Excitation PRISM for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Excitation PRISM for Microsoft CRM is a modular add-on for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, designed to assist organisations better allocate skills and resources and improve revenue forecasting around projects. It provides a centralised 'wallplanner' view of resource bookings that can be linked to projects, opportunities, accounts and contacts.

Using PRISM for Microsoft CRM, projects can be associated against opportunities, even from the earliest stages of the sales cycle, enabling more effective resource planning and improved resource utilisation. This results in increased business productivity and profitability.

Management reports from pipeline predictions, through sales and marketing activity, to actual resource use and revenue by staff (including sub-contractor costs) are available. All this gives up-to-the-minute insight into issues such as hiring, training needs, resources conflicts, cost of sales, predictions against actuals, and of course, revenue against costs.

Excitation PRISM for Microsoft CRM Features:

Resource Planning

PRISM for Microsoft CRM has a project entity which can be linked to opportunities and orders. This allows entering of anticipated resource requirements against user-specified time intervals, and includes options for specifying work types and subcontracted work. These predicted requirements can be easily compared to actual bookings.

Utilisation targets can be set for all resources (human and others), and again these can be displayed against actual utilisation.

Resources can also be assigned to individual projects, and this information is viewable either by resource or by project.

Resource Scheduling

A key part of PRISM for Microsoft CRM is a powerful shared calendar tool to easily view all scheduled Bookings. The main features of this tool are:

• View Bookings by resource, project or customer
• Group resources or projects
• Colour coding by booking status
• Toggle view of individual resources, projects or customer
• Definition of custom, reusable views to filter display, for instance by time, status or resource group
• Personalised views
• Inline display of related data, e.g. resource utilisation, or project requirements
• Facility to split the booking view, to display bookings by both resource and project

Reporting

All data, from the initial opportunity through to specific Bookings are interlinked, and can be easily accessed. PRISM for Microsoft CRM offers 3 main ways to access this information:

• Screens within the main application. One example is the views of bookings by resource, project or customer; another is the screens showing project resource expectation alongside actual Bookings.
• Reporting Services reports. For more powerful and flexible data analysis, PRISM for Microsoft CRM supplies many pre-built reporting services reports. These reports can be accessed directly within the Microsoft CRM application; alternatively they can be scheduled to be run automatically and sent to managers' inboxes. Further custom reports can be created on request.
• Links from external applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Crystal Reports etc.). PRISM provides many views to allow external access to the data.

Customisation

PRISM for Microsoft CRM has been designed to be easily customised to each customer's needs. Customisation options include:

• Add, remove or rename fields on all custom entities
• Facility to link to CRM entity data within custom entities
• Add, remove or modify scheduling views
• Modify other data views
• Customise display of shared calendar (e.g. colour coding)

New Entities

PRISM for Microsoft CRM extends Dynamics CRM data through several new entities. The main entities are:

• Project - Used for revenue and resource planning. This is linked to the CRM opportunity and order entities.
• Resource - Someone or something that can be scheduled. It could be a consultant, a piece of equipment, a room or whatever you want. This entity can be linked to either the Dynamics CRM contact or user entity.
• Booking - The main unit for scheduling; allocation of one or more resources for a given time period against a project or customer. PRISM for Microsoft CRM offers 7 different booking types to enable precise specification of the properties of any booking.

Excitation PRISM for Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides comprehensive scheduling, planning and reporting tools that will help your business improve productivity. A pre-configured module for Microsoft CRM it can be included in your Microsoft CRM implementation or can be added to an existing implementation and provides an enormous amount of business solution for the money.

Take a look at some of our case studies to see how our customers have benefited by adding PRISM for Microsoft CRM to their Dynamics CRM implementation.