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Retail & Distribution · Business Applications

A dealership network brought into one ERP and CRM

A major heavy equipment dealership, United States. Entrenched legacy processes and tools that staff had used for many years were limiting the business, and equipment dealing has requirements that generic ERP does not cover.

The situation

What the organization was dealing with

Entrenched legacy processes and tools that staff had used for many years were limiting the business, and equipment dealing has requirements that generic ERP does not cover.

Equipment dealerships have requirements that generic ERP handles badly: parts, service, rental, warranty and finance all attach to the same physical machine over a life measured in decades.

What was done

The work, and the part that was actually hard

Dynamics 365 was selected with an industry solution for heavy equipment dealers, spanning Finance, Supply Chain Management, Sales, Field Service and Customer Insights with more than 700 predefined dealership processes.

Adopting an industry solution with seven hundred predefined dealership processes is a deliberate trade — less configuration freedom in exchange for not rebuilding twenty years of sector practice. For a business whose processes genuinely are industry-standard, that is usually the right trade and it is often resisted.

Results

What was published

These are the figures exactly as reported in the source. Nothing has been rounded, extrapolated or restated.

Predefined dealership processes700+
Dynamics 365 applications5
Connected ERP and CRM1

What changed

  • Finance, supply chain, sales, field service and customer insight on one platform
  • Industry-specific dealership processes available rather than built from scratch
  • Direct integration with manufacturer interfaces
  • Legacy processes replaced with a modern operating model
Platforms involved

What each product was doing here

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Finance

Financial management, cost accounting and close automation across entities and currencies.

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Planning, inventory, warehouse and production execution, with availability that reflects what is physically there.

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Sales

Pipeline, relationship intelligence and forecasting, built to be maintained as a by-product of selling rather than as administration.

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Work orders, resource scheduling by skill and parts, asset service history, and a mobile app that works fully offline.

Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Unifies customer or constituent records from several source systems into one profile, then orchestrates journeys that react to behaviour rather than to a schedule.

What transfers

If you were to attempt this

The question of whether your process is genuinely differentiating or merely familiar is worth asking before any ERP selection.

Where it usually gets harder than expected: Five Dynamics 365 applications live together is a broad first phase. It works when the industry solution has already integrated them; it is risky when it has not.

How we would take it on

Our approach to Business Applications work

1

Shadow the real process

We sit with the people doing the work and watch what actually happens, including every workaround. Process documents and reality are rarely the same thing.

2

Design against your own data

We prototype and show you your own records in it, not a demo company, before anything is built.

3

Go live in a contained phase

By site, by practice group or by service line — with the group that wants it most going first, to a fixed price.

4

Measure against the baseline

We report against the numbers agreed at the start, including where the result fell short of the target.

Recognise the problem?

If any of the above describes your organization, tell us where it hurts most. We will tell you what the same platforms could realistically do in your environment, what we would measure, and whether we think it is worth doing at all.

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