Case Study: Natural Resources Wales achieves unified permitting and cloud savings with Civica’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Natural Resources Wales Uses CRM to Modernise The Legacy

Natural Resources Wales (NRW), the Welsh Government–sponsored body formed from the merger of three environmental organisations, faced fragmented, expensive legacy permitting systems that ran in silos and prevented a single view of landowners’ activities. To modernise its customer-facing services and create a unified permitting platform, NRW extended its Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment and engaged Civica, a Dynamics CRM and online services specialist, to streamline licensing and migrate processes to the cloud.

Civica scoped and cleaned legacy data, took an agile, sprint-based approach to configure Microsoft Dynamics on Azure, and treated each permit type as an iterative project; between September 2015 and April 2016 NRW migrated three regimes (waste handling, installations and water abstraction) with further work planned for billing, compliance and returns. The Civica-delivered solution produced master records for customers, permits and land parcels, improved data quality for risk‑based regulation, enabled Office365 and Power BI integration and mobile working, and realised significant savings by moving to cloud infrastructure—showing an off‑the‑shelf Dynamics approach could meet NRW’s needs without costly bespoke systems.

Natural Resources Wales

Greg Lawrence

NRW Lead Technical Architect