The Right Information in the Right Hands

Dynamics SL has won awards for its project management and accounting capabilities and industry experts continue to talk about why Dynamics CRM is becoming the industry leader for customer relationship management. They are valuable tools operating alone, but they really shine when they are working together. For a project-driven company, think of the possibilities if you could initiate a project in Dynamics SL when you complete a sale in Dynamics CRM. What if you could track all the communication activities related to a project, as they happen, in Dynamics CRM? And how much more efficient and effective could you be if you had visibility into the status of a project while the customer was on the phone asking about it? Image what it would be like if the right people had access to the right information at the right time. Infuse has been providing benefits like these to distribution-focused companies for nearly five years; now we are extending them to project-driven companies as well.

What we are doing is pulling the Project details from SL into a Custom CRM Object.  We are exposing the key fields from the Project Maintenance Screen in SL:

Additionally we are bringing over the the Budget to Actual amounts – we think Account Managers would be interested in this summary information.  Also, the CRM workflow engine could use these fields to help manage some CRM notifications when numbers go negative, or over budget. 

SL Project Series customers are also using Business Portal combined with CRM’s iFrame technology which will allow us to drill into details on the SL project Tasks to get the transactional details right from the CRM Project Screen.

SL Project can be configured to set up a SharePoint site specifically for the Project. Our customization is built to also point to the project SharePoint Site. This allows the entire team to go to one place in CRM to view the Project status, and manage all of the related documents.

There is more to come on this integration. In Beta now we are working through the details to get project propagation to start in CRM, and also generate project Vouchers, or allow CRM service activities and Cases to post time against the SL project - that part is still in development.

I seriously think that this solution has a real potential to increase the adoption of SL and CRM in organizations that are considering Microsoft as an alternative to more legacy Project Accounting solutions that have an integrated CRM system like Deltek.