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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,... / Best Practice for Sync...
Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
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Best Practice for Synchronizing 'Industry' Field Between Account and Contact Entities

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Posted on by SR-02080227-0 117

Hello Everyone,

I am looking for the best practice to ensure that the 'Industry' field in the Contact entity is automatically created and synchronized to always reflect the same value as the 'Industry' field in the Account entity, which is of the type Choice (Non Sync with global choice). Our goal is to maintain data consistency across our CRM, and we want to implement a solution that will automatically update the Contact's 'Industry' field whenever the Account's 'Industry' is modified.

Could anyone share their insights or experiences on the most efficient method to achieve this? Whether it's through workflows, plugins, Power Automate, or any other approach, I would greatly appreciate your recommendations on ensuring this field remains consistent across both entities.

Thank you for your time and assistance!

  • Verified answer
    SR-02080227-0 Profile Picture
    SR-02080227-0 117 on at
    Best Practice for Synchronizing 'Industry' Field Between Account and Contact Entities
    Our Marketing Team needs to filter contacts by account industry in Segment of Customer Insights to send emails to the customers. Unfortunately, we cannot filter from related tables in Segments as it only allows filtering by their own table.
     
    To address this, I have created a new field "Account Industry" in the contact table and deployed two Power Automate flows. The first flow triggers when the industry's account is modified to update the associated contact. The second flow triggers when an account of a contact is created or modified to update the field.
  • Suggested answer
    CU27081348-3 Profile Picture
    CU27081348-3 4 on at
    Best Practice for Synchronizing 'Industry' Field Between Account and Contact Entities
    What reason would you have to store that data in 2 places and maintain it, especially considering that the Contacts have a 1:1 relationship with their parent account? Off the top of my head I cannot think of a user process or automation that could not present or reference the Account's industry when viewing the Contact. What process are you enabling by doing this?
    Views - add the related field
    Contact form - add a quick view form
    Marketing Lists - pull related table and reference the industry.
    Automations - same as marketing lists, pull the related table.
     
    Best practices for data management say you would not duplicate, or establish a workflow that maintains the data, especially considering the single system and record relationships.

    Also, if you're dead set on doing this Power Automate would be the way to go. Trigger off Account, set it to listen to that column only, and when it changes Get List and retrieve all related Contacts, then update each's Industry field. It will auto apply the "Apply to Each" function. To prevent unwanted updates/discrepancies in data I would also lock the field on the Contact Form.
  • Suggested answer
    SaiRT14 Profile Picture
    SaiRT14 126 on at
    Best Practice for Synchronizing 'Industry' Field Between Account and Contact Entities
    Here are the options:

    • Set up a Power Automate flow that updates the Contact's Industry when the Account's Industry changes.

    • Create a workflow that automatically updates the Contact's Industry whenever the Account's Industry is updated.

    • Build a plugin that ensures the Contact's Industry field matches the Account's Industry when it changes.

    • Use PowerApps with some simple code to keep the Industry fields in sync when the Account is updated.

    Low code option is Power Automate!

  • SR-02080227-0 Profile Picture
    SR-02080227-0 117 on at
    Best Practice for Synchronizing 'Industry' Field Between Account and Contact Entities
    Is Power Automate the best way to do it?

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