By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Newmarket International, a vendor of sales and catering products for the hospitality industry, today announced “Newmarket Connex” forMicrosoft ( News - Alert) Dynamics CRM.
This product allows hospitality workers in the central sales office to manage and source groups and meetings business from directly within Microsoft Dynamics CRM to their individual properties. Request for proposals, responses and business actuals are all exchanged between the central sales office and the individual properties through Connex.
By centralizing the groups and meetings sales process into one application, the central sales office hopes to have visibility into all the details associated with a customer, the RFP and the event, according to the company.
Newmarket officials say: “The result is the ability to respond to RFPs faster than the competition, improving the win percentage and streamlining the sales process.”
Hospitality organizations need a lead management product to “help them manage the details and logistics that go into every meeting and customer interaction,” said Sandra Andrews, U.S. hospitality industry products director for Microsoft. “Newmarket Connex, integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, helps address this need by ensuring the RFP process is part of the overall CRM application.”
Features of Newmarket Connex for Microsoft Dynamics CRM include the ability to manage room block, event and meeting detail information for group and meetings business opportunities within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and to source opportunities as meetings or RFPs to your portfolio of hotels from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product.
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, described by company officials as “an adaptable business management product” offering capabilities aimed at helping users “streamline processes, reduce operational costs and manage compliance.”
The product offers “new multisite and shared services capabilities” for financial and supply chain management.
“For example,” company officials say, “the new software can run multiple legal entities on a central installation and provide a single, integrated view of financial and supply chain information from facilities around the world.”
Planning and reporting scenarios, such as consolidation and budgeting, are offered through integration with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server.
R. “Ray” Wang of Forrester (News - Alert) Research in the firm’s report “Microsoft Dynamics Gets
Renewed Focus” in April 2008, noted the “role-based user experience, improved reporting and BI capabilities, and improving platform harmonization” of the product.
