Case study · India
A sales portal on Dynamics 365 for a packaging manufacturer
Sales reps enter a product ID and see every past order, the rate it was priced at, current stock and the rate trend. Every number matches the ERP.
- Dynamics 365 F&O
- Rules for every figure
- Reconciled against ERP reports
- Read-only sales portal
The problem
A packaging manufacturer's sales reps quote the same customers for the same products again and again. Every answer they needed was already in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations: what the customer paid last time, the quantity behind that rate, what is in stock today. Getting to it meant either navigating the ERP, which most reps could not do, or asking someone in the office and waiting. Quotes took longer than they should, and it was hard to keep rates consistent from one rep to the next.
What we built
An internal, read-only portal on top of Dynamics 365 F&O. A rep enters a product ID and sees, on one screen:
- every past order for that product, with the rate it was priced at and the quantity behind that rate
- current finished-goods stock
- how the rate has moved over time
Nothing in the portal writes back to the ERP. It cannot change an order, a price or a stock figure.
How it works
The screen was the easy part. The real work was the data layer underneath it.
ERP data looks simple until you report on it: amended and cancelled orders, unit conversions, stock in different states before it counts as finished goods. A portal that shows a number slightly different from the ERP is worse than no portal, because nobody trusts it again.
So before building any screens we wrote down the rule behind each figure: which orders count, which rate is the real one, what counts as finished-goods stock. Then we reconciled the portal's output against the ERP's own reports, product by product, until every number matched.
Outcome
Reps answer pricing and stock questions themselves instead of waiting on the office, and quote from what the customer actually paid before. Because every number matches the ERP, there is nothing to argue about.
Stack
| Part | Tools |
|---|---|
| Source system | Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (read-only) |
| Access | Read-only, nothing writes back to the ERP |
| Data layer | Rules for every figure, reconciled against the ERP's own reports |
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