Open uping Your Business Potential with Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 custom solutions are specialized configurations and extensions that transform Microsoft’s powerful CRM platform into a custom system that perfectly aligns with your unique business processes. If you’re seeking ways to optimize your Dynamics 365 implementation, here’s what you need to know:
What are Dynamics 365 custom solutions?
- Container-based approach: Packages of customizations that can be exported, imported, and managed across environments
- Alternative to default solution: Provides cleaner organization and deployment compared to working in the default solution
- Component management: Holds entities, fields, forms, workflows, and other customizations in a structured format
- Deployment control: Enables version management and controlled rollout of changes
Organizations implementing custom Dynamics 365 solutions report up to a 40% increase in operational efficiency due to workflow automation and custom processes. Yet many businesses continue struggling with generic implementations that create friction rather than flow.
“Working directly in the default solution might seem convenient—but it’s not best practice. Creating your own solution is a smarter, safer, and more scalable approach for managing customizations,” notes industry experts.
If your team is spending more time fighting with your CRM than focusing on customers, you’re not alone. The challenges are common:
- Difficult to locate your specific customizations
- Inability to export changes for distribution
- Inconsistent naming conventions causing conflicts
- Broken dependencies when deploying between environments
I’m Warren Davies, founder of BeyondCRM with over 30 years of experience implementing Dynamics 365 custom solutions that transform how businesses operate by delivering custom CRM environments that actually match how you work.
Why Optimise Your Dynamics 365 Right Now
Is your Dynamics 365 system feeling more like a roadblock than a runway for your business? You’re not alone. Across Queensland and Australia, we regularly meet teams struggling with clunky processes, frustrating data silos, and poor user adoption. What should be powering your growth is instead creating daily headaches.
The numbers tell a compelling story. Businesses using properly customised Dynamics 365 solutions experience a 30% reduction in manual data entry errors thanks to smart automation and validation. Companies with custom CRM systems enjoy 25% faster user adoption rates because their team members work with interfaces designed specifically for their needs. And importantly, over 80% of organisations using managed solutions report smoother deployments with fewer post-launch issues.
Every day you continue with an unoptimised system costs you real money and opportunities. Your team deserves better than wrestling with workflows that fight against their natural processes.
Real-World Wins from Smart Optimisation
The change we see when optimising Dynamics 365 for our clients creates genuine business impact:
A Brisbane manufacturing company slashed their quote generation time from 45 minutes to under 5 minutes with a custom solution featuring automated calculations and approval workflows. Imagine what your team could do with those extra hours each week!
One Queensland professional services firm boosted their lead conversion by 23% after we implemented automated follow-up sequences custom to their specific sales process. Their team now focuses on high-value conversations while the system handles routine nurturing.
A mid-sized retail chain gained complete visibility across their customer journey with unified dashboards that consolidated previously scattered data into actionable insights. Their management team now makes decisions based on complete information rather than fragmented reports.
These wins weren’t magic—they came from understanding each business’s unique processes and creating Dynamics 365 custom solutions that aligned perfectly with how these organisations actually work.
What Happens When You Delay
The cost of continuing with an unoptimised system grows every day:
Manual workarounds multiply as your team creates spreadsheets, notes and shadow systems to compensate for CRM limitations. These bandaid solutions create inconsistency and waste valuable time.
Staff frustration builds when they’re forced to use systems that make their jobs harder rather than easier. This leads to declining adoption rates and resistance to using the very tool meant to help them succeed.
Revenue opportunities slip away without proper automation and visibility. Leads fall through cracks, follow-ups get missed, and customer relationships suffer from inconsistent attention.
Data quality deteriorates with inconsistent entry practices, leading to unreliable reporting and poor decision-making. You can’t improve what you can’t accurately measure.
As one client told us after we optimised their system: “We spent a year trying to make our team adapt to the out-of-box system before realising we needed to adapt the system to our team. The difference was night and day.”
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Dynamics 365 custom solutions: The Engine Behind Seamless Processes
Ever wondered what makes a truly effective Dynamics 365 system tick? It’s not just about having the software—it’s about how you configure it to work for you. At the heart of every successful implementation are well-crafted custom solutions that transform the generic platform into your perfect business tool.
Think of a solution in Dynamics 365 as a smart container that neatly packages all your customisations. It’s like having a special briefcase where you store all your important business tools—entities, fields, forms, workflows, and more—keeping them organised and ready to transport between environments as needed.
