Reference IDK Kleinjohann

Sustainable Communication on Digital Piles

More about the project

With Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 CRM

Some are discouraged by crises. Others see them as an opportunity to improve and to put digitalization projects that have long been in their sights into practice. IDK Kleinjohann belongs to the latter category and is not only planning-savvy with regard to its core business, structural engineering. The company's own communication strands should also stand on solid foundations so that the (digital) future is secure.

Initial situation

More than ever, good communication is important and relevant for success. Due to increased work in the home office and the increased use of digital channels instead of face-to-face meetings, IDK has also identified potential for improvement in its own internal and external communication. On the one hand, there was a lack of a common database, because each employee maintained relevant knowledge about customers and projects decentrally in Outlook, their own Excel, the analog file server or in their smartphone. The consequence: a customer database characterized by duplicates and incomplete data records. On the other hand, communication among employees needed to be bundled, which resulted in unnecessarily high and inefficient coordination efforts via many channels and in an unstructured form.

Solution

Since IDK controlled communication almost exclusively via Microsoft Outlook and Excel, the company decided to expand its existing Microsoft environment. As a basis, a migration to Outlook 365 was first carried out to bring e-mail communication up to the latest, technical standard. The next step was to introduce Microsoft Teams for internal employee collaboration, followed by Dynamics 365 CRM for the centralization of customer records. Furthermore, processes were introduced using Power Automate to optimize appointment management. The project included customization of the new solution to IDK's processes, cleanup and migration of inventory data, and user training on how to use Microsoft Teams and CRM profitably. The connection to Outlook and Sharepoint enables the linking of data records with appointments or related documents.

Benefit

By combining Microsoft Teams and Dynamics CRM, IDK has found the optimal solution for digitizing the company's two most important communication strands on a single platform: Thanks to Microsoft Teams, all employees now have a common communication and collaboration tool at their disposal. In the sense of customer service, transparency about projects and the efficiency of processing them has improved significantly.

About IDK

IDK Kleinjohann GmbH & Co. KG together with the other operating companies WSK Ingenieure Berlin GmbH and WSK Ingenieure Düsseldorf GmbH, ConTec d.o.o. Zagreb as well as ConTec d.o.o. Sarajevo form a group of companies with over 90 employees, which plans building construction projects of all types and sizes throughout Germany and across borders. The bracket over these operative companies is the EDD Engineering & Digital Design Service GmbH as a holding, which guarantees that the identical requirements in the administrative area as well as to the needs concerning innovation and development are implemented.

Furthermore, EDD is the link, ensures in particular standardization in the group of companies and provides for the linkage of the location companies with the foreign countries. IDK, WSK and ConTec see themselves holistically as service companies whose focus is on the highest processing quality and innovative structural planning.

Do you have any questions?

Dr. Cornelia Mossal

Corporate Communication