From Sale to Delivery: Extending an Existing CRM With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations

The Challenge

Our Client is an Italian system integrator specialized in Microsoft Modern Work, collaboration and cloud security solutions. Its Dynamics 365 CRM, originally implemented by a previous partner, covered the sales cycle well: Opportunities, Offers and Orders, with purchase requests toward suppliers handled partly outside the CRM in a separate management system. What the CRM stopped at was the sale itself. A product sale and a professional-services engagement are delivered in completely different ways, but the CRM treated every confirmed order the same way — delivery, resource planning, time and expense tracking and project reporting all lived outside the system entirely, and orders billed in multiple steps had no structured way to be tracked.

The Client needed a partner who could pick up a CRM built by someone else, understand how it actually worked well enough to extend it rather than replace it, and carry the sales process its team already relied on every day into a real delivery, resourcing and billing process on the other side of the sale.

The Solution: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Dynamics People took over the Client's existing Dynamics 365 Sales environment and integrated Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations into it as a Lite Deployment — extending, rather than replacing, a CRM built by a previous implementation partner. Making that integration work meant first giving the existing Opportunity, Quote and Order forms a distinction they didn't have: whether a sale is product-based or work-based (professional services), carried automatically through the whole sales cycle, and bringing purchase-request handling for product orders fully inside the CRM instead of the separate system it had lived in before.

That groundwork exists to serve one goal: the moment a professional-services order is confirmed, Project Operations takes over automatically — creating the project, standing up the team's workspace, and giving the Client's Operations team a structured plan to deliver against, on the same platform that closed the sale.

The Role of Dynamics People

At Dynamics People, implementing technology is only part of the journey. The real goal is to make sure that technology becomes part of the way people actually work.

Extending someone else's system is a different discipline from building on a blank canvas: it means understanding exactly how the Client's Sales, PMO, Operations and Acquisition teams were already working inside the existing CRM before changing any of it, so the new Project Operations layer would feel like a natural continuation of that process rather than a system bolted on beside it. Dynamics People's role was to make the moment an order is confirmed the same moment delivery actually begins.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations gives the Client a real delivery process, not just a sales one. Dynamics People built it directly onto the CRM its team already knew, so an order and a project finally speak to each other.

An Order Becomes a Project, a Team and a Plan — Without Manual Setup

The moment a professional-services order is confirmed, Project Operations automatically creates the corresponding project, carrying over the relevant sales information and, where a Project Template applies, the full structure of activities that template defines — so a recurring type of engagement always starts from the same proven plan instead of a blank project. An automated flow creates a Microsoft Teams channel, a project folder and a OneNote section for the new project in the same moment, and notifies the Operations team, turning what used to be a manual kickoff checklist into something that simply happens on its own.

Each project then moves through a four-stage process — from draft, through resource assignment, to active delivery and completion — with Operations and Sales notified automatically at the key transitions rather than having to ask for a status update. Universal Resource Scheduling helps the PMO team assign the right people to each project by matching its needs against actual skills and current workload, and resources log their own hours and expenses directly against the project as the work happens, rather than reconstructing it after the fact.

A Dashboard Built Specifically for Delivery

Alongside the process itself, Dynamics People built the Client a dedicated Project Operations dashboard, using Dynamics 365's own dashboard components rather than a separate reporting tool, giving the delivery organization six purpose-built views: active projects by project manager, to spot workload imbalances; projects by phase, to see where delivery effort is concentrated; projects by client and by channel and solution, for a client- and offering-centric view of engagement; projects by the template they were built from, to see how standardized delivery actually is in practice; and open personal tasks by deadline, so individuals and team leads can see upcoming workload before it becomes a bottleneck.

Billing That Matches However the Deal Was Structured

A professional-services engagement rarely bills as a single invoice, so Dynamics People also built a configurable Invoice Type model that lets the Client define, once, how many invoices an order should generate and on what schedule — by percentage of the total amount, by a fixed number of days, or tied to the order date itself — through a Master-Slave order relationship built specifically to support it. Once an order is saved with its invoice type set, the full invoice plan is generated automatically and stays visible directly on the order, so multi-step billing no longer depends on someone tracking it by hand outside the CRM.

Key Benefits

• Sales and delivery finally connected — a confirmed professional-services order triggers an actual delivery process, on the same CRM that already ran the Client's sales cycle.
• Projects created and structured automatically — Project Templates give every new project a proven activity structure from the moment it's created.
• Delivery kickoff happens on its own — project creation automatically sets up a Teams channel, folder structure and OneNote space, and notifies Operations.
• Resource planning grounded in real skills and workload — Universal Resource Scheduling suggests who should work on a project, not just who happens to be free.
• Multi-step billing built in — configurable, percentage- or date-based invoice plans replace tracking phased billing by hand.
• A dashboard built specifically for delivery — six views break active projects down by manager, phase, client, channel, template and personal task deadline.

The Result

Dynamics People has extended a Dynamics 365 CRM originally built by another partner into a full sale-to-delivery process: a professional-services order now flows automatically into a structured project, a ready-made team workspace, a resourcing plan and a billing schedule, without the Client having to give up the sales environment its team already knew.

For the Client, that means a sale no longer ends at the signature: it flows straight into a project its Operations team can plan, staff and bill correctly from day one, on a CRM that has grown with the business rather than being replaced by it.

Dynamics People × Microsoft Dynamics 365 | Italy