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Most Businesses start small. Sometimes it can start over a cup of coffee, or a mutual drive between colleagues to do something new. The aim for most businesses is to flourish and grow, and to do that, the business needs to focus on maintaining a positive relationship with its customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are basically a type of software that provides companies around the world with relevant information that ensures that their customers are always happy.
A CRM system’s benefits are not limited to the clientele. It is known to enhance an organization’s overall abilities to create an outcome-oriented focus. CRM systems help employ ease of access in many things, and there are many CRM software’s out there, but in this article, we are going to be focusing on our personal favorite; Dynamics 365.
In this post, we are going to start by introducing Dynamics 365 and then moving onto discussing how business processes across different industries can be streamlined and made further efficient using this revolutionary tool.
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365?
It is a cloud-based enterprise solution that has unified both CRM and ERP capabilities. Dynamics 365 is a collection of business applications that are designed to streamline the way a business handles manufacturing, distribution, sales, customer service, operations, marketing, project service automation, and company finances.
These apps can be purchased as standalone apps as well as in a suite depending on the needs of a business. Dynamics 365 empowers the user with the necessary tools needed to flourish when engaging with customers in your industry. With constant new functionalities and apps, Dynamics 365 allows companies to integrate with other Microsoft products such as Outlook and Microsoft office. Furthermore, it even supports third-party apps! The current version of Dynamics 365 contains six apps that help streamline a company’s processes.
Dynamics 365 Applications:
- Dynamics 365 for Sales
This app is designed to help the sales team develop and track relationships with clients, focus on actionable insights, and ensure that sales are closed quickly. Dynamics 365 for Sales allows you to nurture sales from lead to order and create sales collateral. It also isolates data on potential clients, customization, and client engagement and measures performance metrics along with sales productivity.
- Dynamics 365 Field Service
This business application is designed to help an organization deliver onsite services to client locations. This app is a combination of workflow automation, scheduling algorithms, and mobility that ensures that remote workers achieve success when they are dealing with onsite customer fixing issues. With the field service app, users can focus on improving first-time fix rate, organizing and tracking resolution of client problems, reduce travel time, and perform many more actions that enhance field service.
- Dynamics 365 Marketing:
It is a cloud-based application that aims to turn potential clients into nurtured business relationships. It guides the user through the sales funnel that can be easily integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales app.
- Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation:
This app allows users to build positive client relationships by executing fruitful project experiences. This app focuses on ensuring that the user can deliver profitable projects within the decided time and budget. It also helps improve employee productivity and boosts overall company morale and confidence. Users also enjoy the optimization of resources and better project profitability.
- Dynamics 365 for Talent:
This cloud-based app helps ensure that user hires, acquires, and retains the best talent by nourishing a two-way culture of responsibility, visibility and excellence for both the management, and the employees.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service:
This app is designed to give the user a complete view of the customer, ensuring that customer service is enhanced. It keeps track of the interactions, important customer information, user preferences, and any customizations demanded by the customer.
Now that we have discussed the suite of Dynamics 365 Applications, let’s move on to how we can use Dynamics 365 to streamline processes across business industries, namely Manufacturing and Distribution industry.
Every organization has three core processes/departments:
- Sales
- Accounting
- Marketing
Businesses also have other processes that revolve around product/service development, manufacturing, HR, quality control, etc. Businesses often cope with these processes in silos which frequently causes them to face the following issues:
- Bottlenecks in the pipeline due to task complexity
- Increasing operation costs due to redundant activities
- Poor visibility of business processes thus a direct hit on revenue and management
Keeping these problems in mind, we can see how Dynamics 365 acts as a life savior for manufacturers and distributors. Dynamics 365 provides access to applications that can work autonomously or can be merged to facilitate complicated workflows that would modernize all processes. Let’s take a few examples from industry use cases:
Manufacturing
This industry is constantly evolving and focusing on improving process efficiency. Most manufacturers rely on Dynamics 365 for a competitive advantage. Dynamics 365 comes with fully operational ERP capabilities that permit manufacturers to enhance their processes and make data-driven decisions.
Furthermore, IoT technologies are capable of generating massive sets of data, which makes it important for manufacturers to have reliable data storage and processing systems. Without an efficient and reliable system, the data cannot be used to its fullest abilities. Here comes Dynamics 365, which has in-built AI capabilities that can be used to extract actionable insights from data. This allows the organization to be more proactive and make accurate decisions.
Dynamics 365 is a tool that enhances innovation. It provides access to real-time data for products, clients, and business performance that allows its users to plan, strategize, react and reinvent in a shorter time period, thus improving customer relations and time to market ratio.
Distribution
For the distribution industry, Dynamics 365 opens innovative ways to make data-driven decisions based on real-time insights about the customer’s needs. By combining the “superpowers” of the Cloud, this system aligns CRM and ERP capabilities with the productive abilities of other applications.
As a result, the business processes guided through this software can identify loyal customers and profitable products. It also helps gain more visibility in inventory planning and supply chain processes.
By aligning and streamlining business processes, an organization can optimize all aspects of their sales and operations and efficiently track and control them.
Conclusion
As we discussed at the beginning of our post, all businesses need to focus on customer relations in order to scale up or even survive! The idea behind streamlining or implementing a proper workflow is to improve efficiency which helps your bottom line! With effective ERP/CRM systems such as Dynamics 365, companies can enjoy a much brighter future with their clientele than ever before!
