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How to plan for a successful Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementation with top Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partners in the UK

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Mayank sen
How to plan for a successful Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementation with top Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partners in the UK

Do you want to accelerate your business with competitive speed? Many businesses don’t have enough visibility into their operations or data, as a result, have to welcome uncertain challenges as and when they occur. For example- have you noticed your customers support people trying hard to find themselves struggling to find information of their customers when they receive support calls or do you have access to the right tools and resources in place to predict when a customer is likely to contact you and what the most appropriate steps for the resolution will be? Such situations call for the tools and components, just like Microsoft Dynamics 365, also known as D365, is a cloud-based solution that unifies CRM and ERP capabilities into applications that work together and effectively connect your enterprise, including sales, marketing & services, operations, and commerce.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementation process

 

 

D365 solution offers a wide variety of benefits, including:

  • Capable of providing seamless connectivity across your information systems.
  • Realize valuable insights from the existing data with the help of advanced tools and metrics like Artificial intelligence and Business intelligence.
  • Shorten the Sales cycle and build the best CRM forum, resulting in the fastest customer delivery and make more profits.
  • Enhance the social engagement
  • Deploy and scale easily
  • Streamline all the business processes, provide a holistic approach
  • Gain the advantage of automation

This comprehensive guide to Dynamics 365, will give a good information source to road map your buying decisions of the solutions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementation Process

  1. Start with “why”

Tie your investment in D365 straight while reframing your strategic vision and mission. What aspects of your vision can the solution help you achieve?

Try to develop goals that are measurable; for example: achieve the highest customer satisfaction score in our industry within 2 years.

 

Once you identify the “why”, focus on each business unit within your organization. Capture potential efficiency gains, current pain points, and general requirements. Create a list, or “backlog” of your findings, and rank each one according to expected business value.

  1. Create a cross-functional team to spearhead the project

The next step is to rejig the right and an appropriate team of employees to contribute to the planning and execution of your implementation. The efficient players should possess significant knowledge of their respective business units in order to provide constructive system requirements and insight into how Dynamics 365 will affect your daily work operations. 

You may think a D365 implementation is solely IT-related, which means they focus on IT staffing for the implementation. While it is true that IT plays a role, they won’t have the same perspective as your business users. To ensure the products your objectives, focus on staffing business analysts and subject matter experts – in other words, people on your team who know your business extremely well and are dedicated to this implementation.

For example – if your implementation will include the finance, logistics, sales, and customer service departments, you should have at least one representative from each on your team. Ideally, these individuals will be fully dedicated to your D365 implementation, which means you also need to think about backfilling their positions. If for example- you have a customer service manager devoted to the implementation for 6 or 9 months, you need to consider filling their positions, while their responsibilities are shifted in other waves at the workspace.

  1. Identify the important goals

Visualize the scope of your project and the final outcome. What does success look like? Will the entire organization use Dynamics 365 or specific teams? Which processes will be supported by the software? Identifying the goals will help in ensuring that you need to plan accordingly. If you are working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partners in the UK, India, etc. you may be asked to compile a certain list of KPIs that will help to check the successful adoption of the solution and is it helping you achieve your target.

Collaborate with department heads to determine measurable outcomes that show the results in business value terms after the implementation.

  1. Frame out your plan

This step includes planning, we all know how crucial it is for any project to start with. But it is very important to do and it becomes more important when you are planning to do the process through some business organizational tool. Since Dynamics 365 is a complete cloud-based, hence you should review your infrastructure and systems architecture to ensure you can easily access the externally hosted applications without compromising on their overall performance.

  1. Understand Microsoft Dynamics 365’s capabilities

Dynamics 365 has a lot to offer, which is why it is important to review the solution’s capabilities prior to implementation. Consult your implementation partner to gain further understanding of how the platform can help you accelerate business processing.

 

  1. Conduct a process review

Take time and observe the process by analyzing the existing processing and procedures across the organization. Now is also the time to have an overall check over all your current business processes. Having thoroughly documented processes will save a considerable amount of time during the implementation.

  1. Access current systems and tools

Take a pile of software applications across your business unit that will be included in your scope. Is everything up to date with the latest software patches? You also to have a check over your existing systems and if it can easily be integrated with D365. At this point, it is also important for your team to look ahead and familiarize themselves with the new solution.

  1. Cleanse your data

Look at the state of your data quality, figure out what data will be migrated to Dynamics 365, and then eliminate any information which is has turned off-trend, duplicative, or is irrelevant. Remember as your data, the system is also valuable, therefore it is important to ensure that everything is as accurate as possible at the start. It remains intact that data cleansing is time taking and needs a complete team as a whole to do the sorting part, maybe the analysts can be of great use in this scenario.

After the data is being completely cleaned and revised many times, make sure it is easily referenceable and accessible after going into your implementation.

  1. Test and train

Testing is the most important and crucial step to mark. Most of the issues popup in this stage after the implementation is being done, and the solution is live in your systems. Plan for a selected group of end-users to help with testing in order to ensure each role in your company can properly perform their job in the new system. This will also provide your team with hands-on opportunities to learn D365 prior to go-live, also help them to understand the pain points in the testing process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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