Dynamics 365 Business Central Vs Dynamics 365 CRM

Dynamics 365 Business Central Vs Dynamics 365 CRM

For Growing enterprises, it could be quite complex when it comes to deciding between Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM. So, this blog – Dynamics 365 Business Central Vs Dynamics 365 CRM will help you to come up with a relevant and productive decision for your business.

Both the Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM are designed and available with specific functional capabilities, however, there are some overlapping features that may create difficulty when choosing an efficient business solution out of these two.

Before we navigate this blog’s flow for Dynamics 365 Business Central Vs Dynamics 365 CRM, let’s define them first respectively.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central is an all-in-one cloud-based business management solution designed for small to mid-scale enterprises to streamline, manage, and drive end-to-end business practices. It comes and facilitates finance, customers, manufacturing, supply chain, warehousing, project automation, services, sales, and more capabilities. All these capabilities help the growing SMBs to support their process flow, optimize resources, manage regulatory & global compliance, and more.

Dynamics 365 CRM

Dynamics 365 CRM is a customer relationship management solution designed for SMBs to seamlessly manage their day-to-day operations including sales, marketing, customer service, and field service.

Dynamics 365 CRM is specially curated for businesses that deal more with customers, sales, and services. It acts as a complete package for customer relationship management as it comprises related applications such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Both the Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM solutions represent a different set of capabilities, but somehow, they comprise overlapping features as well and this creates confusion for the businesses seeking to decide between these two. So, let’s understand what are the common features between Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM?

Common Scenarios Between Dynamics 365 Business Central & Dynamics 365 CRM

Both the Business Central and CRM solutions from the Microsoft Dynamics family serve a few similar functional capabilities. Here is a sneak peek about:

Business Central incorporates modules like customer services, sales, and project operations which are also owned by Dynamics 365 CRM. However, with Business Central, you will be lacking the field service capability which is not provided by Business Central. Now, the question comes ahead whether the Business Central can be used as a CRM solution or not?

Can Business Central Be Leveraged as a CRM Solution?

Business Central offers customer relationship management capabilities, but that may satisfy the core level of customer management such as contact management, engagement, interaction management, segmentation, sales-driven scope, and capabilities to run marketing campaigns.

Using Business Central, you can turn your prospects into customers and further, enter quotes for the same to convert it into order completion. It also offers a part of supply chain management capabilities. Again, you can merely leverage core CRM functionalities leveraging Business Central.

If you are looking to manage your customer relationship and sales-related practice on an advanced or major level, Business Central may not help you. Further, if your enterprise comprises sales and marketing-focused practices, choosing Dynamics 365 CRM could be a proven profitable deal for business.

Now, let’s understand what makes Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM different.

When to Choose Dynamics 365 CRM?

Here are more considerable things that reveal whether you need Dynamics 365 CRM solution:

• Your business comprises a set of business practices that are quite complex and are not provided by the Business central such as lead distribution, field service management, etc.
• If your process flow imbibes advanced marketing automation, project operation, customer service, and field service, you need to finalize for Dynamics 365 CRM.
• If you need to facilitate your team to access and leverage CRM features using mobile devices, going with CRM could be a quite suitable deal for your business.

See Also – Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

When to Choose Dynamics 365 Business Central?

Considerable facts that disclose in what circumstances you need Business Central:

• When you need to manage and drive not merely customer part even other practices as well including finance, supply chain, manufacturing, warehousing, and more, better to implement Business Central.
• When your business is at the growing stage, and you need to support your global expansion by simplifying regulatory and compliance management. Apart from this, if you are willing to maximize financial visibility, improve your financial reporting & closing, etc.
• If you want business insights but not limited to customers, sales, and marketing part as Business Central enables you to gain metrics related to project status, profit margins, and even resource utilization.
• When your need goes around optimizing and managing resource utilization, capacity planning, and tracking customer invoices against planned or actual cost-on-quotes or orders.
• If you are seeking to improve your supply chain capability, in-depth access to inventory levels, and functionality to predict inventory replenishment.
• If your requirement goes to create a detailed bill of materials along with registering consumption and output across your bills of materials, you need to go with Business Central.

Thus, the above justifications made in terms of Dynamics 365 Business Central Vs Dynamics 365 CRM may give you adequate clarification to come up with your final decision. Further, depending on your different business practices, process flow, and determined goals, your requirement may also generate to implement both the solutions in an integrated manner.

Here is how integrating Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM can help your business to gain a competitive advantage:

• Integrating Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM can help you to ensure and attain a quote-to-cash process wherein you can enter quotes into your Dynamics CRM application leveraging the price lists created in Business Central.
• You can even convert your quotes into orders by accessing Business Central’s inventory level in Dynamics 365 CRM application.
• By integrating Dynamics 365 Business Central and CRM, you can gain the capability of shipping and invoicing orders via Dynamics 365 Business Central.
• Integrating these two can also enable you to receive and post cash statements against invoices created within Business Central. It also allows accessing your invoices’ payment status via your Dynamics 365 CRM account.

Final Decision to Be Made

If you are still confused while making a smarter decision after deriving Dynamics 365 Business Central Vs Dynamics 365 CRM, here is a sneak peek that can help you to finalize out of these two:

When you need Business Central

If your primary need goes to managing financials, inventory levels, production & capacity planning along with the basic level of sales and customer management features, you can simply go with Dynamics 365 Business Central.

When you need Dynamics CRM

When your primary requirements are to engage & drive prospects, track and carry out lead generation and need to manage customer relationships through email marketing, you need to implement Dynamics 365 CRM solution.

When there is a need to implement an integrated solution

When your business comprises a process flow that requires functional capabilities such as finance, operations, warehousing, manufacturing & distribution, supply chain, project operations, customer service along with power-packed sales and customer management capabilities, finalizing an integrated solution would be a productive deal for your business. This will require implementing both the Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM solutions in an integrated manner.

Final Words:

Depending on your core business practices and requirement specification, your solution requirement may vary. In this blog Dynamics 365 Business Central Vs Dynamics 365 CRM, we have discussed all three potential situations. Now, it’s time to make an efficient decision. If you want expert advice, contact Dynamics Square, we can help.

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