Zellis is the largest provider of payroll and HR software and managed services to companies in the UK and Ireland, trusted by 42% of FTSE 100 companies. 

In this final blog of our four-part series, we’ll take a look at their flagship product, Zellis HCM Cloud. Read on to discover how your organisation can benefit from AI-powered payroll solutions that drive efficiencies right across your business.

Modern experiences that navigate challenges 

Organisations and employees are still navigating challenging times in the wake of Covid and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. These macro events have fuelled ongoing legislative change and increased complexity across the board. In today’s fast-moving and often unpredictable world of work, it’s no longer enough to ensure efficient payroll and HR processes. Organisations need the very best AI-driven HCM technology to ensure compliance with complex regulations, unlock data-driven insights, and provide people with modern, digital experiences.  

Zellis has tackled the challenge by providing the most engaging, empowering, and efficient AI-powered HR and payroll solution in the UK and Republic of Ireland markets. 

Delivering award-winning solutions 

Zellis HCM Cloud can help you achieve a lot more than the smooth running of payroll and HR processes. It’s a data-driven, cloud-based, and open HCM software platform, complete with award-winning solutions for payroll, HR, benefits and recognition. Built on Microsoft Azure, Zellis HCM Cloud also connects into the AI-based Microsoft Power Platform – PowerBI for analytics and Power Automate – to create business-wide efficiencies. 

Let’s start with Zellis’ cloud payroll software. It’s automated, accurate and compliant, affording the flexibility and peace of mind that organisations need. You can either use it as a standalone, best-in-class payroll solution, or together with their HR solution. 

Then there’s the HR management software. This empowers your employees, creating process efficiencies via automated AI-driven workflows that free up time for HR to spend on strategic activities. From hire to retire, it supports productivity, enables intelligent reporting, and supports exceptional experiences. 

In addition, the MyView PayNow app is designed to support financial wellbeing. This self-service app, available as an extension to the MyView portal, helps your employees to better understand their pay and benefits, manage their budgeting, choose when to get paid (also known as flexible pay), access free guidance, and save for a rainy day. 

Building innovations of tomorrow 

Leveraging Microsoft technology has enabled Zellis to establish a dedicated Zellis AI Lab to build expertise in AI, exploiting the potential of the Zellis Intelligence Platform combined with Microsoft Azure and OpenAI.  

One of the first products developed in the Zellis AI Lab is a Generative AI-powered chat user interface for use by customers’ colleagues. This is designed to support their engagement and drive HR efficiencies by helping employees to perform HR tasks and understand payslips and employment conditions without needing to raise a ticket.  

This frees up time for the HR and Payroll teams to concentrate on more strategic areas, such as strategy planning by using Zellis AI-driven predictive analytics, instead of spending hours on purely reactive work such as answering employee queries.  

Early indications show that by using AI in this way, customers could reduce the time it takes to respond to employee queries by around 75%.  

Unlock the value of the cloud 

AI software published on the Microsoft marketplace forms a powerful mix of innovation, reliability, security and convenience. If you’re looking for solutions to fuel your cloud transformation and grow your business, it’s the place to shop.   

To move at the speed of business today, many companies prefer buying to building cloud apps. This allows them to offload the associated costs and management onto SaaS partners.  You’re able to use private offers to get exactly what you need, including customised terms and conditions, negotiated pricing, prototypes for proof of concept, and tailor-made solutions.  

Better still, transact in a single, accessible place, reducing procurement complexity, saving time and simplifying billing. Apply 100% of the value of eligible purchases to your organisation’s Azure cloud commitment and get faster time-to-value with solutions that work with your current technology. 

All while enjoying the peace of mind that comes from buying and running solutions on a trusted cloud with industry-leading security.   

Boost your HR and payroll solutions with AI power 

Ready to deploy transformational employee experiences across your organisation? 

Visit the Microsoft marketplace to buy Zellis HCM Cloud now, or contact our team at ISVUK@Microsoft.com.

Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Driving your AI transformation with the Microsoft marketplace 

Blog 2: Safeguarding your business with AI-powered security solutions 

Blog 3: Optimising business operations through AI-powered solutions 

About the author

James joined Microsoft 15 years ago and has held leadership positions across the Consumer, Enterprise, and the Partner teams at Microsoft. James is currently the ISV Ecosystem Lead and has a passion for people and technology coming together to drive customer success. James has been at the forefront of Cloud & Digital transformation for the last 10 years launching new business models and driving transformation through the Microsoft Partner ecosystem resulting in and contributing to exciting new revenue streams and significantly accelerated growth for Microsoft and Partners.

The post Deliver transformational employee experiences through AI-empowering solutions   appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

This year’s digital edition of Microsoft Ignite has now wrapped up, but don’t worry if you missed it! The high-quality sessions and keynotes from across the two days are available to watch on-demand from the Session Catalogue on the official Ignite website.

2022’s instalment has brought us plenty of news and reveals, so just in case you missed it, let’s walk through some of the key Azure-centric announcements. If you’re looking for announcements on other topics, you can check the Microsoft Ignite 2022 Book of News, which details everything from across the two day stream.

