Using Microsoft Dynamics AX and CRM Together to Drive Revenue Growth

„To realise the promises and possibilities of a world ahead, organisations must be united”  Kirill Tatarinov, Microsoft Business Solutions President.

Microsoft Dynamics solutions re-imagine what’s possible for businesses, helping them unite to unlock innovation and creativity in people; and to enable more meaningful experiences for their customers’.

To compete more effectively and profitably in a challenging market, a company must make a strategic decision to combine their technological infrastructure with Microsoft Dynamics AX. To support sales and drive revenue, the company should also invest in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

What does Microsoft Dynamics AX offer an organisation?

Microsoft Dynamics AX is a business solution for global organisations supporting industry-specific and operational business processes; along with comprehensive, core enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionality for financial and human resource management. It provides the ability to anticipate and embrace change; driving faster adoption so your business can succeed. Microsoft Dynamics AX will help provide business value faster, enable agility and insight in your organisation through a continued emphasis on simplicity.

What does Microsoft Dynamics CRM offer an organisation?

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides access to customer information, activities, and conversations ensuring prompt user adoption (due to familiarity) and fast results. Using Dynamics CRM; sales, marketing, and customer service teams can understand every individual customer’s needs, wants and grievances, thus, the enriched ability to deliver effective customer relationship management and customer satisfaction. This information greatly contributes toward better decisions, reduced costs and the profitability of an organisation.

How combining these systems can drive revenue growth:

If you purchase your ERP and CRM solutions separately, you will be stuck with two stand-alone products, requiring duplicate data entry and slowing down enterprise-wide analysis.

There are countless benefits of bringing your CRM and ERP solutions together to ensure continuous, flawless flow of your business data. The top 6 benefits are:

1.    Return On Investment: In business, driving revenue growth is your top focus so it is important to get a prompt return on any investment that you make into your business systems.  ERP and CRM systems are built to work in harmony enabling you  to integrate theses systems with less effort and expense than in the past; lessening your investment and enabling you to reap returns on it faster.

2.    Higher revenue and profitability: better reporting and increased visibility into key performance indicators, allows an organisation to analyse production trends to improve yield, manufacturing profitability, and operational efficiency. Furthermore; with an automated system in place less time and effort is spent doing manual tasks, reducing time costs and improving efficiencies and productivity. Improved service and growing brand managemen leads to an increase in customers and profits.

3.    Visibility: With integration, an organisation can view many aspects of a customers at once. Increased visibility using the combined systems allows an organisation to interpret customer buying preferences, patterns (CRM) and payment history (Dynamics AX) allowing for more accurate target marketing and the ability to satisfy customer needs.

4.    Efficiency and Accuracy:  An integrated system eliminates duplicate data entry, resulting in improved efficiencies and reduction of errors.

5.    Improved customer service: by combining both CRM and Dynamics AX systems; information and customer relationships have never been so imminent. Through using a CRM system, real-time visibility of all customer processes provides in-depth knowledge of individual customers, meaning customised customer service and rapport building. Additionally, using Dynamics AX,  supply chain management, HRM, Sales and marketing, and BI can be accessed at the click of a button; enabling an organisation to provide significantly improved  customer services.

6.    Increased productivity:  The speed in which operations are completed is improved dramatically as a result of CRM systems. Through streamlining production activities, time can be spent effectively on improving production and sales rates. With an improved automated computer system tailored for customer related data organisations; critical billing, accounts receivable, revenue recognition and in-depth reporting can be analysed immediately, increasing productivity.

Combining both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Dynamics AX, an organisation can avail of all of the above benefits. The fallout from this is increased business intelligence, improved productivity, analysis and aligned customer services processes; which overall results in driving customer retention and continuous revenue growth.