See How Chemicals Manufacturers Are Transforming with HSO
Creating a Global Commercial Model Built for Complex Customer Relationships
How a specialty chemicals manufacturer built a connected global commercial platform with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and HSO
About the Company
This global specialty chemicals manufacturer develops highly engineered products used across transportation, infrastructure, industrial, and environmental markets.
Its business depends on long-term customer relationships and complex technical sales processes that bring together account managers, technical sales specialists, product teams, R&D, and marketing.
The Challenge: Moving Beyond a Traditional CRM
Unlike high-volume transactional selling, opportunities in specialty chemicals can take months to develop. Products may need to be sampled, tested, technically validated, and approved before a commercial relationship begins. Once qualified, however, those relationships can become highly valuable and long-lasting.
That complexity made the company’s commercial technology strategy especially important. The company had been using an established CRM platform, but it wanted a modern commercial environment better aligned with the way its teams actually sold.
But the challenge was larger than tracking contacts and opportunities. Sales teams needed to manage sophisticated global account relationships spanning regions, business units, customer locations, buyers, technical stakeholders, and delivery points. They also needed processes that reflected the realities of specialty chemicals selling, including sample management, long sales cycles, pricing workflows, customer onboarding, technical collaboration, and pipeline management.
Marketing had a similarly specialized role. Rather than simply generating large numbers of leads, marketing teams needed to nurture a relatively concentrated customer base, educate buyers about highly technical products and capabilities, support events, and work closely with sales and technical teams throughout the customer relationship.
At the same time, the company had no intention of replacing SAP. SAP remained fundamental to the business, managing areas such as customer and product master data, pricing, sales orders, sales history, inventory, delivery, and financial information. Any new commercial platform therefore needed to complement SAP rather than duplicate or disrupt it.
The goal became clear: create a modern commercial layer around the company’s core ERP environment that could give sellers a better way to manage relationships while providing access to the operational information they needed.
Rethinking What Commercial Modernization Could Accomplish
The initial technology evaluation focused heavily on whether potential solutions could meet a long list of requirements. HSO helped shift the conversation.
Drawing on experience with specialty chemicals manufacturers, the team demonstrated how Microsoft Dynamics 365 could support the company’s actual selling model—not simply generic CRM processes. That was an important distinction.
Instead of asking the company to explain every aspect of specialty chemicals selling from scratch, HSO entered the conversation with an understanding of the industry's typical requirements: strategic global accounts, extended technical selling cycles, sample requests, pricing complexity, customer validation, and collaboration between commercial and technical teams.
HSO translated those requirements into industry-relevant Dynamics 365 workflows and demonstrated them directly in the technology. The result was a much clearer picture of how Microsoft could become part of the company’s day-to-day commercial operating model rather than simply another administrative CRM system.
The team also challenged the company’s original deployment strategy. The company had envisioned implementing the solution through several smaller phases. HSO raised a concern: an initial release with too little functionality could create adoption risk by giving sellers little reason to change how they worked.
Working collaboratively, HSO helped restructure the roadmap around a more substantial initial release—one designed to deliver meaningful capabilities to the business earlier and give sales teams a stronger incentive to embrace the new platform.
Solution: Creating a Robust Commercial Layer Around SAP, Tightly Connected to It
The company selected a Microsoft-centered commercial platform on Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, supported by Power Automate.
The solution was designed to bring sales and marketing activity together while supporting opportunity and pipeline management, customer segmentation, marketing automation, lead capture, customer onboarding, pricing workflows, and access to critical ERP information.
Just as importantly, HSO designed the architecture around the company’s existing enterprise systems rather than attempting to replace them. SAP would continue doing what SAP did well: running the operational backbone of the business.
Dynamics 365 would become the commercial engagement layer, helping teams manage accounts, relationships, opportunities, customer interactions, and the early stages of forecasting while making relevant SAP information available within the selling experience.
That distinction was especially valuable for a company managing complex global accounts. A salesperson might need to understand not only who the customer was, but also what agreements were in place, what pricing applied, what had been ordered or delivered, and whether there were issues that could affect the broader relationship.
Bringing commercial and operational context together would give sellers a more complete picture of the customer without requiring SAP to become the company’s primary relationship-management tool.
HSO extended the company’s global Dynamics 365 template and adapting it for its North American manufacturing environment. Built on Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in the Microsoft Cloud, the solution is now the operational system of record across finance, manufacturing, procurement, inventory, warehousing, planning, quality, sales, and order processing.
That foundation is especially important in a manufacturing environment where product traceability extends across complex biological production processes. As products move through each stage of production, the company must manage formulas and ingredients, monitor quality characteristics, track batches and genealogy, account for variable yields, and manage shelf life. Wet and dry products create different production, scheduling, inventory, and distribution requirements.
Dynamics 365 provides the common platform connecting those activities across the company’s North American operations.
Building a More Connected, Scalable Commercial Organization
The project also created an opportunity to connect technology that had traditionally been viewed as separate.
Rather than selecting another standalone CRM application and another standalone marketing application, the company chose an integrated Microsoft approach spanning sales, marketing, workflow automation, data, analytics, and the broader Microsoft ecosystem.
This provided a foundation for greater collaboration across commercial teams. Account managers can work within processes designed around opportunities and strategic relationships. Technical and product specialists can participate in the extended selling cycle. Marketing can support customer education and nurturing. And commercial users can gain greater visibility into information originating in SAP without requiring the ERP itself to manage every aspect of customer engagement.
The architecture also positions the organization for future innovation. The company had begun exploring Microsoft Copilot, but the initial project was deliberately focused on getting the underlying commercial foundation right rather than overcommitting to specific AI scenarios before licensing and business requirements were fully established. HSO viewed the new platform as an AI-ready foundation from which the company could introduce additional Copilot capabilities over time.
What’s Next: Turning Commercial Technology into a Selling Platform
For the company, the move to Microsoft represented more than a change in CRM technology. It was an opportunity to rethink how a global specialty chemicals company supports some of its most important customer relationships.
By combining Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Insights, Power Platform, and the company’s existing SAP environment, HSO is helping establish a commercial platform designed around the realities of technical, relationship-driven selling. The approach protects the company’s investment in the systems that already run its business while creating a modern environment for the teams responsible for growing it.
And by restructuring the implementation around meaningful business capabilities rather than a minimal first phase, the company is laying the groundwork for stronger adoption, greater commercial visibility, and continued innovation as Microsoft’s data, automation, and AI capabilities evolve.
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