Azure AI

• Numerous updates to Azure Cognitive Services, including Azure Cognitive Service for Language, Azure Cognitive Service for Speech and Computer Vision
• New Azure Form Recogniser and Azure Machine Learning capabilities in preview
• Microsoft Project Bonsai adds AI features

Azure Data

• ​​​​​​​Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform adds integrated Partner Ecosystem
• Azure Cosmos DB adding distributed PostgreSQL support
• ​​​​​​​New machine learning updates in Azure Synapse
• Azure Data Explorer adds new sources for near real-time analytics

Azure Hybrid, Multicloud and Edge

• ​​​​​​New, cloud-like capabilities available for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server
• ​​​​​​New deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Service enabled by Azure Arc
• New feature release for Azure Stack HCI

Azure Infrastructure

• Azure Automanage is now available for Azure Arc-enabled servers and Azure virtual machines
• ​​​​​​​New Virtual Machine Scale Set and Spot Virtual Machines capabilities
• ​​​​​​​New Azure Monitor capabilities and features
• New features in Azure Networking
• New Windows Server benefits and features

Azure VMWare Solution

• New features for Azure VMware Solution support availability, security

Developer Tools and DevOps

• Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager simplifies cluster management and organization
• Independent software vendors can now create one-click Kubernetes apps
• ​​​​​​​New Azure Monitor features for app modernization and innovation
• Microsoft Dev Box now in preview
• ​​​​​​​GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps in preview
• Latest version of Visual Studio 2022 now generally available
• Azure App Service updates

Power Platform

• ​​​​​​​Power Automate introducing new way to automate using natural language and AI, and innovations for user engagement, robotic process automation deployment
• Optimise workflows and document processing with AI Builder
• Power Platform Managed Environments features automated low-code governance and security capabilities at scale
• Microsoft Power Pages updates provide enhanced design studio, new templates
• Power BI updates enable self-service data analytics, adds connectivity to OneDrive and SharePoint
• Power Apps updates enable collaboration, fusion development, micro-apps
• Microsoft Dataverse enables developers to connect to external data sources

…and more!

There were so many announcements during Microsoft Ignite 2022 that we can’t do justice to all of them here. If you want to see the full list of announcements, you can do so by Microsoft Ignite 2022 Book of News. This handy website contains everything you need to know from the event, on topics from Microsoft 365 to Security and Windows. Be sure to make use of the contents page, as there’s a lot to go through!

Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President of Azure Marketing, has written an in-depth blog about how Microsoft Azure helps drive agility and optimisation in business. There’s also a great article by Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, on how you can re-energize your workforce, wherever they’re working.

In case you missed it, there’s also a blog post written by Frank Shaw, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, introducing this year’s Microsoft Ignite. It contains a lot of interesting information about what topic areas Ignite covers, so it’s a great starting point if you’re looking at exploring particular areas of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Useful Links

• Check out Microsoft Learn TV!
• Check out the sessions you might have missed in the official Ignite website
• Follow the conversation on the #MSIgnite hashtag!

The post A look at the announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Data can help an organisation identify new opportunities and uncover hidden efficiencies. The business world is no stranger to disruptions and changes, and when you extract as much value from data as possible, your organisation will be able to move with speed and gain competitive advantage.

Data maturity helps empower employees to collaborate, gain new insights and take action to deliver operational efficiencies. It can help teams be more innovative with their product development. Ultimately, this leads to delivering a better customer experience.

95% _{of surveyed organisations have deployed big data initiatives on a department or enterprise level}

To drive tangible outcomes, leaders should build a solid data foundation to start maximising opportunities. By fusing the power of Azure data and AI with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, organisations can start to unlock new insights and more critically – take action.

But what stage are you on in your journey? And how do you leverage the right tools to stay agile and deliver the results you need and drive innovation?

_{Data-driven organisations are growing at an average of} 30% _{or more annually}

What stage is your organisation in your data journey?

1. Good
   • Better understand your customers, employees and use data to drive collaboration.
2. Better
   • Identify needs and trends, and adapt quickly to new business models, drive efficiencies and reduce costs.
3. Best
   • Empower employees with insights and drive meaningful change.

Step 1: Good

Customers have high expectations of brands. They want to be heard, understood and have personal, meaningful experiences.

73% _{of customers will consider switching to a competitive brand after one bad experience.}

How can leaders meet these goals in an ever-changing world?

• Make customer experience an organisation-wide priority.
• Be agile enough to respond to customer needs quickly.
• Respond honestly and authentically.
• Meet customers in the channels they expect.

When you unify and centralise your customer experience technology, you’ll gain insights to build deeper customer relationships.

Royal Enfield offers a frictionless experience to both its potential and existing customers at different touchpoints, ensuring they can access their data on the spot instead of starting anew each time.

75% _{of organisations have proved that customer satisfaction leads to revenue growth through increased retention or lifetime value.}

These insights will help employees deliver a more personalised experiences to customers. They will also be able to make decisions faster and with greater confidence, to deliver insights to the right stakeholders and the right time.

Rolls-Royce provides targeted and actionable insights at the point of need to inform business decisions, such as which factors will have the most impact on fuel performance.

How?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

Helps you better listen to, understand and satisfy your customers. When combined with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, it will help collect customer feedback across channels and form more authentic customer relationships.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Get a 360-degree view of customers and identify new unfound segments to support customer retention or create new revenue stream. Optimise and orchestrate real time personalised journeys to create fans improve loyalty.

Power BI

Gives every employee within the business the ability to respond in real-time with data-empowered insights on a secure platform.

Step 2: Better

To make sure your organisation continues to meet changing expectations, leaders must collaborate across business functions to align data goals and initiatives. At the same time, continued disruption, and budgeting means cost saving measures are critical.

64% _{of IT leaders say they’re using two or more analytics solutions}

When you consolidate your data, you’re creating a single source of truth for the enterprise. And by combining it onto one tool like Power BI, you’ll reduce costs.

PwC provides their clients with the data they need to on one platform. They use Azure to process the data and push it to Power BI, before shutting down (to save costs). From there, clients can view their data across customisable dashboards from anywhere.

