Case Studies

Sales Process Automation with Microsoft CRM and SharePoint

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Posted in Business Intelligence, CRM, Digital Workplace Solutions, Office 365, SharePoint

Summary

Stone Technologies, Inc. is a national Systems Integrator based in St. Louis, MO with offices in 16 states. Stone focuses on project delivery and provides manufacturing consulting and industrial automation services, including process control and manufacturing execution system (MES/MOM) design, software development, and commissioning.

DMC’s Consulting Services team was asked to create a cloud / on-premises hybrid solution to automate the integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online sales opportunity tracking solution with the advanced document management capabilities of Stone’s on-premises SharePoint platform.

Solution

DMC worked with Stone’s leadership and sales team to define requirements for this cloud / on-premises hybrid solution. Once an opportunity reached a point in the sales process where a proposal needed to be created, the new synchronization process would find the opportunity in Dynamics CRM Online and create a corresponding Client site in SharePoint, as well as a SharePoint document set that corresponds to the opportunity.

If a site already existed for the Client, then only a new document set would be created under that Client site. Custom content types were used to copy the latest version of document controlled templates and add them to the proposal library. Important sales data from the CRM Online system is also by synchronized with the SharePoint libraries.

DMC chose to use SharePoint’s External Content Type feature as the primary mechanism for feeding CRM and ERP data into SharePoint. Web services were developed to facilitate the automation of this synchronization process. A custom SharePoint web part was also developed to allow users to bypass CRM and upload legacy Opportunities directly into SharePoint.

Learn more about DMC's Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint service offerings.

Customer Benefits

  • SharePoint integration with Dynamics CRM Online provides the sales team with a full-fledged document management solution and an easy way to collaborate with engineers on proposal generation
  • SharePoint libraries automatically copy the latest proposal templates and stores them directly in the libraries corresponding to the opportunities
  • Customer and Project identifiers are synchronized across Stone’s CRM, SharePoint, and ERP avoiding data integrity issues across systems which allows users to refer to the same customer name and project ID when looking for data in any of these systems
  • Project information gathered during the sales process in CRM is automatically synchronized with SharePoint where the engineering team can find sales information without having to lookup details in CRM
  • Smooth transitions of projects from the sales team to the engineering team after a project is won

Technologies

  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
  • SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition (also works with SharePoint 2013 / Office 365 SharePoint Online)
  • Document Sets
  • PowerShell
  • Business Connectivity Services
  • Custom synchronization application built with Visual Studio / C#