A national specialist in employer arrears recovery operates at the intersection of superannuation compliance and debt collections — processing unpaid super contributions on behalf of Australia's major industry funds and managing recovery workloads through an outbound contact centre. The business depends on a reliable data pipeline from fund administrators, and a CRM that can manage complex case queues at volume. When those two systems fall short, the downstream consequences reach directly into recovery outcomes.
In early 2024, the organisation engaged Desda to conduct a structured diagnostic review of its end-to-end recoveries process. A migration to Microsoft Dynamics 365 in late 2022 had introduced capability gaps that had accumulated over time — business requirements that hadn't been fully captured during the transition, manual workarounds that had become standard practice, and a reporting layer constrained by data quality issues upstream. Desda was asked to assess the full picture and provide actionable recommendations to support a business case for remediation.
The Challenge
The organisation's recoveries team had transitioned from a legacy Wincollect CRM to Microsoft Dynamics 365 in late 2022, with the implementation delivered by an external technology partner. The intent was to modernise the platform and unlock the broader capability of the Microsoft ecosystem — but in practice, the transition was completed without capturing the full set of business requirements that the legacy system had accommodated over many years of operational use.
The gaps were felt across multiple parts of the process. Employer arrears files received from fund administrators via Link came in non-standard formats and at varying frequencies, requiring manual manipulation by the operations team before they could be ingested into Dynamics 365. Within the CRM itself, the vanilla implementation did not replicate the case management functionality the team had relied on in Wincollect, and configuration choices that had been made to meet the go-live deadline had not been revisited to align with actual business processes. Reporting through Power BI was constrained by data quality issues that originated earlier in the pipeline. Taken together, the recoveries team was spending significant effort on manual steps that should have been automated, and managing within a system that had not been shaped to their work.
Key Complexities
- Employer arrears files received from Link carried non-standard field structures and variable frequencies across fund administrators — each requiring manual pre-processing before the data could be loaded into Dynamics 365
- The Dynamics 365 implementation was a near-vanilla deployment: key configuration decisions had not been revisited post go-live, and the system was not replicating the workflow patterns the team had built in Wincollect
- Business requirements across the end-to-end arrears collections process had not been fully documented before the transition, leaving functionality gaps that had been absorbed as manual workarounds rather than resolved
- File volume and format inconsistencies were creating capacity and timing bottlenecks in the Dynamics upload pipeline — data that should have been processing overnight was creating backlogs that delayed the contact centre's case queue
- Power BI management reporting was limited in accuracy and usefulness as a direct consequence of data quality issues earlier in the pipeline — the reporting layer could not compensate for what it was being fed
- The data washing routines used to validate and cleanse the outbound contact centre queues were manual and time-consuming, adding operational overhead that scaled poorly with case volume
- The organisation's implementation partner relationship and the technical scope of what had been delivered under the original statement of work were both areas that required independent review
Our Approach
Desda structured the engagement as a five-week diagnostic review with a fixed scope and a fixed outcome: a report with clear recommendations that could be taken directly into a business case for remediation investment. The review was designed to produce an honest picture of what was working, what was not, and where the highest-value improvements lay — across data, people, process, and technology as distinct but connected dimensions.
What Was Delivered
- Executive Summary (PowerPoint) — problem statement, prioritised recommendations, and immediate actions across the end-to-end recoveries process
- Detailed Recommendations Report (PDF) — structured findings across four dimensions:
- Data — Link-to-Dynamics pipeline, file format handling, and Dynamics-to-Power BI reporting chain
- People — operations team, technology function, and implementation partner assessment
- Process — data extract, transformation and load; queue management; case management workflows
- Technology — CRM configuration assessment (out-of-the-box versus custom configuration), partner deliverable quality review
- Business Case Support — direct input to the organisation's Tranche 1 business case, translating recommendations into investment scope with sequencing and prioritisation guidance
Why Desda
An independent review of a post-implementation CRM environment is only as useful as the reviewer's ability to understand what "good" looks like for that specific operational context. Generic technology consultants can assess configuration against vendor best practice. What they cannot do is assess whether the configuration supports the actual work — the data shapes coming from Link file specifications, the queue and case management patterns of an arrears recovery contact centre, or the regulatory and operational pressures that sit behind the business requirements that were never captured.
- Desda's depth in superannuation data integrations meant the review team could read a Link arrears file specification and understand its implications for CRM ingestion, rather than treating it as a generic ETL question
- Prior experience across Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementations in the superannuation sector gave Desda an informed baseline for assessing what the vanilla implementation should have been configured to do — and where Professional Advantage's deliverables fell short of that standard
- Structuring the output as a two-tier report (executive summary plus detailed findings) ensured the recommendations were usable at both the decision-maker and delivery levels without needing translation
- Providing business case support as a deliverable — rather than an afterthought — meant the organisation could move directly from the review into investment planning without re-engaging consultants to interpret what they had just produced