Advantage Integration with Microsoft Dynamics

Along with the development of the Advantage integration with Salesforce.com, the same integration points were worked out with Microsoft Dynamics. Dynamics is a line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications that can be cloud-based or on-premise. We plan to have integration for the CRM application, as many of our clients use it for their customer and prospect relationship management. We’ve completed an initial prototype-level for this integration.

The integration with Advantage will provide a host of additional tools, including the capability of handling subscription-based products, membership, one-off products, and conferences and events. Advantage allows the different departments inside the organization to efficiently manage any or all these actions.

Order Entity

While orders can be sent from Dynamics to Advantage, at this time, Advantage cannot create an order inside of Dynamics.

Real-time Orders and Quotes

When a sale is made, and the rep working in Dynamics pushes the sale to Advantage where the order is created, all the standard order edits and rules are applied.  Advantage’s Dynamics integration allows this to happen immediately and automatically, rather than requiring manual effort in the flow of the order to payment.

Orders sent to Advantage can be processed immediately, which is assumed by customers purchasing digital products. Alternatively, organizations may want to verify the order, or even wait until payment is received, before accepting it.  In this case, the orders are created as quotes in Advantage, and can be activated when accepted.

Customer and Order Information

In addition to synchronizing the data between systems, the integration enables you to “push” additional information back to Dynamics. For example, a new contact’s address entered in Dynamics passes to Advantage where other data is added, such as the customer number and a standardized address. That information is returned to Dynamics. An order entered in Dynamics passes to Advantage where it is priced and taxed and assigned an order number. That data is applied to the Dynamics order through the integration, and that order number is assigned to the Dynamics entity in a new Advantage order-number field. Information about Advantage orders tied to Dynamics in this way is displayed in a new frame on the order page.

In addition to customer updates, Advantage can notify your reps working in Dynamics of other changes, such as when an order is paid, or when services are cancelled or adjusted.  Actions executed from Advantage Workflow Events can be set up to update standard or custom objects in Dynamics.

Advantage Views

To reduce the need to load data into Dynamics, several views into Advantage are available to let your reps see live data. This is accomplished through custom views (written as Dynamics Web Resources in HTML, Javascript, and CSS) that you can add to your own Dynamics screens.

This new integration has many benefits:

• Streamlining of processes
• Improved customer service
• Elimination of duplicate information
• Delighted customers!