How Deceuninck built a clearer view of its business, starting with sales

Oct 07, 2026
  • customer experience
  • discrete manufacturing
  • Microsoft

In a market shaped by economic uncertainty and constant change, businesses don’t have much room tor time for guesswork. At Deceuninck, a global manufacturer of windows, doors and building profiles, years of expansion across Europe, Turkey and the Americas had outpaced sales’ ability to keep up. Every country and division worked from their own processes, with no shared view of customers, performance or pipeline group-wide. Together with delaware, Deceuninck built that foundation with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights, now live across three regions. What started as a sales project became a common database for the whole company. (Reading time: 8 minutes)

Challenge

Deceuninck had no shared view of customers, performance or pipeline across its different sites. Every country worked its own way, while a slowing, uncertain market made prioritizing accounts and forecasting the pipeline more important than ever.

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Solution

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights was rolled out across Europe, Turkey and the Americas. It is linked to Deceuninck’s SAP ERP landscape through a central middleware layer that functions as a centralized hub for reporting.

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Result

One shared system and process, group-wide, with a full 360° view of every account. The clean, connected database is ready to now also feed marketing and Deceuninck’s AI roadmap. 

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Challenge

For almost 90 years, Deceuninck has thoughtfully built its leadership position in the market of windows, door and building solutions through steady investment in high quality, innovation, and people. In recent years, sustainability has become part of that same formula.

Anne-Sophie Depickere, Digital Lead, joined Deceuninck as part of the commercial excellence team. “One of the initiatives on our roadmap was a solid opportunity pipeline,” she says. “We had an Excel sheet with new clients and prospects, but we wanted more detail, like who was responsible for each opportunity, what visits had happened, which products were being suggested, and so on.” 

At the same time, sales itself was also struggling with a lack of data and insight: sales reps could not check whether a colleague had already visited a customer, whether a complaint was sitting unresolved, let alone whether the revenue from a specific customer had gone up or down.

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A consistent sales process and insight, however, weren’t easy to achieve. Deceuninck’s complex, indirect sales model spanning Europe, the Americas and Turkey made it hard to keep things aligned. The shift to managing the fabricator network more remotely only added to that. Excel sheets and fragmented regional tools couldn’t keep up.

 "We needed one uniform, centralized tool, connected end-to-end: to our SAP ERP, to reporting, and to the other teams that work with the same data, such as marketing and customer service,” Anne-Sophie continues. “Not just to make sure our sales team works the same way everywhere, but also to provide clear reporting for sales as well as the management. Real insight into customer feedback, sales results, opportunities and forecasts would help steer the company and the strategy.” 


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Solution

Deceuninck first ran an internal exercise to define what it actually needed and where it wanted to go. From there, it sent its requirements as an RFP to several vendors and implementation partners. In the final phase, the choice came down to SAP Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.

“Even though we have an SAP landscape, we chose the Microsoft ecosystem because of how familiar Microsoft products are with the platforms we use every day, such as Outlook, Teams and Power BI,” says Anne-Sophie. 

Choosing a partner was about more than the software demo. “It was important to find someone willing to really involve us and collaborate closely,” she continues. “We wanted a tandem, not a setup where delaware executes and we just wait.” 

delaware combined that openness and flexibility with deep expertise of both the Microsoft stack, as well as Deceuninck’s existing SAP landscape. “Before the project started, Anne-Sophie had already gathered detailed requirements from a broad group of stakeholders,” says Robin De Cock, project manager at delaware. “More than sales, she had engaged marketing, product management, and finance, across Europe. In a series of workshops, she then pulled in the stakeholders relevant to each topic: colleagues focused on projects for the project-related sessions, and more people from management for topics like access and security.”

The resulting blueprint was validated with the wider group, before the team started building. Key users validated each sprint, turning it into a genuine back-and-forth between the project team and the business. 

Before you redesign anything, optimize first. Take a step back and look at how the process actually works today, whether it still makes sense, who should see what, and which tools you need for that.
Anne-Sophie Depickere, Digital Lead at Deceuninck

What did
we do?

One connected CRM, built around the customer

delaware implemented Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights, connected to Deceuninck’s SAP ERP landscape through a middleware layer that also serves as a reporting hub. The solution supports the full sales cycle, from leads and opportunities to account and visit management, giving sales teams a complete 360° customer view.

Tailored locally, aligned globally

While Deceuninck chose the standard wherever possible, the CRM was adapted to local and divisional needs without losing group-wide consistency. Clear guidelines ensure regions capture the right data and follow a shared way of working.

Adoption built in

Adoption was a deliberate focus from day one, with on-site training, refresher sessions, digital learning materials, and dashboard-based follow-up. Progress is reviewed regularly, helping keep CRM usage visible and continuously improving.

Results

The CRM went live in Benelux and UK first, then wider Europe, followed by Turkey, Latin America and North America.

One of the clearest gains is the end of siloed systems. Before, if someone made a visit report, a project or a task and wanted to link it to a colleague in another department, they couldn’t. Now they can, and the resulting reports span everything from sale to complaints to delivery information. “Users get a 360° customer view”, Robin continues, ”that extends to account details like the machine park installed at each customer or prospect. That’s data they simply couldn’t see before. That centralized system, which is connected to the ERP system and will soon be used worldwide, truly helps sales to prioritize and respond effectively.”

The clean, connected database also protects corporate knowledge. Previously, that know-how left with the person, which is a real risk as quite a few sales reps are nearing retirement. Now it stays in the system, so new colleagues can pick up an account without starting from zero?

The CRM database has become the foundation for what comes next. All our information sits in one place, and now marketing can build on that too,” Anne-Sophie explains. “We’re currently exploring Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and the same data is already feeding our Power BI reporting. And it’s exactly the clean base our AI roadmap needs to move forward.”


Deceuninck & delaware

Deceuninck and delaware have been working together for years, across a wide range of projects. Some of that work involves delaware consultants embedded almost permanently within Deceuninck’s teams. Yet that long-term relationship doesn’t buy delaware an automatic pass: it was only after an extensive RFP process that Deceuninck chose delaware for the CRM project. 

Looking back, things didn’t always go perfect. What mattered, Anne-Sophie says, is how they worked it out together: “There are always ups-and-downs, and I think that’s normal. If something wasn’t going well, I said it directly, that’s part of how I work. And there’s always an open ear for that. If we raised specific points, we sat down together, and found a way to adjust things. It was really enriching to spar with the team and challenge each other.” 

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