Introduction
A fiduciary wealth-advisory firm serving high-net-worth individuals, families and business owners, offering investment management, retirement planning, estate planning, tax-sensitive strategies and holistic financial planning, runs its client, contact and process data through Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, integrated with a legacy portfolio-management system, Tamarac CRM, which the firm continues to use for parts of its business.
Over the years, the firm had built up roughly 80 automations on Dynamics’ Classic workflow engine, covering everything from lead qualification to meeting preparation to retirement-account servicing. With that engine approaching the end of its supported life, the firm engaged Nalashaa as a dedicated team, not a fixed-scope project, to migrate the estate to Power Automate, resolve issues as they surfaced, and keep advising on the roadmap as new needs emerged. The engagement remains active, with delivery reviewed with the client every month.
The Challenge
Modernizing a Live Automation Estate Advisors Depend on Daily
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A Sprawling, Undocumented Estate Built on a Deprecated Engine
Roughly 80 Classic workflows had accumulated over years, with no consolidated view of what existed or how it connected. Challenges included:
- No catalog of the estate: workflow count, complexity, dependencies and business ownership were not documented in one place
- Automations spanning lead and prospect management, household and contact management, marketing-list synchronization, service requests, retirement and compliance processes, and trading and billing workflows
- Every one of these flows was in daily use by advisors serving high-net-worth clients, so nothing could simply be switched off and rebuilt from scratch
- A migration that had to preserve exact business rules, triggers and exception paths, not just approximate behavior
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Platform Constraints Meant Translation Alone Would Not Work
Power Automate does not support several patterns the Classic engine relied on, so some logic had to be redesigned rather than copied. Key obstacles:
- Time-based and deferred (asynchronous) behaviors used unsupported wait patterns that needed re-architecting with supported alternatives
- A wide mix of trigger types and conditions, built up inconsistently over years by different hands
- No existing complexity rating or migration-priority framework to sequence the work sensibly
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Modernizing Sprint by Sprint, With a Roadmap That Kept Growing
A wealth-management CRM has no freeze window: advisors need it working every day. Challenges included:
- Migrating an ~80-workflow estate incrementally, without a cutover event, while the firm’s day-to-day operations continued uninterrupted
- A steadily growing list of new requests arriving even as the base migration was still underway: meeting-scheduling automation, deeper legacy-CRM integration, field cleanup and SLA monitoring
- Keeping the client’s steering committee confident sprint over sprint, with full visibility into risk and QA status rather than a single end-of-project report
Our Solution: A Dedicated Team with One Reusable Migration Framework
Nalashaa staffed a dedicated CRM Developer and Functional Expert team, running continuous two-week sprints against a prioritized backlog, with progress reviewed against the client’s steering committee every month.
The solution allowed the client to:
- See the full ~80-workflow estate catalogued, complexity-rated and prioritized before a single flow was touched
- Get early wins by migrating the highest-volume categories first
- Avoid rebuilding each service request from scratch by investing once in a reusable, configuration-driven framework
- Extend that same framework across compliance, retirement, trading and client-servicing workflows as the engagement progressed
- Keep adding to the roadmap, including net-new automation, without disrupting the delivery cadence
This approach let the firm modernize its automation estate at a pace it controlled, with evidence of progress every month rather than a single delivery date.
The engagement has run in three phases to date.
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Discovery, Cataloging & High-Volume Migration (Q1)
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
- Catalogued the ~80-workflow estate with a complexity rating, dependency notes and a migration-priority grouping for every flow
- Migrated the highest-volume categories first: lead and prospect management, household and contact management, marketing-list synchronization, and data copy, population and validation flows
- Designed and built a configuration-driven service-request framework as the reusable foundation for every request type that would follow: entity design, forms and views, and a main flow orchestrating child flows for email, condition evaluation and action application, each with its own error handling
- Delivered the framework’s first proof points: retirement-account inquiry flows built entirely on the new pattern
TECHNICAL ENHANCEMENTS
- Classic triggers and conditions rebuilt natively as Power Automate flows, with standardized connectors and environment variables replacing hard-coded values
- Pre-check logic added ahead of existing flows to prevent avoidable errors before they reached advisors
An open QA item was tracked transparently rather than hidden: a service-request routing behavior flagged mid-quarter, where a request opened under the wrong record type in testing, stayed visible on the risk log until resolved, exactly the kind of item the monthly steering review exists to surface.
