Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customization to Facilitate Quote Generation and Reporting
Customer
The Customer is a multinational company that provides welding-related facilities to enterprises from around the world. The company offers the equipment for rent, lease and sale.
Challenge
The Customer’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM wasn’t correspondent to the need in quick quote generation, which caused excessive efforts from sales reps to create quotes and search for products’ prices specific to a particular business unit. The revenue and expense reports lacked accuracy and visibility. The CRM solution wasn’t linguistically localized to the Customer’s business units in Mexico, Germany, France and Spain, which made its use inconvenient to the employees there. User experience across web and mobile user interfaces was inconsistent due to functionality gaps in the mobile UI.
Solution
ScienceSoft’s team performed custom development of the Customer’s Microsoft Dynamics 365-based CRM solution.
To facilitate a quote generation process, ScienceSoft’s developers enabled easier search for products and their prices by creating a custom look-up functionality for different quote lines (e.g., lease lines, rental lines, and sales lines for the products that were leased, rented and sold accordingly) using JavaScript. The functionality also allowed setting up product prices for different business units located worldwide. This helped sales reps from these business units quickly create quotes with the product prices adjusted to their business unit and distribution territory.
ScienceSoft’s team also created a custom button Copy Quote using Ribbon Workbench. The button allowed easily creating new quotes by copying necessary quote lines in one click. To enable automated quote generation, developers modified the server-side logic of the price calculation process using the Custom Actions plugin. It allowed sales reps to easily generate quotes with automatically calculated prices and discounts.
To provide better visibility into revenues and expenses, ScienceSoft’s team created custom SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports using Microsoft Visual Studio and Fetch-based reports.
To perform CRM language localization for different business units, ScinceSoft’s developers added such languages as French, German, and Spanish to the CRM solution in the settings. Additionally, they had custom UI components and custom reports translated into all the above languages.
Upon completion of Microsoft Dynamics 365 customization, ScienceSoft’s team performed the CRM upgrade from 8.0 version to 9.0 version. The upgrade eliminated functionality gaps in the mobile UI due to switching to the new Unified User Interface (UUI) performed within the upgrade. To make the switch possible, developers created web forms with default drag-and-drop tools and removed the outdated UI components, which were no longer supported in the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 version.
Results
The Customer’s Microsoft Dynamics 365-based solution was properly adjusted to their business needs. The customization of the quote management functionality enabled easier creation of new quotes. Language localization of the CRM solution eased its use for the employees from geographically dispersed business units. New custom report types were helpful for the Customer’s internal needs (e.g., decision-making, sales activities planning, etc.), and made reports sent to the Customer’s clients more accurate and reliable. The CRM upgrade from 8.0 version to 9.0 version brought better CRM’s usability and sleek user experience across web and mobile Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications.
Technologies and Tools
Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, XRMToolBox, Ribbon Workbench, JavaScript.
