Small-Mid Size Business Scenario:
A growing global, learning and development company with 125+ employees quickly ran into complexities due to rapid growth. They were acquiring new clients regularly and had complex payment schedules around delivery of their training programs. Some programs were specific to leadership (life) coaching and others around corporate training. They had Microsoft Dynamics CRM for their Business Development Team and Microsoft Dynamics GP for their Finance Team. Their Business/Financial Analysts would aggregate data from both CRM and GP to create reports on sales forecasts, revenues, year-over-year (YOY) tracking, profit and loss (P&L) and their balance sheet. So during month-end, quarter-end and year-end, the teams were in lockdown to get the reports finalized, signed off by managers and presented to their board members and investors. The grueling task was costly, time-consuming and error-prone. It also lacked internal controls and it was very difficult to audit.
To manage these pressures, they decided to investigate off-the-shelf Business Intelligence (BI) tools. They soon learned that these tools were built for large enterprise companies in mind and not for small, budget-conscious businesses. In addition to that, an economic downturn had started and all new projects got shelved.
What They Did:
Their teams started looking at their CRM system in detail. The dashboard presented relevant departmental data which was easy for analysis. They set out on a course to do the impossible. They were going to use their CRM system, traditionally for salesforce and marketing (SFA and MA) automation, as an analytic dashboard for their Finance department.
The CRM consultants configured the system so that a new CRM record would be created weekly. The record would pull a flat-file from GP and upload it to their dashboard. The dashboard would now have a true financial view into GP data such as their balance sheet, actual versus budget, and how they were tracking year-over-year. No additional BI tool was needed after all.
Approximate Effort:
10 days of effort for this project; Five days for CRM and five days for ERP configuration.
To find out more about how you can maximize your return on an existing Dynamics GP system, contact our CRM Expert Services team. Fieldpoint Service Applications has 500+ clients and 13+ years in CRM service management expertise for the professional and field service industries.
We would be more than happy to spend some time with your team. Looking at your current processes and devising a plan for future success. Contact us today!