48% _{of business goals driving data initiative investments is to improve decision making}

Power BI

Align your data across organisational silos. Employees can easily self-serve to get the data they need when they need it. Take advantage of cloud tech such as AI and automation to create cross-team reports that gain more insight. Plus, industry-leading data security capabilities help keep your insights protected.

_{The average time-to-insights is} 27% _{faster with Power BI}

Step 3: Best

Now you’ve laid the groundwork for a data-driven culture, you can use these insights to drive meaningful change and adapt at speed.

45% _{of users want real-time data aggregation and analysis}

To fully take advantage of your data, leverage automation and AI tools to process, aggregate and analyse data in one place in real-time. This, combined with user-friendly tools allows any employee to pull insights that are relevant for their role, right when they need it.

82% _{of users agree that self-service analytics is a top priority at their organisations}

This gives rise to the citizen analyst. Employees can get the answers they need while reducing the burden on IT staff. This better places your organisation to make decisions at speed.

66% _{of users say these capabilities are critical when evaluating new tools and solutions}

Data and AI can also enable predictive analytics, helping you respond quicker to upcoming changes, uncover new opportunities and better support customers. Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Commerce or Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you find new segments to market to, or drive customer retention with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

_{Preemptive digital transformations have a} 50% _{higher ROI than reactive ones}

Identify operational inefficiencies with analytics to streamline and optimise back-end tasks, for example, monitor equipment health in manufacturing or healthcare or reduce manual tasks. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain can maximise your supply chains operations.

Analytics can also be used to amplify your organisation’s work. Take, for example, healthcare. AI is being used to analyse medical imagery, leading to quicker diagnosis and helping doctors focus on patient care.

Move forward with confidence

Making data-driven decisions with the right technology will help you make bold business moves with confidence. As a result, you’ll empower your employees, deliver better customer outcomes and stay agile in a fast-paced environment.

Find out more

Discover how to build a data strategy:

Imagine business powered by data

Learn how to put your data to work

Get data-driven insights

Get fresh perspectives on business modernisation:

Watch Microsoft Envision UK on demand

Explore data management solutions:

Power BI

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service

The post KPIs and ROI: Quantifying the impact of data management in your business appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

There are numerous technologies that can be utilised to stream, analyse and visualise tweets on Azure, including traditional Big Data technologies such as Hadoop, Kafka, Spark, Storm, No SQL DBs and more. However, there are also a number of PAAS services that can be utilised to achieve the same result, with much less coding, configuration and setup effort and improved maintenance and HA/DR capabilities.

One simple pattern for twitter analytics is this:

LogicApp is used to pull the data from Twitter periodically using the inbuilt Twitter connector, the Cognitive Services Text API can be called from within LogicApp and the enriched data inserted into SQL DB, and Power BI can be used to generate aggregates/measures/KPIs and to visualise the data. Cognitive Services provides a variety of machine learning services which are extremely useful for social media analytics such as sentiment analysis, moderation (less blushes if the profanity is automatically removed), language translation and intent (whether they asking a question or making a complaint).

• Logic Apps -> Twitter Connect,

• Logic Apps -> Cognitive Services,

• Logic Apps -> SQL Database

• Power BI -> SQL Database

This is an awesome architecture for rapidly prototyping a solution and allows for business rules/logic to be changed rapidly. However, for a production architecture it has weaknesses:

• Aggregate generation in Power BI allows for rapid rule changes but doesn’t allow those rules to be shared across multiple reports, requiring the rules to be recreated in each report. This has obvious data governance and quality concerns. These calculations should be done in the DB, so that a consistent set of rules can be applied across all reports. An example PowerBI dashboard is shown below (this is available as a Power Bi Solution Template):

• Logic Apps is exposed directly to the Twitter API. While it’s possible to add code buffering logic and time delays into Logic Apps to handle high volume tweets, other components are available.
• This is hot path analytics only. There’s no provision for cold/batch analytics.

The architecture can be enhanced as per the above, with the addition of Event Hub, Stream Analytics and Blob Storage:

• Event Hub uncouples the Twitter connectivity and acts as a highly scalable buffer for incoming tweets to prevent the overloading of components downstream. It can stream to multiple outputs so it could also stream a raw feed to Blob Storage, but this would lack the enrichment from sentiment analysis etc.
• Similarly to Logic Apps, Stream Analytics can make direct calls to Cognitive Services to perform sentiment analysis, moderation etc. However, Stream Analytics can also perform aggregations over multiple criteria and time windows and push the results in SQL DB. It can also stream a raw feed (with or without enrichment) into Blob storage. Data can also be streamed directly into Power BI to provide real-time reporting, rather than near real-time reporting.
• In-memory columnar storage can be utilised in SQL DB, with triggers used to calculate additional measures. This minimises the complexity of queries and the workload of Power BI, significantly decreasing the refresh time of reports which is critical in near-realtime reporting. It also ensures consistency of business rules for KPIs across multiple reports as the rules are stored in the DB and not the report.
• Passing the data into Blob Storage enables the data to be picked up by other Azure Data Services for additional “cold path” analytical processing or on-premise analytical systems. However using Blob storage is the equivalent of dumping data into files on a file share on-premise; There are more sophisticated, functionality richer services such as Azure Data Lake or Azure CosmosDB that would be better choices. Blob storage does, however, make an excellent transitional staging area before batch moving the data into Azure Data Lake. Just don’t try and use Blob Storage as a “Data Lake” or you will most likely end up with a “Data swamp” or “Digital Data Land Fill”. Once in the Data Lake the data can be further utilised and analysed by Azure Data Lake analytics, Machine Learning Studio/Workbench, HDInsight, SQL Data Warehouse, Databricks and Azure Search, depending on the use case. This is illustrated below:

Additional workflow processing for scenarios such as responding to customer complaints and queries, identifying and pursuing leads, modifying marketing campaigns, enhancing events experience can handled either by:

• Hot path processing utilising Logic Apps to process a real-time stream from Stream Analytics. This allows the stream to be pre-processed before passing into Logic Apps, minimising the workload on Logic Apps. Logic Apps can make additional calls to cognitive and other services as well providing conditional workflow management and passing the message for appropriate processing downstream by, for example, a Call handler, notification hub, email, a tweet, or enhancing bot interaction. A 2nd Event Hub should be utilised between Stream Analytics and Logic Apps to provide a buffer between the two and allow Logic Apps to consume messages at its own cadence.

