The Soil Association’s Food For Life team were relying on an outdated CRM and portal that made simple tasks slow, manual and expensive to maintain.
FormusPro migrated the platform to Dynamics 365 and Power Pages, simplified six complex processes into two, and introduced self-service features that reduced admin overhead and improved the user experience for both staff and applicants.
The result is a modern, flexible system the team can manage themselves, freeing up time to focus on growing their programmes and supporting organisations to deliver healthier, more sustainable food.
Migration from legacy CRM2015 and portal to Dynamics 365 CE Online and Power Pages
Simplified six complex processes into two streamlined journeys
Introduced self-service capabilities, reducing manual admin effort
To modernise the Food For Life platform, simplify core processes and give the Soil Association full control over managing and evolving their system.
The Food For Life system was built on a legacy CRM2015 on-prem platform, supported by an ageing external portal.
Over time, the system had become difficult to manage and expensive to maintain. Even small cosmetic updates required external support, often costing a minimum of half a day’s work.
Users were spending significant chunks of their time on simple yet repetitive tasks to manage awards and applicants. Behind the scenes, processes had grown complex and fragmented, with six overlapping workflows creating unnecessary friction for both users and administrators. Synchronisation between the external website and CRM became unreliable and required constant manual intervention.
The result was a system that slowed teams down, created avoidable admin work and limited the programme’s ability to scale.
FormusPro delivered a full platform transformation, moving the system to Dynamics 365 CE Online with a Power Pages portal.
The core focus of the project was simplification.
Six existing processes were consolidated into two clear, structured journeys, making it easier for users to understand what they needed to do and for administrators to manage applications.
We then introduced a range of self-service capabilities to reduce manual effort. This included branded password reset functionality, templated awards and criteria, and automatic generation of Excel spreadsheets for capturing catering site data, removing the need for repetitive manual preparation.
To improve collaboration between applicants and reviewers, we also implemented a portal-based comment experience using a custom PCF control. This allows users to exchange messages, upload supporting evidence and track feedback in a clear and familiar way.
On the internal side, a custom page provides a single view to manage updates, comments and attachments efficiently.
Then we introduced integrated Stripe payments, removing the need for manual payment link generation and streamlining the enrolment process.
Finally, we ensured the platform was not just modern, but maintainable.
The Food For Life super users came along with us on the journey and fully understand how their solution is built and maintained. As a result, they have full ownership of their new system and its lifecycle. They are totally comfortable and confident to configure and update the system themselves… demonstrated by their first independent release to live a couple weeks after the initial go-live, which included their changes across Dynamics, Power Automate and the portal.
The new Food For Life platform has significantly reduced manual effort and removed many of the bottlenecks that previously slowed the team down.
Processes are now clearer, faster and easier to manage, with one user reporting that payment renewals now take ¼ of the time compared to the old system. External users benefit from a more intuitive experience, whilst internal teams no longer rely on external support for everyday updates and changes.
Crucially, the Soil Association now has full ownership of their system.
With the ability to manage releases internally and a more flexible platform in place, they are better positioned to grow the Food For Life programme and bring more organisations into their certification schemes.
With the new platform now live, the focus has now shifted to ongoing enhancements and future development.
The Soil Association team are already exploring next steps, building on a system that is designed to evolve with their needs… without the constraints of their previous platform.
For over 75 years, the Soil Association has worked to transform the way we eat, farm and care for our natural world.
As part of that mission, their Food For Life programme helps schools, nurseries, hospitals and catering providers serve healthy, sustainable food. Through certification, training and structured award programmes, they support organisations to improve food quality, education and community engagement.
These programmes rely on a wide range of users submitting applications and evidence, often with varying levels of technical confidence, making usability and clarity critical to success.
From day one, FormusPro grasped our convoluted processes and current ways of working, mapping them in real-time and distilling them down into clear workflows. Their ability to quickly gain familiarity with our products and process broke down the developer-customer boundaries and allowed us to work as one team, which both made the project more efficient as well as genuinely enjoyable.
Due to the simplification of our processes and aligning them as closely as we could across our products and services, we were able to move our Green Kitchen Standard certification from an offline-delivery model to delivery via the FFL portal in less than a day; from idea to go-live. Previously, this type of development would have been totally unfeasible due to cost and time constraints.
FormusPro understood that we needed a solution that would work well for us now as well as allow to grow and onboard new products to market quickly in future. To see this play out already has been fantastic and validated our decision to choose these platforms.
FormusPro helped the Soil Association recover £300,000 in Gift Aid in one day by rebuilding their submission process with smart, pre-check validation that ensures 100% HMRC acceptance.
It’s been 14+ years since we first embarked on a digital transformation journey to Dynamics 365 together. With a range of implementations and solutions over the years, this transformation is constantly evolving.
The Little Princess Trust (LPT) identified the need for digital transformation, which would take the form of a system encompassing almost all areas of the organisation.