Hamilton Bonaduz implement Dynamics 365 worldwide

When Hamilton Bonaduz AG,  a Swiss company with a key offering for laboratories and healthcare actors shared with us their wish to extend their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales solution we were ready. ELCA had already accompanied Hamilton Medical for many years before, notably with the implementation of an on-premise environment that was later migrated to the cloud.

The solution for Hamilton Medical allowed them to cope with the tremendous growth over the last years, flexibly adapting the solution to new requirements. The success of Hamilton Medical and the good collaboration with ELCA convinced the other business units of the group to also move to the same CRM solution with ELCA as partner. By this, Hamilton replaces their old CRM-like solution and provides their Sales staff with a new state of the art solution.

The solution provides the sales staff of Hamilton Bonaduz with an integrated view, covering the process from lead to quotation. Thanks to a better overview of leads and customers, this allows Hamilton Bonaduz to be more efficient when managing prospects and customers as well as opportunities in a massively growing market. Furthermore, the customer segmentation in D365 Sales allows for better handling of the customers.

The solution is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales but integrated with additional tools such as Power BI and also leverages the power of the Azure platform (e.g. Azure functions). In addition, the Sales solution is strongly connected and integrated with Hamilton’s existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance solution, hosted on-premise in the own infrastructure and delivered by two other Microsoft partners. Opportunities and quotations being handled in the ERP, a tight and reliable integration was key. The integration of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales in the cloud with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance on-premise appeared first as a challenge but was accomplished successfully, also thanks to the collaboration of the Microsoft experts pulled by ELCA when it was needed.

The close collaboration allowed to overcome these technical challenges and the sales users can now well document the prospects in the sales solutions before qualifying and handing them over to the ERP. Besides the integration between these systems, the data migration also proved to be a challenge as the various business units had different systems before. Hence data from multiple data sources with partially suboptimal data quality had to be covered.

If it looked easy at first to simply copy the solution from Hamilton Medical to the other units, it was key to make sure all stakeholders were on board and would see the benefits of a common platform, in the cloud, to manage their customers and sales opportunities with integration with their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance to optimize their business processes. In addition, the discussions and tests showed that the different business units needed specific and tailored adaptations. Nevertheless, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales solution in the cloud could be designed and customized very quickly, within only two months.

The four business units, having very different and complementary offering with different customerapproaches needed some guidance how to work with a common tool. ELCA could guide them, with the key collaboration of their dedicated internal IT project leader. Their experience implementing a common ERP solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, was a key driveras the business units were already used to collaborating to find a shared solution as a common platform for the benefits of all.

To organize and structure the required discussions and decisions, each unit had a dedicated subproject leader, acting as a product owner (PO) and representing their own unit in the discussions with their peers. Due to the pandemic situation, no travels were possible, and all workshops and discussions were performed remotely using Microsoft Team, which worked perfectly well.

Besides the strengths of the Dynamics Platform and the technical expertise, Boran Kekic, the IT project leader of Hamilton Bonaduz, mentions another key element in the project: "The close collaboration and frequent communication between key stakeholders from ELCA, the different units of Hamilton and their ERP partners was a key driver for the success of the project. We’re happy to have a modern, unified platform for all business units!"

The migration to the Swiss data center is seen as a key element to provide the best compliant solution when it comes to data privacy and ELCA was keen on accompanying Hamilton Bonaduz AG as one of the first customers in Switzerland to apply for it. The storage of all data in Switzerland helps Hamilton in complying with the restrictive Swiss data protection laws. Following an MVP approach, several extensions to the solution are foreseen for the upcoming months.

The plans for the future also include a tight integration with marketing campaigns, which are currently handled in a separate tool. Aftera successful go live in April 2021, Hamilton Bonaduz AG has already equipped most of its business units with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales business application. The solution will support more than 400 users across all continents with upcoming deployments planned also for one last business unit and in China until the end of the year.