Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

General guidance

Hi all,

I am a Dynamics noobie so I am hoping you all may be able to help me create a solution to the issues I raise below.

First, let me say that I work for a provincial government agency in South Africa that focuses on promoting trade, investment and tourism. Like many African governmental agencies, we have limited resources to allocate to improving operational efficiencies. However, not doing so is a negative feedback loop because the resources we waste on being inefficient could be better utilized. Luckily, we have the full Microsoft 365 suite....we just need guidance on how to use it properly. So if there are any links you can provide of "how to use Dynamics", it would be much appreciated.

With that being said, please let me lay out the background and problem I am currently facing that I would be so happy to develop a solution(s) for.

Background

I work on the trade promotion team at my agency. The trade promotion team's main function is to use its resources to take local exporters from the province to outward trade missions. This usually entails attending a trade show in a foreign country. The core KPI we focus on as a result of these engagements is trade deals established between local exporters and foreign importers.

Problem

Throughout this process, there are various forms, reporting, and data that we collect that are currently all being mostly done on paper or email chains - very disorganized. Below are the core problems that I would like to develop solutions for and that I would like to be all interlinked in some form.

Application form. Once we have held a strategy meeting with our team and decide which outward missions we will be attending for the year, we send out an application form to our exporters database via an excel document. It would be great to have the option of having an online template application form that we could email out to our CRM and for that data to be stored securely somewhere. I have played around with Microsoft Forms on Sharepoint but the storing of data to live Excel file in Sharepoint is quite finicky. Sometimes when the form is filled out and submitted, the data does not appear in the live Excel file. Also, it would be great if the application form that is sent out has some sort of a unique ID to the outward mission we are promoting. Essentially, we want to keep the data stored for mission A to be separate from mission B as staff on my team don't all work on the same missions. It would also be great if once the form is filled out, the data is automatically uploaded to our CRM. However, we want to avoid duplicate accounts being created. It would also be great if there was a functionality to send automatic emails to those who were accepted and rejected to attend the mission.
Mission reports. Once the outward mission is complete, two types of mission reports need to be completed: one by the staff member that led the mission and then one that needs to be individually completed by each exporter that attended the mission. We are currently doing all of this via Word documents. For the exporter mission report, it would be great to leverage the data of the accepted exporters per the application form as it would be directly linked to the mission they applied for. It would then be great if the staff member and exporters' mission reports could be compiled together in a particular format that can be exported to Excel. Again, I have tinkered with using Microsoft Forms and tried to use some tricky Excel formulas to compile everything, but the risk of error is too high. Especially around creating a unique ID that links all of the inputs.
Declarations. After missions are complete, we currently have to manually follow up with exporters to see if any trade deals came out of the mission. If any did, we send them a pdf form to fill out and sign. Of course, staff often forget to follow up with exporters or email chains get lost. It would be great if based on the data from the application forms and mission reports, that an automated email gets sent out at 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and 1 year to the exporters requesting that they fill out an online trade declaration form. The data from these forms is to be saved on our CRM.
Quarterly reports. We have to compile quarterly reports which are simply summations of our mission reports and declarations. Currently, this is extremely onerous as staff members for obvious reasons given the challenges I have eluded to above. It would be great if these reports could be automatically created from the mission reports and declarations captured within a quarter.
Annual reports. Our annual reports are simply the summation of our quarterly reports, therefore it would be great to have this automated by just compiling our quarterly reports together.

Overall, I know this is A LOT and I may be asking too much. But any guidance or assistance you could offer would be greatly appreciated. If you need any clarification on any of the points above, please let me know.

Thank you!

Hi ,

Thank you for posting your situation!

The good news is that Dynamics Sales combined with Dynamics Marketing, which includes a subscription to Customer Voice (which is the far more functional version of Forms), and some SharePoint Online licenses from Microsoft 365 (which will include Teams as a bonus and, as of the MS Inspire conference a couple of weeks ago, users can now directly work with some D365 apps right in Teams) can easily accomplish all of your stated objectives. And a great deal more at that.

Let me briefly address each one in the order you provided.

Application form - I would look to create this in Customer Voice which provides the UID you want along with all kinds of branching and show/hide logic as well as significant personalization capabilities. A note that the degree of personalization, along with ease of automated sending, will be determined by your decision to license and use Marketing or not. You get significantly richer capabilities in CV using CJ's (Customer Journeys) in Marketing, though it isn't mandatory to get Marketing.
Mission reports - You can easily create templates in Word and/or Excel (or combo thereof) which can have as much data pulled in from your Dynamics System as variables (think of merge fields) as you want to maintain in Dynamics. But, by ALSO including SharePoint, you can maintain metadata in SharePoint as well providing both an opportunity for security separation (if needed/desired) along with the actual templates.SharePoint also provides a special version of what is called Content Types (the metadata of the files) called a Document Set. That allows you to group up a related set of documents to all share a variety of settings. Imagine say a relatively common employee onboarding scenario where everybody needs to have 1) an offer letter, 2) employment contract, 3) NDA and 4) Non-compete. In that scenario you would create the onboarding Document Set that contained all of those files and they would share the metadata, permissions, version management, and so on. And Doc Sets even each get their own little "landing page". So, in your case, you could group together your internal and external documents for each exporter. You could even go one level deeper if desired and create the sets for each exporter for each mission.
Declarations - Dynamics Sales + Marketing gives you a highly configurable, automated, multichannel follow up and relationship development solution. So, you create the Customer Journeys to align with how and when and who needs to engage (email campaign, text/SMS, phone calls, social platforms including Linkedin and FB, and even snail mail) and Dynamics does the lifting for you. FAR beyond just time-based (3, 6, 9, 12 months in your post). And provides the potential of significant amounts of data that can be used to refine and further develop your missions and your relationships both with the exporters that DO engage with you as well as the prospective ones that may not have engaged yet. You can also integrate digital signatures (or e-signatures) solution into D365. The 2 most common (and free!) ones are Docusign and Adobe Sign. Both of which meet legal standards in many countries.
Quarterly reports - A lot of this point and the next can be accomplished through both the built-in reporting in D365 and SPO/Microsoft 365, but you also have the ability to have OOTB dashboards, you can customize the OOTB reports and dashboards, or you can create completely new ones. If you also opt to purchase licenses for Power BI, you can go positively crazy with what it can provide for reporting, analytics, and dashboarding.
Annual reports - See point #4

I think it is very important to also point out that D365's most important competitor, Salesforce, can also provide almost all of the above. Notably though (even with the just-completed acquisition of Slack), SF has no equivalent to SharePoint. Nor does SF offer anything that actually matches the MS Power Platform family: PowerApps, Power BI, Power Automate cloud and desktop (entry level RPA), PowerApps Portals, and Power Virtual Agents (voice and web channel bots framework). All of which sit on top of the primary data platform for Dynamics called Dataverse. And D365 Sales and Marketing are also 1st party native Dataverse/Power Platform applications. And SharePoint natively uses Power Platform as one of it's channels for extensibility and automation.

MS also offers 2 ERP solutions in the D365 cloud should that be a consideration somewhere down the line: Business Central (which is generally targeted at orgs of roughly 300 or less staff) and Finance and Supply Chain Management (F&SCM, formerly F&O or Finance & Operations). Business Central is largely already within the Dataverse/Power Platform technology stack and F&SCM is slowly being moved over. But F&SCM is a very large and complex solution (and getting more and more so), so that movement will take quite a number of years.

Hopefully, this helps with your planning and choices!

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