And/Or

• Cold path processing utilising, for example, Azure Data Lake Analytics to analyse and pull data. Using parameters or machine learning, data can be pulled out of the cold data store and pushed onto a message queue for appropriate processing downstream.

These options are illustrated below:

The decision point on the 2 methods is down to the use case and what the response time and analytics window for tweets are. For instance, altering a marketing campaign based on tweets received over a week would be an appropriate cold path use case. Responding to a customer complaint or query is an appropriate hot path use case.

Resources

• Create and use analytics reports with Power BI
• Get data with Power BI Desktop
• Explore data in Power BI

The post Using Power BI and Logic Apps​ to analyse social media streams appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

To rise to today’s challenges, successful businesses across architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management are making changes at their own pace to build resilience and become future-proof. They are accelerating their digital investment plans through targeted data-driven modernisation.

By delivering a high volume of marginal gains — even lots of 1% improvements — firms can make a big change to their recovery in these uncertain times.

Are you ready for the rebound?

While the impact of COVID-19 means the future is uncertain, there is optimism that the built environment industry will rebound.

The Construction Leadership Council anticipates recovery will happen slowly but surely, with lost output requiring around two years to bounce back and most of the recovery taking place in 2021. When recovery does come, firms need to make sure they’re best positioned to capitalise on new opportunities.

The McKinsey Global Institute’s Industry Digitisation Index found construction to be among the least digitised sectors in the world, being second from the bottom – just ahead of agriculture. Low levels of digitisation are hurting built environment firms’ potential for economical growth, contributing to an annual productivity increase of just 1% over the last 20 years. Adopting digital technologies across the sector has the potential to transform productivity, with efficiencies estimated to be worth £7-15 billion per annum.

Many players have already made their move to put digital technologies to work. Arup’s CIO says COVID-19 took their thinking around cloud technology “from opportunity to necessity”, accelerating their deployment by as much as a year.

Modernisation often means playing the long game but that doesn’t mean you can’t create impact in the short term.

The way to a smarter built environment

Make transformation happen for your organisation faster and accelerate your time to value.

Where it isn’t suitable to leverage new enterprise applications — due to budget, timescale, or business fit, firms already on a modernisation journey join up their existing technology, drive innovation from within and empower employees across their organisation with the ability to develop new capabilities. They deliver increased flexibility and innovation through incremental gains rather than big projects.

To put this smart approach into context for your firm, here we explore four quick win examples of targeted data-driven transformation. Each quick win is enabled through the Microsoft Power Platform — a drag and drop low-code development platform without limits on growth and scalability.

Quick win 1: Automate outdated manual tasks

Boost business productivity by giving everyone the ability to automate manual administrative and organisational processes, saving employee’s time and costs.

Automation can play a significant role in modernising business processes, but changing the outdated doesn’t have to be daunting. Microsoft Power Automate fast-tracks automation with templates, making streamlining repetitive tasks and turning processes paperless quick and easy.

With Power Automate, time-consuming tasks, such as contract approvals, can be automated using pre-built templates and a trigger system that sets off a chain reaction of tasks, so your employees can focus on bigger, strategic objectives.

Quick win 2: Promote a culture of innovation

Foster innovation across your organisation by empowering business users with the ability to build low cost solutions that can analyse data, build new capabilities, automate processes and create chatbots, through easy-to-build and quick to deploy applications.

Microsoft Power Apps enables your most talented and knowledgeable employees to solve your most pressing day-to-day business challenges, while reducing time to market and increasing the potential value of new digital capabilities. With the use of pre-built templates and drag-and-drop simplicity, continuous improvements can also be easily rolled out. This can help you to quickly adjust solutions to meet your business goals over time or react to changes in the wider industry, such as returning to the workplace safely under the latest regulations.

Through using Microsoft Power Apps, PCL built Job Site Insights – a construction management app to assist with the tracking of project costs, quality metrics, employee schedules and inspections. It gives site managers a valuable single-pane view of all aspects of work at a job site allowing them to spot opportunities to optimise processes and increase profitability.

Quick win 3: Enrich every customer interaction

Chatbots can engage conversationally with your clients and employees to support and empower your customer services. Improving client satisfaction will increase the potential profitability of every client interaction.

By leveraging Microsoft Power Virtual Agent chatbots, which answer questions with insights from your data, you can innovate your customer services and enable a truly personalised experience. Internal and external users can also self-serve by talking directly with the chatbots to get the answers they need fast.

Informed by sophisticated, AI-enabled Power Virtual Agents, the skills and know-how of your team will be boosted when answering a prospect’s query about a remote or little-known site, for example, to maximise the profitability of the potential opportunity.

Quick win 4:  Harness the power of data to understand your customers

Provide real-time insights, so all employees can confidently make informed decisions, faster and based on data not opinion.

