Non-Conformance in Dynamics 365 CRM - Thinking outside the box

In my years as a consultant, I’d struggle to remember the number of ‘green field’ Dynamics projects I’ve delivered; these are the ones where the customer is using another technology and decides to move over to Dynamics (always a sensible choice). When we start scoping what’s going to be used and what’s not, in the Contact entity, I can’t recall anyone ever saying they needed the Anniversary field or somewhere to store their children’s names.

This got us thinking; there’s quite a bit of functionality in there that’s never used but, what about things that aren’t in there that are frequently used?

I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t know about the sales processes or customer services processes that come with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement but over the years, when visiting various customers, I’ve had to put in things like a chalet booking process for a holiday park, a process to itemise what carbon reduction technologies can be included in new homes and a process to determine what bulbs are needed when repairing street lights.

All very important to those customers but there’s not much relevance to the type of clients we work with at Technology Management, where there is a dominant focus on manufacturers and distributors. So what processes are cross-industry compatible that aren’t already included in Dynamics 365?

The first one we came up with was product non-conformance. A company makes/distributes a product, and, for various reasons, the product may differ from what’s expected. Whilst there’s going to be some variation in that process, it’s roughly going to follow:

The customer reports a problem
↓
Information is gathered about the problem
↓
There's an investigation to determine why this has happened
↓
There's some corrective action to appease the customer
↓
A change is made to process(es) to ensure the situation is not repeated

So, Company A might want to send a confirmation email to the customer when the issue is logged but Company B would prefer to have an account manager telephone them. Clearly a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work here but the core process will follow this rough path. A solution with forms and some common fields (such as who the customer is, how they got in touch, a problem ‘category’, etc) will be there which will let us gather all the required information. 

I don’t know what your thoughts are, but the process above looks perfect for a Business Process Flow to get the key information required.

We may have to add a few fields, business rules, etc here and there to cater for individual requirements but as long as the process itself isn’t too ‘bolted down’, this approach could work for most types of businesses with this requirement.

There are of course variations, and there are different types and levels to a non-conformance process. But think about it, you want to manage the non-conformance end to end, and name me a better tool to implement it in than Dynamics 365.

Engage with our CRM experts at our upcoming webinar

We’re hosting a brief 30-minute webinar on Thursday 17th October at 11:00am to help you learn more about the fresh Unified Interface in Dynamics 365 CRM. We won’t leave you in the lurch either, as we’re here to help you smoothly transition away from the legacy client.

From the comfort of your office, you can engage with one of our CRM experts and help us to collectively wave goodbye to the legacy client that will be gone this time next year.