Dynamics 365 custom solutions vs the Default Solution
One mistake we see time and again with our Queensland clients is working directly in the Default Solution. It seems convenient at first, but quickly creates headaches:
When you work in the Default Solution, you’re essentially trying to find your needle in a massive haystack. With thousands of standard components, locating your specific customisations becomes a frustrating treasure hunt. Plus, you can’t export the Default Solution, which means you can’t easily move your changes to other environments when needed.
The Default Solution also uses a generic publisher prefix, making it nearly impossible to quickly identify which components are yours. This often leads to naming conflicts that can be a nightmare to sort out later.
Perhaps most problematic is what happens with dependencies. When you modify components in the Default Solution, dependencies can break when you try to move individual parts to another environment. I’ve seen teams spend days troubleshooting these issues when they could have been avoided entirely.
As one of our Brisbane clients put it: “We wasted so much time digging through the Default Solution trying to find our customisations—switching to a proper custom solution approach was like turning on the lights in a dark room.”
Microsoft’s own documentation confirms this approach: “We recommend that you create a solution to manage your customisations, allowing you to easily find and package your customised components.” Use a solution for your customisations
Key Benefits of Dynamics 365 custom solutions
When you implement Dynamics 365 custom solutions properly, the benefits are immediate and substantial:
Clean deployments become the norm rather than the exception. Our clients report significantly smoother go-lives with fewer issues when using managed solutions—over 80% see noticeable improvements in deployment reliability.
Reduced errors mean less frustration for everyone involved. Custom solutions with properly managed dependencies dramatically cut down on broken references and failed imports.
Easier upgrades save you headaches down the road. When Microsoft releases updates (which they do regularly), having your customisations in separate solutions makes the upgrade process much more manageable.
Smoother user experience leads to better adoption. 25% faster adoption rate we mentioned earlier? This is where it comes from—custom interfaces that actually make sense to your team.
Better governance gives you control and visibility. Solutions provide a framework for tracking changes, managing versions, and controlling who can modify what—essential for maintaining system integrity.
A manufacturing client of ours switched from working in the Default Solution to our recommended custom solution approach and was amazed when their solution import times dropped from over an hour to just 5 minutes—a 90% improvement that translated to significantly less downtime during updates.
What You Can Customise Today
The possibilities with Dynamics 365 customisation are practically endless. Here’s what you can tailor to fit your business perfectly:
Entities (Tables) can be created from scratch or modified to match your exact business data model. Whether you need to track unique products, special client relationships, or industry-specific processes, custom entities make it possible.
Forms can be designed to show exactly the fields your users need, in a logical order that matches their workflow. No more scrolling through irrelevant fields or hunting for important information.
Dashboards bring your most important data front and centre. We can build role-specific views that give each team member the insights they need at a glance—sales teams see pipeline metrics, service teams see case statistics, and managers see performance indicators.
Workflows automate your specific business processes, not generic ones. This is where the real magic happens—turning manual, error-prone tasks into smooth, automated sequences that just work.
Business Rules implement validation and conditional logic without requiring a single line of code, ensuring data quality and consistency across your organisation.
The key isn’t just knowing what can be customised—it’s understanding which customisations will deliver the most value for your specific business processes. That’s the difference between a technical implementation and a true business solution.
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Creating & Managing Your Own Solution Playbook
Now that you understand why Dynamics 365 custom solutions are crucial, let’s look at how to create and manage them effectively. This is where many organisations struggle without expert guidance.
When we work with clients across Queensland and Australia, we recommend solution segmentation as a best practice. Think of it as organising your home—different items belong in different rooms. Similarly, your Dynamics customisations work best when logically grouped:
Your Data Model Solution houses the foundation—your entities, fields, and relationships that define how information connects. The Process Solution contains the engine room components like workflows and business rules that automate your operations. For what users actually see, your UI Solution holds forms, views, and dashboards, while the Metadata Solution manages configuration elements like option sets and status reasons.
This thoughtful organisation isn’t just about being tidy—it’s strategic. When your solutions are properly segmented, you can manage dependencies more effectively and deploy changes in the right sequence. It’s like building a house—you need the foundation before the walls, and the walls before the roof.
“We used to spend nearly an hour waiting for solution imports to complete,” shared one of our Brisbane clients. “After implementing proper solution segmentation and switching to managed solutions, the same process now takes just 5 minutes—that’s a 90% time saving!”
Connection references and service account ownership are equally important considerations. These ensure your system doesn’t break when individual team members leave or change roles—something that can cause significant disruption if not properly managed.
