How often do critical steps get missed in your business processes?
Does information sometimes fall through the cracks, and are you still getting too many approval requests in your inbox?
Even a process that works okay right now may need changes down the road. Let’s look some ways you can make improvements and streamline things using Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Get Employees Involved When Creating Processes.
As a manager, you know the goals you want to achieve, but your hands-on employees know what stands in the way. It’s important to include them when defining or revising any process.
Employees know the system’s flaws and will have ideas about how to make their jobs easier. If the process of creating a quote takes too much time, they will be able to pinpoint the cause faster than you will.
Make Improvements By Linking Business Processes Together.
When it makes sense, you may want to link two separate processes together in Dynamics.
Let’s say you have one system for submitting quotes and orders, and another for fulfillment. When a customer makes a small purchase, your sales representative would need to put together a proposal and collect information about that account, such as shipping and billing addresses, and the number of employees.
Using Dynamics, you can create custom forms that will collect all the information you need, and connect it with the system used for creating orders. This way, you can easily monitor and measure end-to-end business practices.
Require Critical Information At Each Stage Of The Process.
To prevent information from getting missed, you can program your CRM to guide people through the process in a specific way, requiring them to fulfill each step before moving to the next stage. This helps ensure people will gather critical information as they work.
Let’s go back to our sales representative for a moment. Let’s say she is working with a customer who asks for a bigger discount than you approved in the initial proposal. You can automate a process for situations like this. When the rep requests a larger discount, a notification goes to you for managerial approval. The quote will not proceed until you give the green light to the discount.
When you log into Dynamics, you will see a list of notifications for you to approve or deny. This is much more effective than playing defense against a barrage of emails.
Don't Limit Your CRM To Sales Processes.
Companies tend to focus mostly on sales and service when it comes to their CRM, but you could be missing out on other opportunities to improve your business.
Don’t overlook other possibilities, like reducing manual data entry and easing the flow of data across departmental lines. This is particularly useful in the world of commodities traders who need customizations in their CRM to suit their needs.
We recently created two custom entities for a commodity trading company that was keeping track of trades on pen and paper. Prior to using Dynamics 365, their traders would write on sticky notes or send emails to merchandisers to notify them about trades. This involved entering the same data multiple times to accomplish simple tasks.
With Dynamics 365, they now enter the contract information once, starting a business process that sends workflows when the contract has been finalized.
These entities didn't come out-of-the-box, but they were integral for capturing information and storing historical data. Not only did this streamline activities for traders, it also helped managers create powerful dashboards in Power BI, which gave them insights they had never seen before.
By bringing consistency to the business process and enabling easy data sharing, the employees spend more time making trades and less time entering data.
Is it time to revisit your organization's way of doing things?
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