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Case Study

Twining Enterprise: Dynamics 365 for Not for Profit 

Twining is a not-for-profit organisation setup to help people with mental health barriers find and sustain work in London. They offer an employment support service and exist to improve the mental wellbeing of the people who most need it, through motivational coaching to help them reach their work-related goals and aspirations. Twining Enterprise has been in existence since 1995 and their core vision is a world where people with mental health problems can enjoy the same life and work opportunities as everyone else.

The challenge

For many years Twining had been using a basic CRM System that had limited facilities for tailoring. They had managed to customise it, but it was becoming unmanageable and they required a system that was more flexible and more process driven to allow the charity to grow. They wanted a system that could deliver: 

  • An easy way to link emails and schedule appointments with their clients and capture all the information on them.
  • Automation of sending welcome documentation out to newly registered clients.
  • Email and SMS meeting invites and reminders for clients and for users to be automated.
  • A system that could be accessed from wherever the users are (a cloud-based solution).
  • Varying access rights depending on user role, visibility of certain records, restricted deletion rights.
  • Auto-save facility during data input.
  • Automatic duplicate data detection and a way to customize this.
  • Visibility of pending / outstanding tasks, appointments and an easy way to manage this.
  • A way for the users to easily see at what stage of the ‘Client Journey’ the client had reached and what the next steps were.
  • A system that is easily searchable.
  • A way of ensuring users capture all the appropriate documents before moving the client on to the next stage.
  • Customizable process flow that can drive and force users to populate data (mandatory fields).
  • On the compliance side, visibility of all documentation and making sure the documents are accurately completed, if not a way to manage the information to be re-entered and re-scanned.
  • An ability to capture a client’s mental wellbeing at certain intervals, hopefully seeing an upward trend as they go through the various phases of the client journey and continue working with Twining to reach their end goal of a job.
  • Easy to enter and capture job information, then match and link them to the client.
  • Live management reporting and dashboards

The solution

The system requirements justified the decision to go for Office 365 and all the accompanying suite of applications. Twining also took advantage of the discounted pricing that Microsoft offered for not-for-profit organisations. With KMS Software onboard for the implementation, Twining had the right partner to advise, assist and customise the following:

  • Dynamics 365
  • Exchange (Outlook) 
  • Teams
  • SharePoint

KMS began the implementation with the setting up of the entire Office 365 environment and all its components and applications with assistance from Twining IT that consisted of Gehan Seneviratne and Martin Hayes. An agile methodology was in place for the implementation with the project split into five key stages:

  • Referral
  • Registration
  • Employment Profile
  • Ongoing Work
  • In-work Support / Evidence Gathering

During the implementation KMS and Twining had to overcome the unforeseen implications of Covid-19, so our regular scrum meetings and deliveries all had to be online. Having well motivated individuals in both the KMS and Twining teams was a huge benefit here.

The key aspect to the Dynamics 365 customization was the creation of a custom entity called the ‘Client Journey’, where every other entity had a relationship to this. It is the main area that the users open, and with the business process flow it guides and forces them to follow a specific process.

Automated processes and workflows were setup to send SMS reminders to clients, send meeting requests via email and send welcome emails with documentation. Many different functions and features were put in place to hide / show fields, sections and tabs within forms based on certain data being populated. During this setup, Paul Doerr the KMS lead worked closely with Martin (Twining) so not only was there a transfer of knowledge to the client, but a faster turn around on implementation of features and functions.

On the reporting side, Power BI was configured, customised and used to generate the dashboards and the key feature here was the ability to change the criteria on the fly and drill into the reports to see what data forms those charts.

The outcome

 

The transfer of the existing data from the old system, the training of all staff for the CRM and Outlook has all been completed remotely using Microsoft Teams. With coaching and training that KMS have delivered Twining are now implementing changes to further enhance the system and are using KMS’s expertise to further enhance the CRMs functionality where needed.

Twining is in addition leveraging the CRM Dashboards and Power BI data to track and monitor Client’s progress more effectively than was ever possible before.

KMS’s expertise during the implementation and their timely support afterwards has been key to the success of the project, all in a time when no face-to-face meetings were possible due to Covid-19.

For more information about Twining Enterprise, please go to their website:

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