Dragotec USA is the exclusive North American dealer of Olimac products, working with over 100 dealers to provide best-in-class corn heads, which are used to help manage stalk variability and minimize yield loss at harvest. Supporting a massive network of dealers and the farmers they partner with meant that Dragotec USA needed a way to organize all their sales collateral, marketing material, and service manuals into one organized place for simple communication and collaboration.
The team had previously used a paper-based solution for document storage but had outgrown its capabilities and the marketing team needed a custom, digital platform to better organize their materials and make updates to collateral easily without needing to reprint paper copies. Thus, the idea for the dealer information platform was born.
Emergent Software designed and developed a dealer information portal to host all sales/service documentation and collateral. A cornerstone of this portal is the integration with Dragotec USA’s CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365, where all dealer login information and activity is synced and updated. Once logged in, dealers can view pricing, service, and sales program information on Dragotec USA’s products.
Integrating the platform with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 has a robust API and was a key focus of our team in developing the dealer information portal. Dynamics acts as a central point of contact and user information for the Dragotec USA sales & marketing teams. Due to its complexity, our team spent time examining the application’s various login paths and how they connected to Microsoft Dynamics to ensure that the correct information is synced to the right platform. Our team had to accommodate for over 10 different login paths that a user could take when using the dealer portal and plan for every use case.
All user information and preferences are stored in Microsoft Dynamics but can be accessed and edited in real-time in our dealer information platform. Both dealer information platform accounts and Microsoft Dynamics are integrated in a way that is seamless – meaning any information changes are automatically synced between the two platforms. Sales representatives can use the platform while on the go and are enabled to set up new users into the system, rather than working with the internal team.
During the development of the portal, the Dragotec USA team requested that the dealer portal integrates with their online parts catalog, which was a project that was in development at the same time within another department in the company. The online parts catalog was created by the support department and aims to connect dealers with up-to-date parts manuals and solve internal documentation issues. Hosted on Documoto, the online parts catalog is now easily accessed through the dealer portal with a few clicks of a button. Once inside the dealer portal, a user simply clicks on a link that takes them to the external parts catalog.
Using an Umbraco CMS for document management
The dealer information portal documents are hosted and presented with an Umbraco CMS. The CMS serves as a way for the team to easily upload, store, and manage the files that are published in the portal. Umbraco was chosen for this purpose as it provides a simple content editing experience for its users and can integrate easily into the .NET framework of the Dragotec USA website and Microsoft Dynamics 365. No user information is stored in the Umbraco CMS, it only hosts the sales and marketing documents. Once the system was created, the Dragotec USA team leader was trained by the Emergent Software team to understand how to create, upload, and maintain the sales documents used in the portal.
The results
The new dealer information portal is a well-organized hub of information for Dragotec USA’s vast network of product dealers. The sales, marketing, and product teams now have a central source of truth to refer to when communicating with customers and are empowered to update the system to everyone’s benefit. The professionally built system launched successfully in August 2020 and the team has moved into an ongoing continuous development engagement with our team. We’re working on adding additional features and enhancements to the platform to ensure it’s providing as much value as possible for the entire Dragotec USA team. We look forward to the continued success of the platform and developing new features to suit the team’s unique needs!
Technologies Used