Microsoft Power BI empowers people across the business by helping to surface insights hidden in your data across a disparate set of systems. Using up-to-the-minute analytics, Power BI means smarter reporting — with employees united by a common dataset to accelerate business transformation.

Laing O’Rourke used the Microsoft Power BI platform together with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, to develop an interactive, smart hard hat, with sensors and a data collection unit that monitors the user’s temperature and heart rate, plus the external temperature and humidity. The data collected provides a real time view on the environment and the user to enable quick, informed decisions, to not only react but predict outcomes, increasing the safety of workers.

The roadmap to a data-driven built environment

Choosing the way to a smarter built-environment through targeted data-driven transformation means your firm will be able to adapt and thrive in times of change. Without the advantage of having the right information at the right time, you risk not being able to compete in the future marketplace.

With Microsoft Power Platform you can initiate your focus on applications that deliver impact quickly, across the business or for specific departments, to unleash the power of citizen development in a controlled, secure and compliant framework.

Once ready, you can scale up innovation across your entire operations by connecting complementary Microsoft integrations — such as Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations together with Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. Thanks to our common data model, platforms across the Microsoft environment integrate with ease. So, alongside over 350 custom-built third-party product connectors, you can build end-to-end business solutions that secure further long-term benefits for your firm, your people and your clients.

Find out more

Read the blog: How to support resilient operations in the built environment industry

Download the whitepaper: Reconciling the Irreconcilable

Explore solutions for the built environment

Discover the Microsoft Power Platform 

Discover Microsoft Dynamics 365

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

A Senior Solution Specialist for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Power Platform, with over 10 years’ experience working with organisations in the Field Service and Facilities Management sectors. Michael’s mission is to drive ever-closer alignment with our Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) customers as well as Facilities Management (FM) customers and support their transition to modern, adaptable and unified business applications.

The post Four quick wins to make your built environment firm smarter appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

At the University of Sunderland where I am Deputy Technical Director and Head of IT, our ambitions are based around three main themes, which are:

• Being student focussed, by providing transformative experiences to our learners.
• Being professions facing, by developing highly skilled graduates who are ready for work and are career focussed.
• Being society shaping, by leading research, innovation and practice.

Underpinning this there are a raft of issues and opportunities. This could be improving the overall student experience, aiding access and participation, growing new and emerging markets both domestically and internationally, and attainment and progression.

Finding the right tools for the job

Those of us who work in IT are often tasked with providing the technology-based solutions to help support and fuel these ambitions. I often ask myself these two fundamental questions:

• How do we play a central role in the delivery of these ambitions in a world of technological possibilities whilst maintaining financial stability with predictability in cost base and the ability to flex?
• Do the services we provide meet the ever-changing needs of the business?

We took an assessment of the environment and the hundreds of applications used by university staff and students. One of the major challenges we faced was around the silos of adopted innovations with specific functionality and limited viability used. We needed something better, more integrated, more functional and something that offered more opportunity.

For many years, a platform-based approach has been the nirvana, and now they exist, Microsoft is leading the way in terms of the technology and affordability.

An all-in-one platform

In my own institution we have chosen, after many years of assessment and planning, to adopt a data centre zero strategy. We removed the large on-campus data centres and pushed production workloads into a newly designed Azure environment.

This allows those employees who would have been traditionally maintaining equipment and supporting services to reskill, reinvent, and hone their talents to design and develop new services to support the improvements in academy. They’ve streamlined and simplified administration which has ultimately led to an improved student experience and therefore student success.

We chose to consolidate on a platform that provides a common toolset for managing our infrastructure and our data. This provides the ability to refine systems of record, improve management information, and business intelligence. This opens up the opportunities in terms of big data, analytics, and AI.

The use of Microsoft PowerBI as a tool shows insights for the University community by communalising information. This gives a clear and consistent picture of the performance of the organisation. It also highlights the engagement of students, and allows data-based reflection on the services we provide.

We also enjoy the ability to build environments in a consistent online platform using PowerApps. It delivers on any device and removes the burden of the past by promoting and supporting innovation.

Built with accessibility

Accessibility is at the fore of our approach with a sector average of around 15 percent of students recording some form of disability in 2017. Microsoft’s approach to accessibility makes a significant difference to how we can deliver services for all. It also helps us support staff and students to get the very best from the experiences we can provide.

The ongoing adoption of Microsoft Office 365 for staff and students opens up opportunity for collaboration. Because users can access Office 365 anywhere on any device, they can work in the way they see fit. Office 365 is accessible-by-design and fitted with a range of tools to help people with limited vision, hearing, speech, mobility, and learning abilities to create, communicate, and collaborate on content.

With this comes the need to address the capabilities of both staff and students. We are working with JISC and their Digital Capabilities Framework to help build vital skills. We also have adopted LinkedIn Learning. Using these tools in combination allow us to assess digital capabilities, identify opportunities for development, and then provide a direct link to the learning materials and communities which support those developments.

Building collaboration, productivity, and business value

Rolling out a platform-based approach with all the assessments, planning, collaboration, and pure effort to make it work is not to be underestimated. All parts of the business and the community play an important role in bringing this together. This includes staff, students, and the Microsoft teams who help support the sector with advice and guidance.

The ability for the institution and its staff and students to seamlessly engage together, along with developing research, innovation, and contributing to practice is powerful. It shows how the right technology choices can help deliver to the ambitions of the university.

Find out more

Transforming higher education

About the author

David Conway is Deputy Technical Director and Head of IT at University of Sunderland in the north east of England. He is leading a programme of business change enabled by new and innovative digital solutions.

