Implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM – The IT Backbone of INSYNC

At the beginning of 2020, Covid-19 had given many of us the challenge to survive with the new normal. Many had to run the business and office remotely as the only option. This surely gave an ultimate boost to many IT projects which were previously either crawling or never born. INSYNC was no exception to this.

As you know, every standard organization has the need of computerization for making their business process efficient and sustainable in this information age. In INSYNC also, to run the business, we used a couple of software solutions for ticket management, customer relationship management, project management, chatting, voice & video conferencing, invoicing, accounting, product & service management, reporting, and what not! At the same time, there were challenges and pains around these solutions too. First of all, these solutions were mostly disconnected, and overall, this was not a cost-effective approach too.

Being a partner of Microsoft, we always had an option to switch to a better and integrated business solution platform from them. A long time ago, we had some experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM which was not so great at that time, and that is why maybe we were not aggressive enough to implement it. We started talking about Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM (D365) implementation in December 2017 for our internal purposes. But as usual, the need was not as strong as after the lockdown declaration in India, where being connected with the business remotely became the top-most priority. However, a pure cloud and centralized solution for an organization like INSYNC was mandatory. So, after hanging around more than 2 years, Covid-19 created a do-or-die situation for our internal Dynamics 365 implementation. Becoming more agile and responsive in this situation was one of our key requirements which we had to fulfill with this implementation too.

I, Narottam Das, with almost two decades in IT with line-of-business (LOB) applications, seemed to be the perfect fit to take this challenge in the eyes of INSYNC management. Mr. Atul Gupta, CEO – INSYNC, had a clear and firm vision for this implementation and confidence in my work. Dynamics 365 implementation was new to me, and I had to do such an implementation after a long gap in hands-on implementation in my career. So, initially, it was a bit worrisome for me. I was in a dilemma of how to cope-up with this enterprise-level solution to implement from home in the lockdown! Frankly speaking, my job appeared to be at stake! Nevertheless, there were no other options other than facing it boldly.

Facing the Challenge

Initially, we made the plans and deadlines of various migrations from the existing discrete systems to the one central system – D365. I worked hard day and night, extended hours even on weekends and holidays. Finally, I drove this implementation to a success story, and how I did it is going to be an interesting read next.

Firstly, I am grateful to everyone who helped me make our CRM implementation a success. I should mention the immense help of Google-like search engines and the LOB tech forums over the internet to become successful in this endeavor. Our IT department, especially Milan Dan, was a great help too in managing the cloud part (Microsoft Azure) of this solution. However, without sincere users any LOB app implementation is meaningless and a sure-shot failure. So, the final credit of this success goes to the users and our entire team of the D365 CRM+ Solution.

The Exciting Part

The most interesting part of this story lies in how we achieved it in a very short period of 6 months. Most of the major migrations from our existing discrete applications were achieved in the first 6 months itself. Also, the major features for sales and support critical functions, for instance, were up and running on D365 by then. Implementing the major parts of an enterprise solution in that short period seems very rare. It would not be possible without having the kind of focus we had in the lock-down period.

At the same time, we also moved to the Microsoft Teams platform which made our life easy for remote work. With this, it was even much easier to meet someone over Teams than in the office physically. Ready-made integration between Teams and D365 was an additional advantage. We realized that the new D365 platform is now far more superior and capable than it was a decade ago.

One of the major works in this implementation was data migration. As already said that we had planned the major migrations initially, the data volume was huge and had accumulated for more than 10 years. To manage this huge data migration better, we had divided the dataset into various segments as per their techno-functional needs and availability. We had taken the partner data to migrate first, followed by the customer master data as per our needs. Most of the sales process and data were on Zoho CRM, so we started migrating the master data from Zoho CRM to D365 first.

Our initial attraction with D365 was – we could access and work through our CRM from anywhere on the web, outlook, and mobile seamlessly. With this, the mission to nurture, pamper, support, and groom our prospects, customers, and partners could be more collaborative and efficient.

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