Outcome: 27 workflows migrated across six sprints, 100% of milestones on schedule, and zero critical blockers reported, giving the steering committee a track record before committing to the next phase.
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Extending the Framework Into Compliance, Trading & Client Servicing (Q2)
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
- Reused the same configuration-driven framework, rather than building one-off flows, across meeting preparation (both calendar-integrated and manual), estate and account-servicing requests, and compliance-driven data requests
- Migrated trading and billing-related workflows, including trade requests, journal entries and billing adjustments
- Delivered a further run of service-request types on the established pattern: welcome packages, account reopen requests, referral requests, client portal requests and standing instructions
TECHNICAL ENHANCEMENTS
- The framework’s child-flow pattern extended to new request categories without re-architecting the core design
- Consistent error handling and standardized connectors carried through every new flow added
BUSINESS ENABLEMENT
- A growing share of the estate now running on a single, maintainable pattern instead of a patchwork of one-off Classic flows
- Continuity maintained on the functional side throughout, even as the developer role changed hands, so institutional knowledge of the framework was not lost
Together, the two phases carried the estate from a first foundation to a repeatable delivery model (Figure 1).
Architecture & Governance
From the client's standpoint, the architecture delivered
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ARCHITECTURE
- Systems of record
- Dynamics 365 CRM stayed the canonical source of truth, with the legacy portfolio-management CRM and SharePoint integrated around it rather than replaced.
- Orchestration
- Power Automate as the single orchestration layer, running one reusable framework instead of dozens of disconnected flows.
- Integration
- A standardized API gateway decoupling integration logic from the systems it connects to.
- Operations
- Monitoring, retry logic and error-logging built in for long-term stability, not added as an afterthought.
- Governance
- An open risk and QA log carried transparently between monthly steering reviews.
This architecture let the firm modernize without disturbing the CRM its advisors rely on every day.
Technology and Controls
CORE TECHNOLOGIES
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Power Automate (Classic-to-cloud-flow migration)
- A legacy portfolio-management CRM, integrated rather than replaced
- SharePoint for document-centric workflows and knowledge bases
- API Management gateway for standardized, secured integration endpoints
- A generic ERP layer for finance and HR data surfaced through those endpoints
- Application Insights / Power Platform monitoring, retry logic and error-logging pipelines
OPERATIONAL CONTROLS
- Weekly status meetings and a monthly steering committee review to align on strategic direction
- Project status reports delivered weekly, with risk and issue logs maintained continuously
- Requirements frozen at the start of each sprint, with scope changes routed through a formal change request
- Continuity managed on the developer role through a documented handover, with the functional expert role held constant throughout
- Formal offboarding and access revocation built into the resourcing model for any role transition
Business Impact & ROI
Quantifiable Outcomes
Measured against the engagement’s own yardsticks, as of the most recent monthly connect:
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47
of the roughly 80 workflows in the estate migrated to date, with the next tranche already underway
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100%
of milestones on schedule across every phase reported to date
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Zero
critical blockers reported in any sprint
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1
reusable framework carrying roughly 18 distinct service-request types
Strategic Value Delivered
This engagement shows how a live, business-critical CRM automation estate can be modernized incrementally, with delivery proven every month rather than promised at a single go-live.
By combining a documented estate catalog, one reusable migration framework and transparent monthly governance, the client now benefits from:
- A modern, maintainable automation layer replacing a deprecated workflow engine
- One framework the client’s own team can extend to future request types
- Full visibility into what has shipped, what is in flight and what remains open
- A dedicated team that has absorbed a growing roadmap without slowing the core migration
Looking Ahead
With the framework proven and roughly 60% of the estate migrated, the engagement is now positioned to:
Complete the remaining service-request categories and close out the legacy estate- Deliver net-new automation: a fully automated meeting-scheduling capability with advisor routing, dynamic scheduler links and automated reminders
- Deepen the integration between the legacy portfolio CRM and Dynamics, and introduce CRM field cleanup, stage-gated process tracking and SLA monitoring as the next roadmap items
- Evaluate a proposed increase in dedicated team allocation to support that widening roadmap