As an executive within an organization, you need to have a global view of what’s going on across your entire organization. At all times you should not only have a snapshot of the activities across your key departments, but also of the different business areas within your organization such as:
- Customer profiles and statistics
- Financial performance
- Level of efficiencies with regards to internal processes
- Measuring employee productivity
An executive dashboard offers high level information that includes details from a variety of departments. The complexities arise due to the fact that your departments use different tools for their daily operations, and in order to have access to these types of dashboards and get what you need, you have to extract the information from a variety of different places.
Even though a lot of information can be found and pulled from within an ERP solution, some information is easier to pull from a customer relationship management solution such as:
- How many leads does it take to gain a new customer?
- How many customer requests and support calls are received in a day?
- How efficient are your organization’s marketing campaigns?
With an ERP system, you could estimate the costs and revenues associated to these different activities, but using an integrated system will allow for these calculations to become a lot more specific. You will have the opportunity to have a greater level of intelligence since you are merging both financial and operational data.
Here are some examples of how having an integrated financial and CRM system can help you get more specific details on your organization.
Customer profiles and statistics: This will give you greater insight into not just the sales numbers but also the win rates by salesperson. ERP solutions can easily capture sales by salesperson or region but it becomes more difficult to review how many leads it took to get to this number and the efficiency in doing so.
Financial performance: Since this information is highly ERP-based, sharing and making it accessible to the other executives becomes more difficult as not everyone has access to the ERP system. By offering these details within the Dynamics CRM platform, you can be assured that they are always up to date and this relieves the demands to the finance department to pull this data.
Level of efficiencies with internal processes: This information can primarily be found within the CRM system, but do you know the effects on your costs? By linking your operations to your financials, you would be able to track in more detail the costs associated to each activity or operation, giving you a greater insight into which processes can be improved.
Measuring employee productivity: Even though this information can primarily be extrapolated from the operational or CRM system, in addition to knowing your employee’s productivity, would you be interested in knowing their profitability? This is only possible once you have linked your two systems together in order to have the intelligence from one interaction with the costs from another.
In all of these situations, integrating your financial system to a Microsoft Dynamics CRM application makes it easier to share information with and to other departments so that everyone is reviewing and analyzing from a single data source. This will help your executive team be assured of the reliability of the information and for all of the different business units to have a single version of the truth, which in turn will help your executive team make more informed business decisions.
Read our other blogs in this series to learn more about why your organization should integrate their financial system to Dynamics CRM: from a Sales Manager perspective, and have a look at our infographic on “Why Companies Should Take Advantage of an Integration Between Their ERP and CRM Systems”.
By JOVACO Solutions, a Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation specialist in Quebec
Why You Should Integrate Your Financial System to Microsoft Dynamics CRM: From an Executive’s Perspective is a post from: CRM Software Blog
The post Why You Should Integrate Your Financial System to Microsoft Dynamics CRM: From an Executive’s Perspective appeared first on CRM Software Blog.