Connecting Microsoft Dynamics® CRM & Microsoft Dynamics® NAV to solve the disconnect between the front and back office

A TISSKI DISCUSSION PAPER

Your Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Management solutions are both essential to your organisation. They help you to manage your key business processes, align various departments, and enable you to be much more efficient as an organisation.

However, even with solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics® CRM and Microsoft Dynamics® NAV in place, there is still a disconnect between your front office and back office operations, at least in terms of technology. This can lead to a number of ongoing issues. This paper aims to highlight the noticeable benefits on offer from working with Tisski to link your CRM and ERP solutions, and the pitfalls to avoid, when implementing the Dynamics Connector.

The Problem

The main scenario we see within the various organisations with which we work, is that CRM and ERP solutions are in place and working well. However, there is no connection between the two and the various teams, sales, finance, stock management etc.., are using the systems in isolation.

This leads to a number of ongoing issues:

• The development of data silos - whenever there is a disconnect between business critical systems there is the potential for information silos to develop. In this case, that means that your sales team is selling to your customers without access to the correct information, and your finance and stock management teams don’t know what your sales team are promising your customers. This can sometimes lead to embarrassing situations, such as selling products that are not in stock.

• Inefficientuseoftime - The information is there, but in order to gain access to it your teams have to contact other members of staff, sometimes more than once, in turn the staff member with access to the information needs to stop what they are doing to answer the query. It would be much more efficient for team members to be abe to access the information that they need themselves, which is where the Dynamics Connector comes in.

• Makingdecisionsbasedonincorrectinformation- sales teams have a bad reputation when it comes to making promises that they or the company cannot keep. However, often this is simply due to not having access to the correct data and information. Lack of access to key information increases the chances of wrong decisions being made, such as selling products to a client who has been put on hold by your finance departments for non-payment.

• Adisjointedcustomerjourney - the journey that your customers take, from first point of contact with your organisation, through to product delivery and ongoing customer service, is key to maintaining customer loyalty and building a positive reputation. Any bottlenecks or flaws in this process can count against you when it comes to keeping your customers happy.

TheSolution

The obvious solution to this is deploying the Connector between Microsoft Dynamics® CRM and Microsoft Dynamics® NAV, making for one smooth end-to-end process. Enabling this connection offers a number of key benefits, including:

Increasing the opportunity to win optimised, correctly priced and reasonably dated salesMicrosoft Dynamics NAV retains your standard pricing arrangements and “capable-to-promise” profiles, based on the standing order pipeline and known lead times.

Therefore, the Connector could receive an enquiry from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and interrogate Microsoft Dynamics NAV on the first available delivery date, then return this to CRM.

Many integration projects are limited to mere “copy-pasting”, constrained by the premise that it is a technology-driven solution. In reality, the technology is only a messenger and it is up to both the sender and receiver to ensure that the messages are worth sending and reading. For example, you could just pass this information to your ERP solution, i.e. order 10 of widget Y to be delivered by date Z, or you could ask the ERP, if widget Y is not available by date Z, can you suggest an alternative that is in stock, or give me the next date?

However, this is not an off-the-shelf “template”. Getting this kind of benefit out of the Connector means you need to have a deployment team in place that understands the technology involved and the ERP/CRM application processes.

Cost savings and reduced licence costsAnother approach to solving the problem of disconnect between front office and back office operations is to give your team direct access to both solutions using remote desktop access or the new web or iPad clients.

Other than the back-office and stock-grabbing issues this would create, the bigger and less solvable problem is that each staff member would require their own licence which, with the maintenance overhead, is repurchased every 4 or 5 years. This increases running costs significantly.

Alternatively, the Connector makes the most of pre-existing investments with a single deployment and project cost and involves no further license costs.

Time savingsIt’s almost self-evident that the integration of any systems will have time-saving benefits generated by electronic data entry and interrogation, compared to relying on emails and phone conversations.

What’s not so obvious are the other productivity gains arising from bypassing the drawn-out phone calls and getting a smarter connector deployment between your Microsoft Dynamics solutions:

• Getting a smarter delivery date or a substitute item removes all the internal arbitration as the shop floor works out how to keep the salesforce’s promises

• Fewer emergency purchase orders and secondary-shipments (with next-day shipping costs) to fulfil commitments made for out-of-stock items

• Reduced shuffling of the current pipelines, reprinting of picking instructions etc…• Reduced customer expectation re-management.

