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AX/NAV CRM or Dynamics CRM?

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The mayor part of my side meetings at the 'Best of...' event in Iceland last week, were around whether companies should choose AX or NAV CRM or Dynamics CRM and what Microsoft is focusing on over the next years. Customers were asking about differences, advantages of the one or the other and our plans for the future.

This has given me the incentive to repeat some key points clarify and elaborate on the topic here on the blog and to give some of my conceptual angles and answers to the question "What is better for us?"

When you go and ask Microsoft, may it be a PTS or Sales person, they will properly start asking you some questions to better understand your business before answering. That is because the answer is very much depending on a number of key elements of your needs and ambitions with CRM.

So, the short answer is that you typical will have to go both ways, not for all users but for the company as a whole.

The longer and more extensive answer is depending on a number of factors including what you mean by CRM, what you want to do with it and in which environment it will live.

Consider these three questions:

  • How do you define CRM?
  • What are your ambitions with CRM?
  • What's the universe like in which CRM will find its success?

Definition of CRM
Does it mean moving goods or attending customers? Or both? Is it for developing your business or managing it?

Look at the processes, map them and look at the users - employees and automations - handling them.

If a process is product oriented; logistical, SCM like, interacting with customers around product offers and delivery, go for the CRM world tightly combined with or in your ERP system - AX or NAV CRM and integrate with the rest of your business applications like Office, Outlook, document storage etc.

If a process if about activities and interactions with people, communication, knowledge, information storage and skills like this, go for the CRM world in your dynamic and agile business world, the world of Office and Dynamics CRM and integrate/combine with your ERP-system.

Ambitions with CRM
What will you have CRM do? Act as the platform and/or portal for the users? Combine information from different sources? Be the tool for business development, optimizing business processes, developing you customer service skills?

Look at your company's world of CRM, at the CRM-strategy, at the skill level of the organization and the driving factors of 'CRM' in your world.

If you want a tight interaction between Sales and Logistic, Logistic and Service, Production and Sales, Production and Logistic etc. you will want to go for CRM in your ERP system for supporting these processes.

If you want a tight interaction between Sales and Service, your customers and Sales, Service and your customers, Marketing and Sales etc., you will go for Dynamics CRM.

CRM universe
Take your IT environment into consideration. Also take a close look at your employees and their skills. Do you want CRM as a supporting mechanism or driving sales? Are the users in focus for CRM processes mainly ERP minded or CRM minded? Do they work with numbers and rules all day, or do they (want to) live a flexible and dynamic day with their customers?

If your business processes centers around the ERP system and most or all processes somewhere along the way go through here, you will want to go for CRM in your ERP system.

If you have the future CRM users work less time in applications and would like to focus on automating processes, optimizing processes, packaging functionality, let's say for employees that (should) focus on the interaction part of the customer dialogue, you would like to go the Dynamics CRM direction. 

In conclusion
Again, within many successful companies of today we see both CRM scenarios as described above:

  • Some employees will be on the road most of their working hours visiting customers. A lot of processes connect them with their colleagues in the office and both groups will expect a supporting CRM tool which is easier to use than a typical ERP system. The tool should have a user interface similar to other tools familiar to them – like e.g. Microsoft Outlook.
  • Other employees within the same company work in a back office function expecting a CRM tool to support campaigns with a large number of transactions, that are tightly connected to other entities in the ERP system – like inventory items, price lists, etc.

Conclusion: Most often, it is not a question of either/or – but both/and and fortunately Microsoft offers the right and best answer for most of the situations :-)

Thanks to my brilliant colleague Per Christensen (PMM for AX and NAV) for establishing this overview together with me.

 

Enjoy! :-)

Martin Houlberg Jensen
CRM Evangelist
Microsoft Dynamics CRM team

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