Pull data from one system. Copy it into a spreadsheet. Cross-check against email threads. Format it into something a landlord or tenant can actually read. Rinse and repeat — every time a report is due. For Retail Insite, a Southern California commercial real estate advisory firm specializing in retail properties, this wasn’t the exception. It was the process.
A Siloed System that Hobbled Reporting
As Retail Insite grew, so did the volume of property, tenant, and deal information its brokers and operations team had to manage. The firm’s existing solution could hold that information. It just couldn’t do much with it.
Reports had to be assembled by hand from siloed systems — a slow process in a market where owners and investors expect real-time answers. The system was also fragile: a change in one area could break something in another, creating recurring glitches and ongoing frustration for the team. And because it functioned mainly as a data repository, it offered little support for the sales-related work brokers actually needed to do — managing relationships, tracking deals, moving a pipeline forward.
"The previous system was hard to work with—glitches in one area caused other parts of the system to fail. Reports had to be pieced together from separate sources like spreadsheets and email."
Rebuilding Around How the Team Actually Works
Dyn365Pros recommended migrating Retail Insite to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales — not as a like-for-like swap, but as a foundation built around the firm’s real workflows. The project included:
- Migrating existing data and tables into a structured Dynamics 365 environment
- Configuring a model-driven application tailored to Retail Insite’s business processes
- Reorganizing and extending the underlying data structure
- Implementing business process flows to guide users through standardized workflows
- Developing custom Power Automate workflows to automate report generation
- Creating Word-based templates for highly customized branded documents
- Building tenant-facing and owner-facing reports directly from account and property records
- Providing user training to support adoption of the new platform
Power Automate and Microsoft Word templates do the heavy lifting behind the scenes, turning account and property records into polished, branded documents — without a broker manually assembling them each time.
Hours of Manual Work, Down to Real Time
Properties, tenants, accounts, and opportunities now live in a single platform instead of a patchwork of tools. The system that once needed workarounds to function now needs only occasional support after go-live and a brief adjustment period.
With that foundation in place, Retail Insite isn’t standing still. The firm is already expanding its use of Dynamics 365 to include property owner records, a fuller sales cycle, data cleanup, and Outlook integration — with revenue and commission projection next on the roadmap.
The Bottom Line...
Retail Insite’s challenge is a familiar one: a system that stores information but doesn’t support the people who rely on it. Dyn365Pros specializes in migrations like this — taking a firm’s existing data and processes and rebuilding them inside Microsoft Dynamics 365 in a way that fits how the business actually operates, not the other way around.
If reporting is eating hours your team doesn’t have, or your current system creates more friction than it resolves, schedule a free consultation with Dyn365Pros to talk through what a modern CRM foundation could look like for your business.
