CooperSurgical accelerates sales productivity during rapid global growth with unified CRM on Dynamics 365

After nearly doubling in size in just two years, a leading fertility company, CooperSurgical, saw an opportunity to promote innovation by getting a clearer picture of its complex operations. Each facility used its own enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, which made knowledge sharing difficult to operationalize at scale. CooperSurgical set out to adopt a unified set of solutions that would give leaders insight into the rapidly growing organization.

Connecting ERP systems around the world with a central solution wasn’t just a business goal. CooperSurgical strives to give the physicians that use its products the support they need to better serve patients. Customer relationship management (CRM) is an essential part of that mission. “In many parts of our business, we did not have a CRM system at all,” says Dan Grapengiesser, Vice President of Commercial Technology at CooperSurgical. “We made a decision to build an integrated technology solution that gives us a 360-degree view of our customers globally.”

Unifying business applications with Dynamics 365

CooperSurgical brings its products to patients in more than 130 countries, with manufacturing facilities distributed around the world. Its 3,000 employees innovate to develop and improve more than 650 products. Yet with strong organic growth and numerous acquisitions between 2020 and 2022, CooperSurgical needed to improve the way it forecasted, planned, and optimized its commercial operations. Moreover, many recently acquired organizations were accustomed to using their own systems, so cultural change would be just as important as technical changes.

The company decided that a single global solution would serve as the foundation for business improvements for years to come. After reviewing a range of options, CooperSurgical decided to use Microsoft Dynamics 365 for its ease of use and its pre-integration with Dynamics Finance & Operations. “The goal was to implement global best practices and common processes,” says Grapengiesser. “We also wanted to digitalize processes that were previously not digitalized.”

Achieving a rapid initial rollout to 700 professionals with Microsoft solutions

With the goal of accelerating product rollouts and implementations, the company deployed Dynamics 365 as quickly as possible. “A relatively quick rollout has helped us to really drive change in the company,” says Grapengiesser. By minimizing the disruption to its teams, CooperSurgical made it easier for its professionals to start using the new tools. In the first phase of the rollout, CooperSurgical focused on delivering a Dynamics 365 CRM solution to about 700 people. “With Dynamics 365, we have a more organized way of forecasting our opportunities and the sales pipeline,” says Subhajit Bharadwaj, Director of Commercial Technology and CRM Rollout Project Manager at CooperSurgical. The tool is now being used as a contact database that streamlines physician communication and support.

Although the technical implementation of Dynamics 365 was fast, some teams were hesitant about the change when the rollout started in 2021. They were comfortable with their own tools and skeptical of the big push to unify systems. To help them make the transition and see the value of standardization, CooperSurgical launched a dedicated change management team. “When we set up our change team, we thought it would wind down in two or three weeks,” says Bharadwaj. “Ultimately, we decided to maintain change support for six months, which was a game changer for our users.” By giving its teams the help that they needed, CooperSurgical accelerated the adoption of its new solutions.

In addition to Dynamics 365, CooperSurgical uses a number of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 services. Its business analysts use Azure Data Factory to integrate all their data sources in one place and Microsoft Power BI to glean insights from the company’s data. Employees also collaborate using Microsoft Teams.

Delivering 360-degree customer view through Dynamics 365

Business leaders are particularly excited about the insights they’re getting from Dynamics 365. “Dynamics 365 CRM automated the reporting of sales and lead generation, improved communication, and provided valuable dashboards for analyzing and reporting sales data,” says Amit Bhatnager, Vice President of Commercial Asia Pacific Fertility Solutions at CooperSurgical. Because CooperSurgical has teams distributed all around the world, it’s critical that they all have access to information about customer needs. “Having global technologies allows us to roll out best practices,” says Grapengiesser. “And the 360-degree view of customers makes it easier for different teams to collaboratively support the same customers.”

By tracking and measuring a range of new metrics, CooperSurgical can now target more fine-grained process improvements. Based on its insights, the company is also expecting to save both time and money by reducing inefficiencies and waste from manufacturing operations. “This Dynamics 365 rollout will result in faster product rollouts and service implementations,” says Grapengiesser. That, in turn, means that vital healthcare products and services will reach the patients who need them sooner. 

Driving new features across global operations on Dynamics 365

CooperSurgical has a clear plan of action for its Dynamics 365 solutions. “After integrating and rolling out finance and operations, which will expand system capabilities and data, we are moving forward with marketing automation and quoting solutions integrated with the CRM system,” says Grapengiesser. “The fact that we can build everything from lead to cash on Dynamics 365 is a huge win for us.”

The company is pleased with the early results of its digital transformation project. “This digitalization effort with Microsoft will move our business faster,” says Grapengiesser. “Our new processes will drive change in months rather than years.”