Case Study: Implementing MS Dynamics CRM 2011 for a Newsgroup

Case study (Newspaper group)

The purpose to write the blog is to tell the people that how Dynamics CRM improve the performance of a newspaper group. Recently I have an experience of working with a Multilanguage newspaper group based in UK. They care about their customers and they are much interested in implementing contract base system which uses very complex business roles and it has 10+ offices in different part of the world and has a lot of agents in all over the world.
Business needs
They have already running a system which is a custom desktop application it has a central database which is linked with all offices. But the application is start causing issues and is really difficult to upgrade or integrate with any system. The application does not support direct marketing list functionality and the main feature of marketing. The client is much interested in reliable fast and accurate system which must be less expansive and they must have good control on it.

Solution:
After consulting we decided to go for Dynamics CRM for Marketing and contract management and for financial management we decided to use Dynamics NAV. Dynamics CRM has a great feature of Marketing and contract system as a built in functionality. They need to store all the data in CRM and also wants old data in new system. And using the NAV contactor we can connect both CRM and NAV. Even If they want to implement other dynamics products it’s easy for them because Dynamics gives adaptor functionality for all the dynamics products.

Benefits for using Dynamics CRM
1. Dashboard
CRM Dashboards allow us to drilldown to the data due to this functionality a business can take more efficient and quick to respond to issues and new opportunities.
Executives can take decisions from dashboard visibility for example if any country has less revenue generated with comparison to the last month the executives will try to find the cause and focus on that country before anything goes in loss.
2. Contract management
After implementing dynamics CRM they can easily manage contracts and have better control on Marketing and pricing.
3. Expands the Agents
In newspaper group agents are great resource of profit. Using accounts and partner portal functionality we can increase agents as much as the newspaper industry can. And using contract management system we can distribute there commission easily. 4. Ad Management
We can use Product as Ad it’s easy for group to manage with contracts.
5. Availability of old data in new systemUsing import feature of Dynamics CRM we can easily migrate data to CRM from any old system.
6. ReportingReporting is really easy in CRM anyone who has a little knowledge about CRM can easily develop reports.
7. Easy to useDynamics CRM has office type UI so if any one who is familiar with office can easily and quickly learn CRM.

This is an open blog any one can share his/her idea's in comments and they are highly appreciated.

Thanks :)

MS Dynamics CRM vs Salesforce - 5 Deciding Factors

In my last project my client asks me to give him some suggestion to choose the CRM product between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce. And depending upon the below criteria I told him why to go for Dynamics CRM.

Here is a comparison of two major CRM products

1. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM we have a lot of options to integrate it with any other application and also office 365 makes it really easy to manage all the things on one place. And in Salesforce we have limited integration capabilities.

2. You could use any deployment option for Microsoft CRM (on-premise, Saas, on-premise hosted, or hybrid) depending upon your business requirement for example if you have resources to manage deployment on server you could go for on-premise version otherwise you have an option of online but in Salesforce you have only one option which is SaaS

3. Overall cost of Dynamics CRM is cost effective you could go for on-premise or online but for salesforce its twice than Microsoft Dynamics CRM online edition and if you need to do more customization you have to go for enterprise edition which is very costly and you have to learn a new language called Apex to add any new feature in it.

4. We could configure almost everything in Dynamics CRM like workflows, role-base views, filed level security its SDK is very powerful we could integrate any application with the help of web services. But Salesforce is not highly configurable.

5. CRM 2013 or CRM 2011 (rollup 12) has built in Yammer, Skype and Bing Maps integration. And upcoming rollup also has cross browser capabilities.

Depending upon the above criteria I suggest my client to go for Dynamics CRM because it is cost effective and if he wants to automate the overall process and uses its custom feature. 

I hope it helps someone :)