Any marketing activity done by your organization should be tracked to determine its ROI. There are many analytics software that can help you track different information related to your business processes. Microsoft Dynamics is one of the tracking applications you can use.
Information Tracking with Dynamics AX
While mostly used for tracking of production processes, Microsoft Dynamics has some features that can help you track different types of information related to your contacts. The ERP has a contact management feature that allows you to track unlimited websites, email addresses and phone numbers against a contact.
However, you probably need to track more than the primary information types available in Dynamics AX. In today’s world of social media and apps, it’s only logical that your ERP provides a way to track such information against a contact.
The good news is that you can tweak Dynamics AX to be able to track additional information types not available in the ERP’s default state.
Let’s look at how you can tweak Dynamics AX to track social media types for your contacts.
Tweak Dynamics AX for Custom Information Tracking
The default information you can track against a contact in Dynamics AX are very basic i.e. phone number, fax, websites, email addresses and telex. Some of these parameters are outdated. For example, do you know of anyone who uses telex anymore?
Moreover, to have a better understanding of today’s customer, you may want to track more information than what is available on default in Dynamics AX. Setting the ERP to tracking additional custom information is easy.
For example, let’s say we want to track contacts and their other information, for example their LinkedIn or Facebook. To do this, we’ll have to add the social media network parameters to Dynamics AX Contact Information. Here is how to go about this:
i) Open up AOT, click on the Data Dictionary group to expand it and then click the Base Enums group.
ii) With the Base Enums group expanded, scroll down within to find the LogisticsElectronicAddressMethodTypes enumeration. Expand this module.
iii) On expanding the module, all the default standard types of information that you can track against contacts will be listed. To add a custom type information, right-click LogisticsElectronicAddressMethodTypes and choose New Element from the pop-up menu. A new element will be created.
iv) Change the Name and Label of the new element to the social media type that you want to track. Simply click on the respective value boxes to add the information you want. In our case, we will change the Name and Label to Facebook since that is the contact information we want to track.
v) You can add other contact types you want to track by following the four steps above.
To confirm whether the contact tracking information has been updated, save your model and restart Dynamics AX.
After saving your model, the additional types you customized within Contact Information will be available when you restart Dynamics AX.
Now you can track your contacts across different social media types within your Dynamics AX application.