Design Offices optimizes business processes and supports rapid growth with Dynamics 365

Modern workplace as a service

With 40 facilities covering more than 250,000 square meters of equipped office, coworking, and conference space, Design Offices delivers advanced workplaces for hybrid workforces in the modern age. The company offers business spaces for long-term or temporary rent complete with full-service capabilities like front desk support, digital connectivity, and conference spaces with 70-inch monitors. Typical customers range from banking, software, and hospitality companies that need short-term conference space to startups and small businesses that require fully equipped workspaces.

Many companies have begun to rethink how, or whether, to use their office space. Design Offices helps businesses maximize teams’ productivity, collaboration, and innovation by providing everything they need where and when they need it—for a year, a week, or a day. Design Offices calls it the full office experience as a service.

To support the company’s many types of accounts, its finance team manages billings, accounts payable, and accounts receivable for each customer—often a complex undertaking. Design Offices wanted to update its legacy infrastructure to streamline and automate processes, scale more elastically, and improve transparency. This ultimately led Design Offices to explore the benefits of a cloud-based business management solution for optimizing finance, operations, and customer engagement processes.

“We’re growing fast and don’t know how big we’ll get this year or next year,” says Florian Bauer, Project Manager – Digital at Design Offices. “We chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications in part because we knew we’d never have to worry about speed or capacity.”

Design Offices adopted Dynamics 365 Business Central to support its financial accounting and purchasing departments and Dynamics 365 Sales to help the sales team manage customer relationships and drive engagement.

Improving the sales process and enabling growth in months

To accommodate rapid and anticipated business growth, Design Offices needed a finance and customer engagement platform for its sales and accounting departments right away. It wanted to be able to continuously scale up services, provide space to more customers in more locations, and better manage the end-to-end sales process, including omnichannel sales and processing.

Given the company’s relatively small IT team, the platform also had to be easy to install, set up, and use. Design Offices found that Dynamics 365 Business Central aligned with its list of requirements and deployed it in a matter of months, without adding IT staff or infrastructure.

Says Bauer, “No other provider could offer us the potential to integrate our complete accounting department in just four months like Microsoft did.”

Streamlining customer and employee experiences

Finance professionals at Design Offices use Dynamics 365 Business Central to optimize and digitize payment processes, while sales managers use Dynamics 365 Sales to track and qualify leads and manage contracts, especially those that may automatically recur. When a customer needs any type of work or conference space, a Design Offices sales manager uses Dynamics 365 Sales to collect new information from the customer and combine it with existing data in Dynamics 365 Business Central to fully explore the customer’s needs and potential opportunities and draft a formal quote, all more thoroughly and efficiently than a manager could do before.

After a customer signs a contract, Dynamics 365 Sales seamlessly connects to Dynamics 365 Business Central, which automatically creates a sales order and sends an invoice to the customer via email without it needing to pass through a manager again. By unifying operations and sales engagement with Dynamics 365, Design Offices has streamlined the customer experience—from sales inquiries through contracts and all customer touch points, all the way back to billing and accounts receivable. Teams were able to establish new integrated workflows without much additional effort, building on existing processes with minor personalization to optimize business operations experiences.

Thanks to increased process transparency and improved organization, Design Offices can get each customer’s reservations arranged faster, ensuring that they are assigned to the right room or desk space. The process also ensures that ready-to-use Microsoft Teams access, credentials for digital whiteboards, and pastries in the conference rooms are all ready and waiting for the customer when they arrive. The company knows these customer experience transformations have been met with approval because repeat customers are driving a significant amount of business.

Expanding the scope of the solution

Design Offices extended its Dynamics 365 environment to take advantage of Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud resources, including Azure API Management and Azure Active Directory B2C. The company streamlines workflows using Power Automate, increases data visibility and delivers insights through Power BI, and empowers non-technical employees to quickly develop applications using Power Apps. It also uses Azure Logic Apps to build further integration into its workflows and optimize its operating models to help manage sales.

“We used Power Automate to help us clearly define unique processes and drive new workflows like our purchase orders and invoices, ensuring custom data is tracked accurately in the system,” says Bauer. “For other tasks—like transferring all articles from Sales to Business Central—we use Logic Apps.”

As needed, Design Offices calls on the expertise of prisma informatik, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to make the cloud migration journey as simple as it can be while also increasing the level of maturity of the system and its processes. “We have 300 users at Design Offices, and the team supporting Dynamics 365 consists of just three people,” says Bauer. “Now, we can develop smaller apps on our own and keep the bigger consulting and developing parts on prisma’s side.”

Uniting data, achieving flexibility, and unlocking new customer insights

By managing operations and sales processes on a single, centralized system, Design Offices now has the adaptable IT infrastructure it always dreamt of to proactively address ever-changing customer demands. “In our on-premises environment, we had to check all our servers for capacity. In our Dynamics 365 cloud environment, we have the flexibility our company needs to handle continuous change,” says Bauer.

Data visibility will prove a key differentiator for Design Offices’s business agility. Since sales managers track correspondence with retained and prospective customers using Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can easily use Power BI to identify and anticipate customers’ needs and provide the best possible experience. “We now have historical data in Dynamics 365 and Power BI, and we can proactively contact customers who may need our spaces or will benefit most from new services,” says Bauer.

Connecting customer insights with sales and finance operations is just one way the company benefits from its centralized environment and Microsoft technologies that work together so easily. Adds Bauer, “All of the data for our mobile Design Offices member app is collected in Dynamics 365, sent via custom APIs, and displayed in a customized native iOS and Android app. If we still had an on-premises system, we would never have had a chance to provide such an app.” At the same time, having comprehensive customer information in one place and accessible from any web-connected device puts the company in a stronger position to cope with and overcome business disruption.

Design Offices looks forward to further customizing its finance and customer engagement platform and developing more solutions for its clients. It particularly appreciates the control it has with Dynamics 365 Business Central to create the business management platform that’s right for Design Offices and its fast-growing customer base—both now and in response to rapid, future changes.

“By adopting Dynamics 365, we’ve put ourselves in a position where we don’t have to look back,” says Bauer.

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