The post Driving better university outcomes with technology appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Data visualisation can be used to provide more insight than traditional descriptive statistics can’t. It can also be used to see distinct patterns and observations that won’t be immediate if you wade through data line-by-line.

This allows companies to gather and quickly act on their data. Faster, informed decision making makes organisations more responsive in an increasingly competitive market.

I’ve put together a very short tutorial on how to use the PowerBI preview tool called Shape Map to help you visualise data across regions. Shape Maps are unique in its ability to use custom maps based on TOPOJSON files. It distinguishes the different regions of the map by using different colours in a way that’s easy on the eye.

Prerequisites

• Enable the preview feature Shape Map Visual
• The UK-Counties TOPOJSON file – download it here
• The sample use case data – download it here

Enable Shape Map Visual

Once you have PowerBI go to Options by clicking on File, then Options and settings, then finally Options:

Clicking on Options will lead to the window as seen below. Ensure that Shape Map Visual is ticked. Once this is done, restart PowerBI for the changes to take effect.

All set! You should now see the Shape Map icon in your Visualisation tab.

Importing Sample Data

In a new PowerBI window click on Get Data and select Text/CSV.

Once the select file dialog appears, choose the provided file countydata.csv.

Click on Transform Data on the new window.

Now rename the top two columns to County and Value as shown below. Once you’ve done that click Save and Apply.

Shape Map Visual

On the Visualizations pane select the Shape Map icon – the one that has a red ring around it in the below picture:

You will end up with something plain looking like this.

Not very eye-catching is it? Let’s fix that, shall we!

On the fields pane, select County and Value.

Now under the Format tab in the Visualizations pane, select Add Map and choose the uk-counties.json file from whatever directory you saved it in. Your subsequent pane should look something like this:

Your Shape Map should be complete. As specified by the data source, the following counties are represented in the map; Bedfordshire, Berkshire and West Midlands. I highly recommend you add more county and subsequent values in the CSV file to make the map look more distinct.

This map will help you visual data in a way that will help your business make more informed decisions, gains actionable insights, and quickly respond to a competitive market.

Special thanks to Matthew Stephen.

About the author

Jalal Uddin is a Cloud Solution Architect Intern at Microsoft, UK. He is passionate about empowering customers to learn how to use data to discover actionable insights to be more productive, more profitable, and more competitive. Jalal is completing a Computer Science Degree at Aston University.

The post How to visualise geospatial data by location to inform better decision making appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The opportunities created by digital transformation not only affect how businesses run but they also affect our lives as consumers. It doesn’t seem that long ago that on a Friday night, I’d head down to the local Blockbusters store to pick out a new film whereas now I don’t need to leave the comfort of my own home!

However, as organisations adapt to become more data-driven, there’s lots of challenges they must address on their journey. A recent Harvard Business Review’s report looked into why some analytic strategies fall short but others succeed. I’ll be delving into a few highlights from this report, as well as discussing where we’re seeing customer success with delivering insights at scale.

1.      Get the basics right

Global consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser who produces health, hygiene, and home products is one of many companies who are using technology to unlock the power of data and empower their employees to work smarter. Executives at Reckitt Benckiser are now seeing a direct link between business performance and decisions based on high-quality data.

Whilst the majority of business leaders agree that effective data and analytics strategies are essential for business transformation, success in this area is hard to achieve and organisations are struggling to become mature users of data and analytics.

If you’re expecting a quick journey to becoming data-driven, you’re likely to fail. You need to get the basics right. This is a process that must be continually modified based on changes in your markets, your business, and in technology.

2.      Unlock your data

Data silos and difficulties managing data from multiple new systems is often stated as the root cause of disappointing results. This is because siloed data locks information within individual departments and can block insights being generated by the wider organisation.

To enable a broader dissemination of information, these data siloes need to be eliminated. Organisations that leverage technologies like data warehouses to bring together data from different formats, sources, and applications can derive insights that are richer than from a single source.

Whilst going through their transformation, Reckitt Benckiser realised they needed to become more data-driven and unlock more than just their internal operational data. To get a holistic view of their business, they also needed third-party data from retailers and their competitors to understand their performance. More importantly, they needed it all to know what to do next.

To do this, they built a modern data warehouse solution to bring together a variety of data from different sources in Azure HDInsight and Azure SQL Data Warehouse (now Azure Synapse Analytics). They used Power BI to make the data easily accessible in one view across the organisation.

3.      Manage your data

The success for analytics really depends on the quality of your data. Data inaccuracies can be created in one department and then easily spread throughout an entire organisation.

Therefore, it’s important to invest in an effective framework for reliable data management which can address a range of tasks. This includes creating rules for sharing information across departments and monitoring the accuracy of new records to enable better data governance.

NEL support over 43 London clinical groups. They had a vision to improve their ability to predict health outcomes by using advanced analytics. To achieve this, they first had to create a system to better integrate and govern their data. Once they put this data management system in place, they enabled their customers to deliver personalised care and improve patient outcomes by making more accurate healthcare predictions.

“We’re giving the clinicians the intelligence to have an informed conversation that helps patients learn about their risk factors,” says Graham Crawford, NEL’s director of analytics.

4.      Turn insights into action

By investing in data management solutions, organisations put themselves into a better position to take advantage of advanced analytics. Technologies, such as machine learning and AI, support their decision making and turn insights into action.

UK insurer LV= needed a different way of doing business to support customers whose car accidents fall into the grey area of who’s at fault. Working with their data scientists and Microsoft Services, they implemented an Azure machine learning solution that reduced these grey area outcomes from 20 percent to 3.9 percent. As a result, they had better claim resolution outcomes and delivered better customer experiences.