Step-by-Step: From Idea to Published Solution
Creating effective Dynamics 365 custom solutions isn’t complicated when you follow a proven process. Here’s how we guide our clients through it:
Start by creating an unmanaged solution through Settings > Solutions. Give it a meaningful name that reflects its purpose—this makes it easier for everyone to understand what it contains. When setting up your publisher, choose a unique prefix that represents your organisation (we use “beycrm” for Beyond CRM). This prefix becomes your signature on every component you create, making them instantly recognisable as yours.
Adding components is where your solution takes shape. You can add existing components or create new ones directly within your solution. When the system asks about required components, choosing “Include required components” ensures you don’t miss any dependencies—like remembering to pack both the pasta and the sauce, not just one or the other.
Testing in your sandbox environment is non-negotiable. Export your solution as “unmanaged” for testing, then thoroughly put it through its paces. This is your safety net—finding issues here means they won’t impact your live environment.
Once testing confirms everything works as expected, export as a “managed” solution for deployment. Managed solutions provide that extra layer of security and integrity that’s essential for production environments. Remember our mantra: develop in unmanaged, deploy as managed.
Deployment Pipelines Made Simple
For organisations that make frequent changes or have complex customisations, we recommend setting up automated deployment pipelines using Azure DevOps. This approach transforms what was once a manual, error-prone process into a streamlined, consistent operation.
The magic happens through carefully parameterised deployment flags. ConvertToManaged determines whether existing unmanaged components become managed during import. OverwriteUnmanagedCustomizations controls whether your import will replace any existing unmanaged changes. ImportHolding allows large solutions to be imported in stages, while ApplyUpgrade manages whether upgrade steps run during import.
By thoughtfully configuring these flags—often setting both ConvertToManaged and OverwriteUnmanagedCustomizations to false—you can dramatically reduce import times while maintaining solution integrity. For most of our clients, we recommend a quarterly “clean-up” import with all flags enabled to ensure everything stays properly aligned.
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Scaling, Integrating & Automating for Long-Term Growth
Your Dynamics 365 system shouldn’t exist as an island in your business. When properly optimised, it becomes the beating heart of your operations – connecting seamlessly with other systems and scaling alongside your growing business.
I’ve seen how the right integration strategy transforms a good CRM implementation into a great one. The most successful Dynamics 365 custom solutions we’ve built for Queensland businesses share several key characteristics.
First, they have a thoughtful environment strategy – clearly separating development, testing, and production environments to protect your live data while enabling innovation. Second, they implement proper connection governance with dedicated service accounts and well-managed connection references that don’t break when an employee leaves. Third, they build a flexible integration architecture that connects your CRM with other essential business systems like accounting software or marketing platforms.
“Before we reorganised our environments, every update was a white-knuckle experience,” one of our Brisbane clients told me. “Now we can test thoroughly in our sandbox before anything touches our production system – it’s given us the confidence to keep improving.”
Business Process Automation that Actually Sticks
The real magic happens when your Dynamics 365 custom solutions automate complex business processes. But here’s the truth – automation only works when it’s built around how your team actually operates, not how a software developer thinks they should operate.
We’ve helped dozens of Australian businesses transform their operations through thoughtful automation. A Brisbane financial services firm we worked with is a perfect example. Their client onboarding used to take three weeks of back-and-forth emails, manual document generation, and constant follow-ups. By understanding their exact process first, we built low-code flows that automated the repetitive parts while keeping humans in the loop where their expertise mattered.
The result? Their onboarding time dropped to just three days. Documents now generate automatically based on client type. Scheduled tasks remind the right people at the right time about missing information. Approval workflows route to the appropriate team members without manual handoffs. And everything integrates with their document management system so nothing gets lost.
What made this work wasn’t just technical knowledge – it was taking the time to understand their business processes before suggesting technical solutions. That’s the difference between automation that sticks and automation that gets ignored.
Measuring Success & ROI
How do you know if your CRM investment is paying off? This is where many businesses struggle – they know things feel better, but they can’t quantify the improvement.
We help our clients establish clear metrics that demonstrate real business value. Rather than focusing on technical metrics, we track what matters to your bottom line:
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tied directly to your business objectives – whether that’s increased sales, faster service delivery, or improved customer retention.
Adoption metrics that show if your team is actually using the system as intended. This includes login frequency, feature usage, and engagement patterns.
Efficiency gains measured in actual time saved on routine tasks and reduced process cycle times.
Error reduction tracking the decrease in data quality issues or process failures.
One of our retail clients in Queensland measured a 42% reduction in their sales cycle time after implementing our recommended customisations. They also saw a 27% increase in average deal size – concrete ROI that justified their investment many times over.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Dynamics 365 Optimisation
If you’ve been considering optimising your Dynamics 365, you probably have some questions. Let’s tackle the most common ones we hear from our clients across Australia.
