What's new in Sales and marketing

Microsoft Dynamics AX 4

The Microsoft Dynamics AX Customer Relationship Management ([Label: @SYS80908, CRM]) module is significantly enhanced with redesigned sales quotations, sales management statistics, and Microsoft Office Outlook integration.

Sales Quotations

Quotations are fully integrated with the sales order process and CRM sales pipeline reporting. This enables users to register winning, losing, or canceled quotations. Users can also register alternative quotations and note the winning quotation and reason for winning.

Users can perform price simulations on quotation headers or lines, in addition to saving a history of any previous price simulations. Users can copy quotations and create sales quotation templates to alleviate repetitive work. Quotations can be stored for reference purposes or deleted to free up storage, and users can perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis for each quotation.

Sales Management Statistics

This has been improved and now includes:

Improved adaptability based on full user access to underlying queries.
Improved design of data-capturing functionality, allowing users a greater degree of control over the values returned.
Improved data rendering with an option of batch processing and load/save functionality for large data calculations.

Microsoft Office Outlook Integration

The integration with Microsoft Office Outlook is redesigned, including enhanced tasks and activities synchronization, and Contact person synchronization with rights management and rule-based synchronization.

The administrator can define on a field-level basis the synchronization between Microsoft Dynamics AX and Outlook by mapping Outlook fields to Microsoft Dynamics AX fields. The administrator can also choose to use the default field mappings between Outlook and Microsoft Dynamics AX.

General Enhancements to CRM

Automatic activity generation

The default creation of activities that remind users of impending deadlines for sales quotations, campaigns, and telemarketing initiatives is enhanced. Users now adjust the activity details when the quotation, campaign, or telemarketing record is created.

Table redesign

The Business relations, Contact persons, and Relation tables are redesigned and aligned for improved performance and adherence to the Microsoft Dynamics AX data model.

The Contact person data table and form are restructured to align with the data in Microsoft Office Outlook Contacts, allowing Microsoft Dynamics AX to store Outlook Contact data and synchronize the data with Outlook.

Target distribution

The distribution of tasks within a campaign or telemarketing initiative is improved to enable users to distribute tasks according to the assigned contact or to another employee.