Preface

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions support a wide range of business processes for an organization. These processes include core financials and accounting, product engineering, sales force automation, sales order management, supply chain planning, order fulfillment and logistics, as well as after-sales service and support. Many of these are mission critical for the companies, and hence the rigor that these organizations go through to ensure that they find the right solution for their needs.

Microsoft recognized the needs of the customer, and set about developing a methodology called Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step to help the customers accomplish their objectives. First and foremost among those goals was to provide processes to enable consistent and repeatable solution deployments. Inherent within that, however, was the need to ensure that the customer and sales team engaged in a meaningful manner to select the right solution, and ensured that the project was scoped such that the customer's objectives would be met.