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Enter Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Manufacturing.
In the manufacturing industry, one might not be faulted for staying focused on the supply chain, your manufacturing floor, or shipping. A Customer Relationship Management solution (CRM), one could think, might best be left to the sales team or might be considered a secondary consideration at any major manufacturing company.
An effective CRM application, however, is essential to the operation of today’s manufacturing enterprise. When that solution is Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or as it is now known, Microsoft 365, this CRM can give a manufacturing company a comprehensive solution that addresses all silos, improving efficiency and productivity across a business.
CRM – The Manufacturing Use Case
To begin, why do we need CRM in manufacturing? The CRM of today as exemplified by Microsoft Dynamics CRM is not just about lead management. It is about using AI-driven data to generate essential business insights into your product chain. This is a new kind of business application.
Built-in analytics and in-depth business intelligence are at the heart of the CRM component of Dynamics 365, and every other module, too. In manufacturing, this translates into:
- Reduced time spent chasing leads
- Increased number of conversions
- Personalized campaigns to gain enhanced insights into customer behavior
- Comprehensive analysis of order history
- Predictive insights into future product needs
Let’s look at each of these in turn:
Development Time with Dynamics CRM for Manufacturing
One of the most significant ways in which Dynamics CRM Online for Manufacturing can transform a manufactory comes through how it can reduce the development time needed for a product.
How does it do this?
Whether you are in the early stages of ideation or already sourcing and costing, product development requires data. What better way to do that than with a solution designed not just to glean data but scads of data?
Dynamics CRM is designed to enable more accurate demand forecasting to begin with. Right there, at the start of your production cycle, you are already better positioned to make informed and accurate business decisions. Dynamics CRM also gives you more enhanced data during the production cycle, allowing you to adapt in real time for a faster and more efficient production pipeline. Your products will be better positioned to address customer wants and get to market that much quicker.
Improved Product Quality
A product defect is the last thing anyone wants to see happen in manufacturing. This turn of events affects customer perception of your brand and leads to real reductions in sales and revenue.
Dynamics CRM steps in to protect against product defects during the production cycle. By gathering and analyzing data across the production cycle and parsing that data via AI and machine learning, Dynamics CRM can identify process errors when they happen, allowing you to step in and address the issue before it can escalate.
Better Customer Service
Dynamics CRM is designed to improve customer service at your business. This is a given with any quality CRM, but it takes on new layers when it comes to how Dynamics functions in the manufacturing space. For one, you get consistency on customer data across every silo at your company. Whoever touches the customer file will be engaging with real-time data on the customer and the product they’ve engaged to enhance a customers experience and improve business processes.
Dynamics CRM can also provide detailed insights into your key demographic’s buying behaviors and preferences, allowing your sales team to better identify leads with the potential to convert. The customer data you glean from Dynamics CRM can funnel back into the production cycle, as well, allowing you to improve product quality and streamline processes to better address customer needs and enhance customers expectations.
Enhanced Field Service Management
More and more these days, businesses in the manufacturing space understand the relevance and revenue generating potential of field service management. By better managing a company's resources when they are at or en route to the client, manufacturing companies can generate and protect new revenue streams.
With the detailed customer data available in Dynamics CRM, for example, you can ensure that your employees have the work order data and tools they need to best address customer pain points. You can also use the data parsed via Dynamics to ensure that your products remain relevant for clients via tailored customer engagement.
The Many Layers of Microsoft Dynamics CRM
It’s also important to understand that the CRM solution designed by Microsoft is made to work in tandem with a suite of other solutions. With Microsoft 365, you not only get a CRM module, you get ERP, and more.
At your manufactory, this translates into many things, including:
- Increased Production Agility – The full feature set of Dynamics 365 gives you the holistic view on production that you need to modernize and streamline using a combination of IoT devices, AI, and the cloud.
- Enhanced Resiliency in the Supply Chain – Demand sensing, traceability and intelligent planning are all part of Dynamics 365, translating into increased profitability across your supply chains. The Dynamics 365 supply chain is one powered by scads of actionable data.
- More Agile Shop Floors – Dynamics 365 is the perfect tool for creating the factory of tomorrow, the much cited “smart” factory. With real-time data captured across your enterprise and then funneled through Dynamics 365’s suite of solutions, you will end up with a factory that is not only smarter, but more capable of generating revenue.
- Better work order management – Finally, by engaging the CRM component of Dynamics in tandem with the solution’s other modules, you can better manage customer orders and maintain control. Office 365 Dynamics CRM allows you to create and release products to specific customers, saving work hours (read: money) and ensuring consistency in order management processes.
Dynamics CRM as part of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the holistic answer the factory of today needs to keep up with competitors and begin a digital transformation. By providing a unified platform from which you can view customer data at every touchpoint at your business, Dynamics CRM defines itself as a must-have solution for this demanding space. To learn more about Dynamics CRM and what it can do at your company, get in touch with a specialized Microsoft Partner like Integent today.