Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade)
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementation
The Client
Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) is the Australian Government’s international trade promotion and investment attraction agency. Austrade promotes Australian trade, investment, tourism and education to the world. The agency plays a crucial role in facilitating economic growth and fostering global business opportunities for Australian companies.
The Challenge
Austrade was using an outdated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system called RMS (Relationship Management System). RMS was Austrade’s customer relationship management, data platform, and engagement system that facilitates interactions between employees and stakeholders. Frontline employees relied on RMS to aid exporters and investors, while marketing personnel utilised it to effectively target and engage clients for events and other beneficial opportunities. Additionally, data analysts and the economics team depended on RMS to derive insights for strategic decision-making, and executives utilise it for interactions with government stakeholders.
In its original state, RMS was over a decade old, proved challenging to modify, lacked integration with internal systems, demonstrated sluggish performance, and failed to meet the demands of the organisation's expanding and evolving business needs.
The challenge was to upgrade RMS so it would centralise operations, improve collaboration, and provide better services to clients in the context of trade and investment facilitation whenever and wherever they are.
Under their previous system, they faced the following challenges:
- Disjointed legacy systems between different divisions.
- Some Austrade business divisions had changed their processes and the old system could no longer support them.
- System-based bottlenecks.
The Solution
After deciding to upgrade their CRM system to Dynamics 365 cloud, the teams began reviewing their system architecture and creating a roadmap to transition them from their outdated and disjointed legacy system to Microsoft’s powerful cloud-based solution that covers a comprehensive suite of business applications, integrating customer engagement, sales, marketing, and service capabilities.
This included:
Dynamics 365 Sales: Allows Austrade staff worldwide to engage with clients on relevant opportunities at the right time. Thanks to D365’s superior user experience that tracks client information with a single view and facilitates collaboration on client proposals.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: Provides a 360-degree customer view which helps inform customer engagement choices and actions.
Dynamics 365 Marketing: Enables personalized engagement across various channels.
Integrations: Cohesive integration between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft stack, including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Azure Data Lake, Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Data Factory.
By adopting Dynamics 365, Austrade aimed to centralize its operations, enable seamless collaboration among its teams, and gain actionable insights from data to make informed business decisions.
Key personnel from The Factor were engaged in several roles including, Program Managers, D365 Functional Consultants and Developers.
The Outcome
After implementing the new Dynamics 365 system, known as ACE (Austrade Client Engagement), Austrade achieved several positive outcomes:
- The agency was able to streamline its operations including automation, leading to improved efficiency and productivity.
- The centralised system allowed for better coordination and collaboration among teams, enhancing overall effectiveness.
- With Dynamics 365's advanced analytics and reporting features, Austrade gained valuable insights into its trade and investment activities, enabling data-driven decision-making.
- ACE is now a cloud-based solution that better aligns with Australian government security standards and budget.
- ACE is now accessible to their global workforce.
- ACE is accessible via mobile devices.
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