CRM for engineering consultancy
We helped the customer select, conceptualize, and implement their Dynamics 365-based CRM solution that streamlines sales and project tracking and ensures superior user experience.
Context
On the market for 30+ years, ECCI is a US-based engineering and environmental consulting firm that consists of professional engineers and experienced environmental scientists. They provide services in the areas of environmental compliance and sustainability, engineering and construction management, and facility and integrity evaluation.
ECCI had a Joomla-based legacy CRM system that was out of date. The solution was problematic to support, and its UI and UX were outdated and inconvenient for company employees. For those reasons, the customer wanted to replace the outdated solution and needed a technology partner to consult them on a new solution suitable to the specific requirements of their business. They turned to Itransition due to our experience in delivering CRM solutions for various domains.
To provide the customer with an idea of their future solution, we demonstrated its implementation using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Integrated with the customer’s Microsoft accounts, the platform would retain the functionality essential for the customer, such as automated notifications for end-clients. On top of that, it would offer a modern interface and seamless mobile access. We also walked the customer through how their database of clients, projects, and email reminders would be maintained. After that, the customer chose to entrust the project to Itransition, and we moved forward with its implementation.
Solution
Itransition analyzed the customer’s initial requirements and studied their legacy CRM. The main disadvantages of the old CRM solution included:
- Outdated technology stack and unavailability of tech support to fix defects and implement improvements
- Unintuitive interface
- Lack of flexible filtering, searching, and data sorting functions
- No capabilities for implementing reports to obtain summarized data on end clients and other information
- Lack of data change history
- No mobile version of the solution
- Absence of integration with the company's active directory (AD)
After delving into the details of the customer’s business, we found a more fitting solution than the one initially demonstrated and recommended a modern Microsoft-based CRM solution. After evaluating the full range of Dynamics CRM features, Itransition ultimately proposed a lightweight solution utilizing Power Apps and Power Automate. This approach enabled the customer to save on licensing costs compared to a full-featured Dynamics 365 implementation. Moreover, the Power Platform tools made it possible to not only implement all the required functionality but also to eliminate many of the shortcomings of the old system by default.
The new solution’s functions and features allow the customer to:
- Get insights via a user-friendly main dashboard
- Easily search and filter client data by any entity field or across the entire client record vs having only a few key fields for each entity
- Enjoy auto-numbering for proposals and projects
- Create custom views with specifying information selection criteria
- Export data and get any number of reports without the need to involve developers compared to a few predefined reports in the old system
- View data change history
- Enjoy integration with the company’s AD and Microsoft products. In particular, user profiles are integrated with Microsoft 365, data can be exported and imported from Excel, and the proposal form is generated automatically in Microsoft Word
- Use a mobile version of the solution as a native Power Apps mobile app or as a web application with automatic adaptation to the size of mobile devices
Disclaimer: To protect our customer’s sensitive data, we hereinafter provide blurred/fake data on the screenshots of the systems.
As the customer approved the proposed solution, we proceeded with environment configuration, solution setup, and data migration. An important requirement for the new system was the ability to retain custom functionality the customer had for sending email notifications to their clients about upcoming environmental monitoring and inspections, which ECCI performs regularly. Itransition experts set up the notifications with Power Automate in line with the customer’s requirements. To ensure the customer’s employees are comfortable with the new solution, Itransition specialists provided user and admin training.
Conclusion
Itransition guided the customer in the process of choosing the best-fitting option to replace the legacy CRM system. As a result of our collaboration, ECCI got a new solution based on the Power Platform. This solution leverages the Power Platform with Dataverse, enabling the use of a unified object model that is consistent with Dynamics 365 with a lot of the same features available.
The customer’s employees enjoy the new system in general and its modern interface, extensive data search and reporting capabilities in particular. The system streamlines customer data and relationship management for ECCI, reducing manual efforts and empowering seller productivity. In addition, the new system ensured a 70% license cost reduction as opposed to a full-blown MS Dynamics 365 Sales solution, while still covering all the customer’s needs.
