Follow Us:
We’ve been doing a lot of Dynamics 365 for Sales and Customer Engagement work for clients who are already using Dynamics NAV and Dynamics Business Central lately. Each of these applications provides some form of CRM functionality, but there is a lot of confusion about when the different solutions might make the most sense. Let’s try to tackle this at a high level...
Dynamics 365 is a suite of business applications offered by Microsoft. These primarily include ERP applications and CRM applications. The naming conventions are a little confusing and have changed a lot, so users and vendors often shorten their names, such as:
NAV and Business Central are both ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications. Each application is designed to handle everything from tracking prospects, to supplier management, order entry, to fulfillment and invoicing. But their strength is accounting processes.
NAV and Business Central are very similar. In fact, they are mostly considered to be the same application with NAV being the on-premise version and Business Central being the cloud version.
For now, let's refer to these two applications as NAV (not entirely accurate, but it helps keep the descriptions concise).
Many licensing options are available for CRM (Customer Relationship Management) functionality within the Dynamics 365 suite. The two primary ones are:
For now, let's refer to these collective sets of functionality as Dynamics 365 CRM (which isn't a real product).
With the above definitions out of the way, let's talk about what makes these applications different. Or, in other words, if NAV already includes a lot of CRM functionality, then why would a company choose to also pay for CRM licenses?
NAV and CRM both include the ability to track the following items. Below are a few screenshots to compare some of the screens between the two applications (NAV is on the left, CRM is on the right):
As you may expect, Dynamics 365 CRM includes more robust CRM functionality than is found in NAV. The list below includes some of the more significant enhancements available in CRM:
Those are just the tip of the iceberg to the much larger set of differences.
If you're a smaller organization, with only 1 or 2 sales reps, or you're resource constrained, then you may only need the functionality found in NAV. As a general rule:
By the time you have 5 customer-facing employees, you need to consider a CRM solution.
Although you may decide you need to use both NAV and CRM, you can give your users the best of both worlds by integrating the two applications. Microsoft provides some connectors making integration fairly simple. Although, most organizations find they need to customize the integration process to manage the custom fields and tables that need to be visible in both applications.
C5 Insight works with Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV customers around the world to help them implement and integrate Dynamics 365 CRM. We are also aligned with the best NAV and Business Central partners in the world. We are happy to help you find the right partner to support your needs.
Contact C5 Insight to talk about your CRM, Business Central or NAV needs.
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
Request Download
This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.
Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.
This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.