North Sea Port

Enhancing harbor management with Dynamics 365

North Sea Port, a pivotal harbor authority operating in Belgium, has revolutionized its contact and stakeholder management by implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365. With a workforce of 250, the organization faced challenges in maintaining high-quality data across national and international contacts. This customer success story unveils how North Sea Port overcame data duplication and improved usability by leveraging Dynamics 365’s robust functionalities.

Contact To the customer case

Mature businessman using laptop in a factory

The challenge

North Sea port was using a CRM solution as of 2011 with a focus on “input of organizations and its contacts”. The data quality at the input phase was too low due to the many CRM users and the amount of contacts and companies. The CRM system allowed multiple registrations of the same organizations and companies resulting in many doubles which impacted the data extractions for various purposes. Due to the level of importance of the ability to extract correct information it was necessary to improve data quality and direct the focus at the input stage.

The main challenge was:

Data quality of organizations their respective contact persons and individual persons.
To improve the usability
To use as many of the standard functionalities of MS Dynamics 365

The solution

Keeping in mind the challenges of the current CRM application a few objectives were addressed as the main focus for the implementation of a new CRM system. The main goal of North Sea Port is: “to manage contacts and stakeholders with a level of quality in a central system”. This clearly sketched North Sea Port’s perspective.

To guarantee data quality and ensure contact information is always up to date a central validation mechanism was implemented. The mechanism evaluates the submitted contact information via a centralized contact manager. Additionally, North Sea Port opted for the OSLO model to manage the data of the organizations, attributes and persons. Via this model the unique information regarding a person is only registered once, eliminating doubles in the system. On top of that a few connections with authentic sources (such as KBO & CRAB) where established and will be integrated with the other applications of North Sea Port.

The most important pillars of the new solutions are:

An extensive validation process
Integration with authentic sources (CRAB, KBO)
Set up of the OSLO model and management of organizations and contact persons

Results

The centralized management of unique contact and stakeholders management information and the central management of requests for advice where at the base of MS Dynamics 365 implementation at North Sea Port. Data quality improved and will continue to do so due to the validation mechanism being connected to authentic sources. This reduces time spent on data registration and maintenance for both contact persons and organizations.

About North Sea Port

North-Sea Port is an organization in the harbor of Gent and in the harbor of Terneuzen (Zeeland) their business objective is to manage, exploit and develop the harbor area. The long-term commitment of North-Sea Port is to strengthen the position of the harbor and it’s surrounding industry, both on a national and international level. North Sea port has many contacts within these national and international companies surrounding the harbor.

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