5.      Build employees skills

Even if you invest in the latest analytics tools, to truly become a data-driven organisation you need to ensure your employees know how to utilise them. In order to take the best advantage of new technology, you need to invest in developing your employees. Help them gain new skills and adapt to the cultural change within your organisation.

As Bk Vasan, Executive Director of Data Engineering, Cloud and Advanced Analytics at T-Mobile correctly said: “the biggest opportunities with analytics come from enabling people to think differently based on the insights they’re getting from data.”

At Microsoft, we have heavily invested into skills for both out internal employees and our customers that you can take advantage of today. Find learning paths for Azure Data Engineers plus many more on Microsoft Learn here.

6.      Gain a competitive advantage

It’s very clear that analytics adds a competitive differentiator in most industries, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. The key to getting started is to get the basics right and then ‘land and expand’.

Identify two or three business goals, understand what data is needed to support these and then demonstrate quick wins that validate your analytics strategies. The actions generated from these insights are what then enables you to re-imagine how you engage with your customers, transform your products, optimise your operations, and enable your employees.

I look forward to seeing what’s next in 2030…

Find out more about becoming data-driven

Discover what makes a successful analytics strategy

How to use analytics in the cloud

About the author 

Jodie is Microsoft UK’s Cloud Scale Analytics and IoT Lead. She is passionate about the opportunities that technology creates through digital transformation, with data and analytics strategies playing a key role. Starting her career with a Computer Science BSc Honours, Jodie has worked in a wide range of industries from Space and Defence to Financial Services before joining Microsoft in 2017 as a Partner Technology Strategist for MSPs.

The post How to become data-driven: 6 steps to success appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We want to help you make growing your business easy and stress-free. After all – you started your business because you had a passion and drive. This doesn’t deserve to be buried under mountains of pressure.

Here’s some tips on how you can leverage technology to help ease those growing pains and take the stress out of running your business.

1. Using data to drive valuable business change

Data is what helps you outpace the competition and retain and attract customers. Howell Jones Solicitors is one company looking to make the most of its data by harnessing the tools within Power BI. The ability to access real-time insights enables them to maximise billable time.

Best of all, it empowers more efficient decision-making, all while staying compliant with regulations.

With Power BI you get access to the latest innovations in AI. It no longer requires hours and hours of an employee combing through data. AI will ingest and transform this data quickly – meaning that employees now have more time to action those insights instead of finding them.

But the great thing about these features is that they require no coding skills, thus enabling every Power BI user in your company to discover actionable insights in data, producing better business outcomes.

“People equipped with knowledge and insight can make faster decisions with the utmost confidence in the data they have based them upon. They can plan for busy times, and report with insight at their fingertips. They can make forward-looking decisions that grow the business and deliver a distinct advantage.”

Chris Cato, Operations Director at Howell Jones Solicitors

2. Drive business growth with a modern workplace

83 percent of SMB’s are now using the cloud, and it’s a cost-effective way to scale your business and work flexibly.

Jellyfish, a multi-award-winning visual effects and animation studio recently made the shift. They previously used on-premise servers for storing and rendering data sets, but found that rendering in this way was computer-intensive and time-consuming.

In order to stay competitive, they would have to bid on jobs, knowing they’d have to purchase extra servers to complete the work. What’s even more stressful is while the computers were working away, the talented employees were waiting around for it to complete before they could start work again.

So, they shifted to the cloud. They used Microsoft Azure to augment their on-premise rendering farm with high-performance computing resources, which could scale with the workload while staying secure. Best of all – because most of the work was done off-premise, it meant their employees would gain back those precious hours and could get back to doing their creative work.

Thanks to the cloud, small and medium businesses have access to the same calibre of technology that their enterprise counterparts use. This removes the barriers that you’ll often face, enabling you to shift from a CapEx to an OpEx business model, and making it easier for you to drive industry transformation but with less stress.

3. Drive employee satisfaction

What do these tools have in common? They’re designed to make work easier for employees, lowering stress and giving them back time to do what they love – whether it’s spend more time with customers, or being creative and driving insights.

Tools like Power BI enable you to gather insight from a broader cross-section of people, thanks to the fact that it requires no development skills to use. By training your teams to access data though the Power BI dashboards and reports, you will provide them with the confidence and skills they need to deliver new insights and become a more valuable member of the team.

Because these insights can be accessed at the touch of the finger, employees are much more productive. Power BI and other Microsoft 365 tools and apps can be used across devices, meaning it’s easy for your employees to collaboratively no matter where they are.

And tools like Azure make it easy and cost-effective for SMB’s to scale with their business, while giving them Enterprise-calibre tools.

Using your data and analytics, think about your current KPIs and business values. Figure out how you can use these insights to make a real positive difference to your business and don’t let stress take over from what you love.

[msce_cta layout=”image_center” align=”center” linktype=”blue” imageurl=”http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-gb/industry/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2017/12/Efficient-growth-e1551173372562.jpg” linkurl=”http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-gb/business/do-more/efficient-growth/” linkscreenreadertext=”Create more room for growth” linktext=”Create more room for growth” imageid=”8236″ ][/msce_cta]

The post Three ways to take the stress out of business growth appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Going through change as an organisation can be a daunting process. Even more so if you’re in healthcare and patients depend on a smooth journey through the system.

65 million people depend on the NHS. A million patients are seen every 36 hours. It employs over 1.5 million people. Any change should be done carefully and always with the patient at heart.

Here are six steps to consider when you’re changing to ensure success.

1. Build a case for change

At 70 years old, it’s important to ensure the NHS leverages digital transformation and the positive changes it can bring for healthcare staff and the patient experience.

