Replacing spreadsheet-and-email operations with an integrated Dynamics 365, portal and Power BI stack
A UK financial services organisation was processing customers by hand — Excel, email and goodwill. The ceiling was not ambition, it was the process. Replacing it lifted the customer volume the business could carry by a factor of fifty.
Context
Customer onboarding, servicing and reporting all ran through spreadsheets and email. Every additional customer added handling time in a straight line, so growth and headcount were locked together. Each previous attempt to fix it had produced another spreadsheet. Nobody had a reliable view of the pipeline, because the pipeline lived in inboxes.
Brief
One platform for customer records and case handling. A portal so customers could serve themselves instead of emailing. Reporting the leadership could act on. And the whole thing delivered while the manual process kept running underneath, because the business could not pause to be rebuilt.
Approach
Discovery workshops with the UK team mapped the process as it was actually performed, including the parts that had never been written down. Those undocumented steps were where the volume ceiling really sat.
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement went in as the core record. A custom customer portal moved the highest-volume inbound work — status enquiries and document submission — out of the inbox entirely. Power BI sat over the top so the leadership team had the pipeline view they had never had. Engineering, QA and business-change tracks ran simultaneously; the change track mattered as much as the build, because a platform nobody adopts replaces nothing.
Governance
I was the Nepal-based delivery lead working across a five-hour gap to UK project managers, consultants and client stakeholders — which meant written, unambiguous handover at both ends of each day rather than relying on overlap. RAID owned across the portfolio and escalated early to protect the dates. Deliverables tied to contractual payment milestones, keeping invoicing and delivery honest with each other. Structured progress reporting and presentations to client stakeholders throughout.
Outcome
The manual process was retired. The figure the sponsor still quotes is the capacity multiple: the constraint that had defined how fast the business could grow was gone. This was one of 15+ Dynamics CRM and ERP transformations delivered for UK enterprise clients over that period.