Dynamics 365

Avantages

I have used this software for over 7 years and over those years have seen it grow and improve at a remarkable rate. With the introduction of Flow/Power Automate and Canvas Apps the abilities of this business application stack are unmatched. You are truly only limited by your own imagination. Microsoft provides great account management resources that will help keep you on the cutting edge.

From a price perspective, Dynamics is very competitive. What you get out of the box cannot be touched by any competitor namely, Salesforce. You will spend a fortune to get the same utility from a Salesforce implementation.

Salesforce and competitors also do not have anything like Azure. Having all of your business application ecosystem under such an umbrella is incredibly powerful.

Inconvénients

I have had less than ideal interactions with support. Mostly they are positive but often times they don't typically know enough about the product and will ask me for information that i already provided in detail upon initial case submission. That being said, this product is innovating and improving so much you can't possibly expect all the people supporting it to be 100% on top of their game. They SHOULD be but realistically you are going to run into people that are just intermediaries between you and someone that can actually help. This isn't really a Dynamics issue at all but you will need to rely on support if you go with an online installation.

Avantages

The system was easy to customize. We were able to add membership modules which captured all the biodata of the Sacco's membership which is roughly 20,000 members. This data could easily be retrieved at a click of a button without buffering or delays. We went ahead and captured passport photos and even digital signatures and ID photocopies of the members and the system did not crash.

The reporting module is easy and simple, there are sample reports and we were able to also create so many ad hoc reports without a challenge. The reports we could export to different formats for further analysis out of Dynamics.

The Asset management module also worked so well for us, we were able to have all the assets captured into the system and their depreciation done well and on time.

We customized the Financial/operations module which captured the Sacco loaning/lending to the members and how they were able to repay the loans on time taking into consideration the loan aging process.

Over all this is a good software but it needs some technical know how to customize and tweak areas of interest and you will be able to automate the whole business.

Inconvénients

The software needs some improvement on the financial module. The new IFRS 9 Accounting Standard being implemented by savings and lending cooperative societies require that the data is captured accurately and the reporting is accurate. This is still a challenge.

Avantages

This is by far the most customizable project management software I have ever used. It helps keep our entire team on track, from the customer service to product team. We are able to write all the necessary information into every single job and track where it is in our system. We love the ability to tailor this platform to our specific needs. You can pretty much make this software work for any type of company you're working in.

Inconvénients

This can be extremely frustrating and take a long time to set up and learn. If you transfer information over from a previous PM software, be prepared for a ton of copying & pasting. Luckily the Dynamics internal team was able to set everything up for us with a little direction, and we were back a forth a lot to get the platform to where we wanted it to be. After that, it took many tutorials and training sessions to learn all the ins-and-outs of the website, but it was worth it in the end.

Avantages

It's fairly easy to navigate and find what you are looking for. It's the CRM we already had and we've built a number of internal integrations with it.

Inconvénients

There are a few really bizarre things about the user interface. 1. The "save" button is at the very bottom, right-hand corner of the screen, where there are literally zero other buttons. It feels like the least intuitive place for something as important as a save button. When I first started using the CRM, it took me almost a week to realize you could actually save something. 2. The sign in process is as clunky as it gets. Every 24 hours, Dynamics signs you out automatically (not a big deal, Salesforce does this too). However, once you are signed out, instead of taking you to a page where you can sign back in, or do anything, it just takes you to a dead page that tells you that you've been signed out and suggests you close all your browser windows to then sign back in. The process is madness, and it hasn't changed. 3. When you are loading the home page, you typically want to search a record, so you start typing something in the search field. Just as the page is about to finish loading, it moves your cursor down to the "What's New" section to post something. The result is that I have a few posts that contain nothing more than partial account names that I was trying to search. The last major hang up is that very few workflow automation tools like Toutapp, Yesware, ect will integrate with Dynamics (mostly because so few of their customers actually use Dynamics). This has prevented us from buying the programs we want to use for our sales team.

Avantages

The breadth of features across Field Service and typical CRM are impressive overall. The scheduling capabilities in Field Service (and now available for other scheduling items) are second to none (at least in other items compared to).

Inconvénients

With the online version, we have run into few problems, but we do occasionally run into slow performance. This is not often, but when it does occur (slow page refreshes, especially in the scheduling tool) it can be painful for our users.