from factory gate to marketplace - microsoft dynamics...

Fullscope White Paper

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From Factory Gate to MarketplaceMaking CRM and ERP the cornerstone of your business platform for agile success

Executive SummaryBusiness platforms should create a chain reaction across multiple departments and facilities. If they do not, you have, at best, daisy-chained a number of best-of-breed products together, but reporting is likely to be disconnected and management still will not have the 360⁰ degree view of the business it craves. In the worst case, your business will be running within silos of disconnected data dependent on point solutions that are not integrated. Any operational efficiencies will be limited.

By definition, a platform should be able to host many different arrivals and departures of goods traffic and customer journeys. A business platform should do the same, seamlessly, without separating the solutions that need to be your core business engine from the production and customer-facing interactions.

Jeremy Cox, principal analyst of enterprise solutions software at Ovum Research, feels that CRM and ERP allow organizations to respond rapidly to changes in customer demand and adapt to the right frequency to remain relevant to their customers. “Continuous, timely and relevant innovation is the hallmark of such an organization,” Cox says. “Any transformational vision...requires a portfolio of applications that work seamlessly together to enable anyone in contact with the customer to deliver context-aware, relevant information.”

This white paper frames out why CRM and ERP can be the cornerstone of any business platform where supply chain and complete customer insight allows for agile success, by retaining, repeating and growing revenues.

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“Any transformational vision...requires a portfolio of applications that work seamlessly together to enable anyone in contact with the customer to deliver context-aware, relevant information.”



First, reduce IT complexity – don’t overcrowd the platformIncreasingly, businesses are looking for agility, global reach, ease of access and, more often than not, a cloud-based solution. As awareness of the components of the cloud grows, organizations are now realizing that a proliferation of SaaS products and solutions created just another layer of toolsets to form a different level of IT administration burden.

The true economies of scalability, business insight and effectiveness now come from Platform as a Service (PaaS), as integrated solutions become uniform in terms of data, processes and the presentation of business reporting and decision support.

CRM, ERP, Service and Support are common solutions that work better together. United, they provide a single view of the customer, behavior and market movement and trends. Being able to anchor one of those solutions as the integration point to the other two solutions will protect legacies and extend and optimize the investments a company has made.

More often, CRM tends to be the primary point for justifying a transition to a business platform such as Microsoft Dynamics. Many companies have yet to embrace the full benefits of CRM, as they struggle with contact management, spreadsheet forecasts and a lack of visibility of customer engagement and the effectiveness of sales. Invariably, CRM delivers immediate revenue improvements as predictive forecasting and sales productivity are introduced.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides a platform for the whole company, with proven functionality around operations, financials, field service, project service automation, customer service and sales. It modernizes ERP and decision support in status alerts, dashboards and reports for PC, tablet and mobile – so IT becomes as portable on the factory floor as it could on the floor of a chain store. At Element Six (part of DeBeers), Fullscope, provided the Dynamics business platform integrated with core business processes and applications, including the ERP system – and it had to be easy to use.


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“If people can’t use the system, it won’t add value. Look and feel plays a big part. You have to give people tools that they are familiar with and that they will want to use,’ remarks Paul Williams, Head of Group IM, Element Six. “Along with the lower cost, Dynamics CRM’s integration with Outlook and the familiar Office style played a big part in our decision. Because Dynamics CRM is built on a core framework, I knew that we could do a lot more with it to extend the value across the business.”

A business platform such as Microsoft Dynamics, that allows an organization to integrate ERP with a CRM application, will provide increased ROI improvements on both investments – operationally providing cost agility into production decisions and improved forecasting for sales success.

“If people can’t use the system, it won’t add value. Look and feel plays a big part.

You have to give people tools that they are familiar with and that they will want to use.”

The customer supply chain – couple up key business functionsMany organizations will have ERP in place in order to manage the supply and production aspects of the business, from planning, supply-chain management and procurement to finished goods inventory and finance. Connecting supply to demand can sometimes be left to a combination of disconnected reports in an attempt to get an accurate view of what needs to go through the factory gate.

To get CRM and ERP implementations working together potentially requires a whole load of data management and transformation. Seamless integration on a single cloud-enabled business platform can and will remove data-point disconnections. As a result, the platform can fully automate common operational processes right across the business – from R&D to service and support. The simple unification of data accuracy and the 360⁰ insight that will align production output with the behavior and propensities of the customer base and the wider market, will allow organizations to sell more to existing customers and increase reference sales to new clients.