Why shouldn’t I customise in the Default Solution?
This is perhaps the most frequent question we hear, and it’s a good one. While the Default Solution might seem like the obvious place to make changes, it’s actually a bit like trying to reorganise your kitchen while cooking a five-course meal.
The Default Solution contains literally everything in your system—thousands of standard components mixed in with your custom ones. This creates several headaches:
When you need to find your customisations later, they’re buried among countless standard components. It’s like trying to find your handwritten notes in someone else’s filing cabinet.
The Default Solution uses Microsoft’s generic publisher prefix, which often leads to naming conflicts down the road. This becomes particularly problematic when you’re trying to identify which components are yours versus standard ones.
Perhaps most frustratingly, you simply cannot export the Default Solution for moving to other environments. This becomes a major roadblock when you want to promote changes from development to test to production.
And when upgrade time comes around? Working in the Default Solution makes maintenance significantly more complex and error-prone.
The better approach is creating your own Dynamics 365 custom solutions with a unique publisher prefix. This keeps your work organised, makes deployments cleaner, reduces broken references, and enables better team collaboration.
How do managed and unmanaged solutions differ?
Think of unmanaged solutions as your workshop—perfect for development because:
They allow you to tinker with components directly, seeing changes applied immediately to your system. When you’re building and testing, this flexibility is invaluable.
However, for deployment, managed solutions are your professional packaging:
They protect your carefully crafted components from accidental modifications. Once deployed, the components are locked down, preventing well-meaning but potentially damaging changes.
If you need to remove the solution later, managed solutions can be cleanly uninstalled without leaving orphaned components behind.
They’re an absolute requirement for proper deployment pipelines and provide much better versioning capabilities.
Our recommendation? Always develop in unmanaged solutions but deploy to production as managed solutions. This gives you the best of both worlds—flexibility during development and stability in production.
What’s the safest way to move solutions between environments?
Moving solutions between environments is where many organisations stumble without proper guidance. The safest approach follows a clear pattern:
Start by developing in a dedicated development environment using unmanaged solutions. This gives you the freedom to experiment and refine.
Once your solution is ready, thoroughly test it in a sandbox environment that mirrors your production setup. This crucial step catches issues before they affect your live system.
When exporting for deployment, always choose managed solutions for your production environment. This maintains the integrity of your customisations.
Be meticulous about including required components when exporting to prevent dependency issues. There’s nothing more frustrating than a failed import due to missing dependencies.
For larger organisations handling complex customisations, we strongly recommend implementing Azure DevOps pipelines. These automated deployment processes can reduce import times by up to 90% and virtually eliminate human error—a game-changer for teams making frequent updates.
Consistent ownership of components across environments is essential—using service accounts rather than individual user accounts prevents problems when team members change roles or leave the organisation.
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The Right CRM Can Change Everything—Let’s Get Started
I’ve spent years watching Queensland businesses transform before my eyes once they’ve implemented Dynamics 365 custom solutions that truly fit their workflows. At Beyond CRM, we don’t just install software—we build relationships and systems that grow with you.
What makes our approach different is simple: we start with your business processes, not with technology. We take the time to understand how your team works, where the friction points are, and what success looks like for you specifically. This human-centered approach means your CRM becomes an extension of your business, not an obstacle.
We’re also practical about costs. Whenever possible, we leverage out-of-the-box functionality rather than building everything from scratch. This approach not only saves you money but creates a more sustainable system that’s easier to maintain and upgrade as your needs evolve.
Our deep expertise in Dynamics 365 means we’ve seen just about every challenge and opportunity the platform presents. We’ve helped businesses just like yours steer the complexities of CRM implementation, customisation, and optimisation—and we can do the same for you.
Training is another area where we shine. The most beautifully designed system in the world won’t help if your team doesn’t use it. That’s why we provide comprehensive, jargon-free training that focuses on practical, day-to-day usage.
And we don’t disappear after go-live. Our ongoing support helps you continue evolving your system as your business grows and changes. Think of us as your CRM partners, not just your providers.
For small and medium-sized businesses looking for a streamlined approach, our CRM Kickstart programme offers a fixed-scope, fixed-price solution with rapid deployment. You’ll get up and running quickly without breaking the bank. For larger enterprises with more complex needs, our comprehensive customisation services transform Dynamics 365 into the operational backbone of your organisation.
The journey to a better business process starts with a conversation. Let’s talk about your specific challenges and goals. Together, we can build Dynamics 365 custom solutions that actually work for you—not against you.