One version of your data Obviously, copying and pasting of records reduces re-typing and speeds up data entry. However, a couple of things need to be considered.

The connector between your CRM and ERP solutions has to be deployed in a way that’s sensitive to the varying data types and field length definitions between the two databases. The easy shortcut for the implementer is to “lose” text-string overflows when a source field is too long for the destination field. This must be avoided.

The best practice solution is to ensure that the two databases mirror each other where fields are synchronised. Don’t let the implementers take shortcuts which leave you with text strings that are cut to ribb….

Allowing your team to work smarterThe connector offers a number of opportunities when it comes to helping your team work smarter and more efficiently:

• Application LogicThe connector runs any logic behind fields and table event-triggers, this is a great strength when exploited correctly. However, If you try to update live tables crammed full of code, enforced lookups, workflows and permissions, then your data has to arrive fully formed and without a single empty piece of the jigsaw. Any failure, however trivial, will cause a silent failure with no visible error message.

A better implementation methodology is to pass data between “dumb” buffer-tables with matching data types and field lengths, and almost no triggered events – save the last event, once the record has arrived, of verifying the newly arrived record. If valid, transfer the record to a “live” table; otherwise alert a user to the failed record and nature of the failure.

This guarantees as near as humanly possible that records cannot fail to integrate and are speedily dealt with.

• TemplatesIntegrated applications will have many differences arising from the core aims of the application. For example, CRM has no awareness of the financial profile of a transaction (e.g. debtor control account). This can be partly solved by supplying default values in the connector mapping function, but this creates as many problems as it solves as the default value is only correct somewhere between 51% and 100% of the time, meaning someone has to identify and then repair non-default records.

A smarter solution is to set up and utilise a series of templates, populating these integration “gaps”, and forcing the sending user to choose one.

• AutomationMake the databases work harder. You may have the integration up and running well enough, but if the data sits there for hours, or requires a chasing phone call before someone picks it up, you are right back where you started…

Your implementation team should also learn about the company’s processes, not just the flat data. Something that we pride ourselves on at Tisski -

When information arrives, whether it’s a new order, quote or customer, it is important to the company, the sales-rep and the customer, not just that business is done, but that it is seen to be done. Make sure that the relevant users are alerted to the fact that an action is required, provide a link to the source data, and identify the sender. Not only does the customer feel that they are a priority, but the company looks slick and creates that warm glow of “reusable supplier” in the customer’s mind.

• FeedbackIt creates a perception of bumbling and does as much harm as good if the integration is just about a faster method of sending information, without the feedback the sales-rep used to get from a phone call. Without feedback, all you have done is half-fix a problem, and possibly even gone backwards!

Make sure that you exploit the ERP’s existing features to return valuable information to the CRM user. For instance, does the new order take the customer over their credit limit, is an item out of stock for months, discontinued, or superseded? Has the rep reduced the profit margins too far?

Each business has its own concerns and priorities, which are readily addressed in a phone call, but lost when data is just re-typed for the caller. Remember, it is quite easy to fall into the worst case scenario of investing in integration and ending up with the old system still continuing to cope with the issues arising from the new.

More efficient supportIssues will arise, it’s the same with any software integration.

The team at Tisski has been involved in many integration support issues with four parties – the customer, the middle-ware, the sender application, and the receiving application engineers. The three engineers are sincerely convinced of the infallibility of their application and demand the other two check their own apps. Meanwhile, the customer is tapping his or her fingers on the desk ever more desperately.

Eventually, one or two days later, blame is apportioned and two engineers look down on the shamed, charlatan third engineer, and the ongoing relationship is well and truly poisoned. Worse yet, the customer is infuriated and wants to pull the plug on the whole solution for not delivering the promised benefits.

Bringing integration support under one “roof” is a good way to stop the rot. There’s no question that issues will arise, but now the three engineers work for the same manager and there’s no motivation for them to guard their own reputations. The acrimony is gone, the engineers can gather round one desk and talk, and the end result is the problem is solved more speedily and with one point of contact between customer and support.

The Dynamics Connector, being part of the Microsoft Dynamics suite, is naturally implemented and supported by the same team that deployed your Microsoft Dynamics® CRM and ERP applications.

ConclusionDeploying the Dynamics Connector between your CRM and ERP databases is good, it’s fast, reliable and code-free. Deploying the connector well is even better, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking technical solutions will solve business process problems. But to get the best out of the connector, first and foremost get a team that understands your business processes to deploy it, and make it the same team that deployed your other Microsoft Dynamics applications.

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