In the many conversations I had over the past years, it is a returning topic to talk about complexity of bringing your CRM and ERP data together to create a 360-degree customer view. While doing business, we all want to understand our customers better, by knowing what drives them, which marketing campaign worked for them, which not. What has led to that boost in orders? Etcetera.

In this blog I will further elaborate on how Microsoft Fabric makes this easier by having native integrations that will help you building that 360-degree customer understanding.

360-degree customer view

Why a 360-degree customer view in the first place? It is a topic that is close to my own heart in the end. Thinking back 8 years or so, during one of my first internships in the wonderful world of IT, back around the time when Power BI first launched, this was one of the research topics I worked on. For 6 months, I worked in a team that mainly implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 (Dynamics CRM at the time), SharePoint and M365 (Office 365 at the time) solution. When Power BI just launched, the team was wondering what this new kid on the block was adding to their portfolio. My task was to investigate how I could fetch data from Dynamics 365 and other sources to create a 360-degree customer view.

Even today, this topic is still relevant for me. We can probably all relate to the pointless marketing emails we receive every now and then. Mails in which they send you offers for a new washing machine or something else that you don’t need. The emails I typically delete directly, if not directly unsubscribe from the marketing mails. I rather see content that is relevant to me, like notifying me that I still have a product in my basket at that one web shop, or maybe even providing me a discount on that product if it stays in my basket for longer than X days, because I still didn’t buy in and by the discount code they can maybe convince me to actually buy it.

This makes me think of an article published by Forbes (original article from the New York Times) back in 2012. The supermarket Target was able to personalize marketing to a level of targeting to-be parents in their campaigns with maternity-clothes and more, even before they knew they were expecting at all. Of course, this is on a whole other level, which also brings along topics like integrity, sensitivity and many others. In case you want to read the full article, you can read it here.

The challenge

Many organizations are working on personalized campaigns and branding nowadays. There are tons of platforms helping them to do this, but bringing together data sources has been a challenge ever since. ERP and CRM systems are the typical ones that you want to bring in to analyze order history in relation to customer patterns, like the area of the country they live in, age group and much more.

Bringing all this to one analytics platform has been the main challenge, through OData-feeds, REST APIs and all other sorts of connectivity types, even up to manually exporting data. Though, some organizations might have templated the connectors to typical CRM and ERP systems, often the setup at customers is customized to their needs. All these setups require lots of customization and engineering work. Metadata driven solution will for sure help, but you remain with the challenge that the solution for data ingestion often is too complex for customers to understand, maintain and further develop.

Fabric shortcuts and mirroring

Well, that is where Fabric will make things easier by bringing along capabilities like shortcuts and mirroring. These two capabilities help to bring the data from typical data sources to Fabric right away. Both shortcuts and mirroring have their own specifics. Shortcuts leave the data where it is, on the original storage but only creating a pointer in your OneLake to the original source. With Mirroring, you basically copy every record from the original source like a change-data-capture (CDC) principle into your OneLake. Mirroring is available on a limited set of data sources today, but I expect this to include more data sources in the future.

Closely looking at Dynamics 365, there are native integrations possible to Fabric. Where previously, there were options like using Azure Synapse Link, nowadays with Fabric you can directly shortcut your data to Fabric using Dataverse shortcuts. There is also a great article describing this approach to speed up things and make integration of your data easier.

For Dynamics F&O, it is a slightly different story. At the time of writing this article, there is no easy path like shortcuts. Personally, I expect that to come as well in the future. For now, you can still leverage the mirroring option to directly get your data in, if you can get access to the database directly.

Some considerations you can make, is whether shortcuts or mirroring is the best approach to go for. In case of using shortcuts, each query executed from within Fabric will hit the source database system (dataverse for example) which might potentially impact the core application performance. And that exactly is what you want to prevent in all cases. Nevertheless, depending on the maturity of your solution, the shortcut might only serve to land the data in Fabric, after which you transform and standardize through applying a medallion architecture. In that case, the impact on source system will be limited and can be reduced to the minimum by implementing incremental loading and detecting data changes.

Wrap up

Using capabilities like shortcuts and mirroring in Fabric, drastically eases the often so complex connectivity between CRM or ERP systems and analytics platforms. Though, in the examples used above, it was all based-on Microsoft-to-Microsoft connectivity. Non-Microsoft services are not yet listed as native integrations at the time or writing (end of November 2023).

However, with the current vision of Microsoft by bringing other clouds to Microsoft Fabric, like shortcuts to Amazon S3 and mirroring of database systems like SQL Server and Cosmos DB as well as Snowflake, opens a wealth of opportunities! Making your 360-degree customer view just got a whole lot easier!