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Standing still will not give you competitive advantage – it’s time to get onboardEvery company needs solid foundations of process and actionable information. A platform that unifies everyday business processes offers competitive advantage. Competitive advantage starts with real-time information and status about customers being visible to all who need those valuable insights. For example, there is more confusion than advantage if a manufacturing company is using the accounting functions in its ERP application when its sales team tracks its opportunities, quotes, tenders and wins in the CRM system. Without integration, when these orders close there is no closed loop process for sales and finance to effectively follow – consequently, productivity is affected as sales and finance become involved in manually generating invoices.

And with sales doing administration, guess what? Your competitor is prospecting in your customer base.

Business platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 provide data, process and solution integration allowing your sales team to have access to data in the ERP application, so price lists and quoting held in CRM becomes enhanced, with instant look-ups into finished goods inventories. Such immediate and simple linkage of live data will feed sales productivity and success.The net result will reduce inventory costs, allow propensity trending for agile production planning and JIT manufacturing and streamline distribution costs simply due to the increased visibility of the pipeline and sales forecast. Having full visibility into product availability and propensity trends removes frustration and helps to drive a high-performance sales team for the success of the company, both in terms of increased turnover and net profit.

China Martens, an analyst at Forrester Research, sees more and more companies seeking greater insight into their business operations as more employees access data from CRM and ERP applications. Companies want a full picture of their customers, one that is generated from CRM (sales, marketing and customer engagement) and ERP, which includes the financial

status of customer accounts, supply chain information and even warehouse management data. “There’s more interest in making end-to-end business processes more efficient,” Martens says. “Some of those processes, for instance order-to-cash, begin in sales and end up in finance. The same is true of project management, where the initial project quote can start in CRM and ends up with billing in ERP.”

“There’s more interest in making end-to-end business processes more efficient.”

Every company is different, sector-by-sector, from manufacturing to logistics, and the extent that ERP and CRM will be deployed will vary significantly. But the advantages of seamless integration and the efficiencies gained from consolidated data and processes are universal.



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Opportunity, contact and account informationBoth CRM and ERP systems contain contact and account information. ERP will hold accounting and company information while CRM will hold further data on prospects and sales/support.

Process re-engineering for continuous business changeA business platform, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, will allow a company to integrate processes and merge different business rules for each department. The consolidation will also support ongoing business change at a process level all the way to new custom fields. This is an opportunity to radically process, enable and automate many of your shared business functions for an agile future.

Finished goods and product visibilityCRM functionality should provide access to stock, products and services typically held within an ERP solution. A single, fully integrated CRM + ERP will allow greater accuracy through quotation to sale and close. More than that, it will also allow marketing to push promotions into the market place for launch, overstock and end-of-life events.

Rapid order managementWhether goods and services are bought and sold online or not, a simple commercial reality is that availability has as much impact on the buying process as pricing. Consequently, a company that can quickly expedite an order created by CRM functionality and executed and tracked by ERP functionality will gain competitive advantage every time.

Order historiesA final function of the single CRM/ERP integration should be to provide the company, at all times, with visibility of order status, those in play and those completed. From this repository, full analytics into buying behavior and propensity trends can be found and will shape production planning and sales initiatives.

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Organizations looking to a business platform to unite the functional silos governed by CRM and ERP need to consider these areas:


Next stop service and supportWhen implementing a business platform with complete ERP and CRM integration, don’t lose sight of the full supply chain. Your production and sales teams also need visibility and access to post sale service and support events. How a customer is handled through a bad experience will be critical to your shared success, especially in a world of hyper-connected, social media aware, consumers.

In this respect, Microsoft Dynamics 365 typifies a business platform. It provides service desk and case management functionally for everything from new product warranty status to maintenance renewal scheduling.

About Microsoft Dynamics 365Microsoft Dynamics 365 unifies CRM and ERP capabilities into applications that work seamlessly together across sales, customer service, field service, operations, financials, marketing and product service automation. With Dynamics 365, manufacturers can better engage customers, empower employees, optimize operations and reinvent products and business models.

About Edgewater FullscopeEdgewater Fullscope delivers innovative Microsoft ERP, CRM and BI solutions and services on premise or in the cloud to manufacturers in North America and Europe. The award winning company enables you to achieve successful business outcomes and is one of the largest resellers of Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics AX and CRM).

To find out more about how Fullscope can help you to build your business call us now on:

(866) 420-7624 option 2 (0203) 608 1445

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Don’t plan for CRM, don’t look to upgrade ERP...

...look for an integrated business platform.

www.fullscope.com© 2017 Edgewater Fullscope. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from Edgewater Technology, Inc. is strictly prohibited.


from factory gate to marketplace - microsoft dynamics...

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