Sales and customer service reps lose significant productivity when they have to toggle between applications to get their jobs done. Yet most reps still have to use one app (usually CRM) to manage customer and prospect information, and another app (usually ERP) to create quotes and orders.

If you’re using Microsoft Dynamics CRM, however, there is some potentially good news. Significant upgrades have been made to how the application handles products, price lists, quotes and orders. Although the functionality is still far from perfect – it now rivals or exceeds what is available in most ERP solutions.

This video – just over 3 minutes long – provides an overview of the productivity enhancing capabilities now available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Online U1.

Summarizing some of the capabilities:

• Inline data entry – for more efficiently entering a list of products into an opportunity, quote or order
• Product bundling – to create flexible bundles of products that can be added to a quote
• Product properties – to customize individual products at the time an order is placed
• Suggestions – to identify cross-sell, accessories, upsell and substitute products to add to orders
• Machine learning – to intelligently populate suggestion lists based on past buying behavior
  

What do you think? Is now the time for your organization to consider migrating their quoting and ordering processes from your ERP solution into Microsoft Dynamics CRM?