New technology can bring great benefits to healthcare. AI is being used to find tumours in MRIs faster and more accurately. HoloLens is helping aid surgery. Big data is helping provide personalised care.

In order to do this successfully, you need to go back to basics and ensure you have the foundation to match.

Tip: Think about what your goals are and how you can leverage technology to help.

Better tools are needed for information sharing, coordination, flexibility, and empowering your workforce. After all – anything that ensures employees spend more time providing care and doing what they do best is something worth changing for.

At the South London and Maudsley Trust (SLaM), they switched to Office 365 to help open communication. This makes it easier for different teams to coordinate care and quickly exchange information. Thus providing better patient care.

“One of the most exciting things we’ve done is adopting Office 365 across the trust,” says Stephen Docherty, CIO NHS – SLaM and Chair of London CIO Council. “In particular, Microsoft Teams has improved the flow of information and decision making, and brought people from disparate teams and sites into one collaborative group.”

SLaM use Power BI and Teams to track bed capacity, saving the Trust a lot of money. They also use Power BI to expand services and improve outcomes. Communication is easy thanks to the tools in Teams.

“Because the platform is so easy and intuitive, we find a lot more collaboration and information sharing taking place,” says Docherty. “This translates to giving clinicians the right information and the right tools, enabling them to spend more time with patients.”

2. Create a shared vision

A vision is where you aspire to be. It’s your organisation’s purpose. The drive that inspires you to get out of bed everyday and go into work.

Tip: Start by looking at where you are currently – warts and all. Then develop your vision based on the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses. Encourage staff to take part in the process. See where they think they are and where they aspire to be. Create a strategy out of this vision, communicate regularly to ensure everyone is brought along the journey, and listen to feedback.

According to the CPID Job Quality Index, about three in four workers feel like they do useful work. 48 percent believe their work benefits society and, as a result, they’re highly motivated by the core purpose of the organisation.[1]

A shared vision that inspires everyone will create a sense of purpose. This purpose will drive people along that journey successfully. Celebrating when goals are met will help motivation levels and bring everyone together as a team.

3. Empower employees with the right tech

According to the WEF, the biggest barrier facing adoption of new technologies is the lack of understanding the opportunities. [2]

Tip: The way to ensure adoption is to take a human-centric approach. How will this technology help empower your staff to provide the best level of care?

At Greater Manchester Mental Health, 6,000 staff deliver mental health services across 100 locations. In order to improve productivity and take back time, they switched to Surface devices and Windows 10.

“Our consultants share machines and could be switching between user profiles up to ten times a day which accumulated to hundreds of wasted hours,” says CIO Andre de Araujo. “Now, it’s much easier for staff to work on the go and have everything they need close to hand securely. It’s sped up the efficiency and accuracy of decision making so staff can see more patients.

“It’s not a case of trying to convince our users to adopt the change – people can see the benefits they bring. It gives me enormous satisfaction that our technology decisions are having a powerful effect on staff morale and productivity and benefiting our community with better quality clinical services.”

4. Lead by example

Now is not the time for ‘do as I say, not as I do’. You’ve created a shared vision. Then put the technology in to empower your team. But if you don’t actually follow or use it, what message do you think that sends?

Tip: The leadership team needs to live and breathe the shared vision and goals. You’re all in this together and you need to lead by example.

5. Be open and transparent

A huge part of change management is being open and transparent throughout the process.

Tip: By being transparent, everyone will understand their place in the business vision and how their individual roles contribute to that vision.

The CIPD survey respondents say that while 42 percent see managers seeking employee views – only 33 percent allow these views to influence decisions.[1]

Unfortunately, only 17 percent of people are satisfied with opportunities to express their views to senior management. By listening to feedback, acknowledging failure, celebrating wins, and adjusting your vision or goals to match, you’ll create a stronger, more empowered organisation.

You can use tools like Teams and Yammer to communicate, listen to feedback, have meetings, and work together no matter where you’re all based.

6. Continually reinforce the value of change

Make change the norm by reinforcing its importance. From the outset provide continuous online/in-person training and education of your vision and goals. Ensure there’s training on new tools and processes. Have specific employees champion these to show their legitimacy. They can also help encourage a culture of learning and improvement, as well. 70 percent of employees indicated that job-related training and development opportunities influenced their decision to stay at their job. It’s even more critical for millennials too, where the figure rises to 87 percent.[3]

Use data to track your organisation’s changes. Address weak points and recognise strengths. Create support systems and KPIs linked to your changes to ensure everyone is encouraged to use them. Above all, make sure everyone celebrates success. Employees are more likely to keep change going when they know it works and they’re rewarded for making it work.

Tip: Change can take a while to stick. Communicate openly and honestly, share knowledge and lead by example. This will ensure change is put in a positive light rather than something scary and foreboding.

A habit takes about 66 days to form, but once employees see the benefits of change that habit will be solidified.

Listen to how technology is helping successful change management

[msce_cta layout=”image_center” align=”center” linktype=”blue” imageurl=”http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-gb/industry/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2019/01/Healthcare.jpg” linkurl=”https://info.microsoft.com/UK-DIGTRNS-CNTNT-FY18-10Oct-27-CreatingaCultureofDigitalTransformation-MGC0001289_01Registration-ForminBody.html” linkscreenreadertext=”Creating a Culture of Digital Transformation” linktext=”Creating a Culture of Digital Transformation” imageid=”6652″ ][/msce_cta]

[1] https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/work/trends/uk-working-lives 

[2] http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2018/global-health-healthcare/

[3] https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/statistics-value-of-employee-training-and-development

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