand managers. Key challenges faced by the client included:

• Limited tool adoption: The users leveraging the CRM platform had little technical expertise, so it was required to make the platform simple and straightforward to help them manage their prospects and clients effectively
• Manual operation: Completion of various tasks on the platform such as processing opportunities by sales reps required manual effort thereby consuming more time for even a minor update
• Lack of reporting features: Previously used reports were non-interactive, and were missing useful informative insights

Solutions

A steering committee was formed including sales representative, sales managers, and branch/ district managers from each region to obtain quick inputs. Brillio conducted weekly project meetings with the steering committee to thoroughly discuss the requirements and find the best possible solution. The team leveraged an agile methodology to deploy enhancements and customizations on the Dynamics 365 platform. Key enhancements include:

• Complete Integration: Initially, the CRM included only commercial sales data points. However, the integration of SXE to CRM helped include residential sales data as well for better analysis.
• Interactive Dashboards: Developed informative and interactive dashboards within the CRM platform, leveraging Microsoft’s Power BI for various roles including Sales Reps, Branch Managers, and the Regional Team. The users were also able to customize the dashboard by slicing, filtering, and comparing the data as they deemed fit. These dashboards provided users the ability to interactively view their performance at the user, branch, region, or company level.
• Data Visualization: Workflows were implemented to import the sales goals data from excel spreadsheet into the CRM platform, thereby, simplifying the process and allowing users to track and visualize ‘Target vs Actual’ data easily.
• Automation: Various processes were automated through workflows to reduce the amount of time for completing a particular task within the platform.

Business Benefits

The team helped the client benefit from a more customized and enhanced version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. This resulted in:

• Better reporting visibility with interactive Power BI Dashboards helping users make informed decisions
• Reduction in the amount of time for Sales Reps to process an opportunity and manage their customers
• Reduction in the number of applications that users require to obtain information