Improving employee effectiveness is a multiplier across your entire business
Employees are the heart of any business. They’re the boots on the ground interacting with customers, suppliers, and partners every day, making them integral to evangelizing the brand. They see and understand business processes intimately, and they’re a vital asset no matter how much you automate or digitize.

The technology that manufacturers invest in should empower and benefit their staff, whether in the sales office, on the factory floor, or in the field. Manufacturers need to equip employees to achieve three main outcomes: improve worker visibility across production and customer engagement; enhance collaboration between locations and across teams; and build agility into everyday operations.

 
Visibility, collaboration, and agility
Empowering employees starts with improving their visibility across processes and teams. At a high level, improved visibility helps employees generate the insight needed for thought leadership. Tactically, employees can better serve customers and mitigate potential problems with a 360° view across sales, supply chain, and production processes. Employees with access to company-wide data and interactive visualizations are better equipped to do everything from answer customer questions to identify inefficiencies in the production process. Moreover, when employees from one functional area start to understand how different business processes intersect, they can speed up service delivery, capture more opportunities, and deepen their thought leadership.

Visibility and collaboration go hand in hand, empowering employees to contribute to all aspects of the business. For example, a field technician may provide valuable insights into the design of an asset, identifying an opportunity to reengineer a product to lower costs and improve performance. Another example of collaboration involves connecting employees: imagine the return on customer satisfaction when field service technicians collaborate with experts from across the world – remotely or through virtual and mixed reality – to quickly solve complex repairs. Employees get the opportunity to learn and work in different ways, adding value across the supply chain, sales, or production. Beyond the productivity benefits, collaboration helps manufacturers cross-train employees and develop talent faster.

The final piece of the puzzle is creating agility in your organization. There are many ways a company can promote agility, from supporting robust mobile technology to providing dynamic persona-switching within CRM and ERP. The latter strategy is especially innovative when it comes to transforming the way a manufacturer supports its employees. A technician could seamlessly switch between roles on a mobile-friendly platform, creating new leads to pursue or identifying competitors in an account. An inside sales rep could switch into a customer service role, instantly accessing support options, machine learning-assisted troubleshooting steps, and a rich customer profile to understand and address customer needs. This kind of cross-pollination throughout organizations eliminates inefficiencies by putting all the tools and knowledge employees need at their fingertips.

The easiest way to improve employee performance is by streamlining everyday tasks and complex projects through a single platform – Microsoft Dynamics 365 delivers on this
By unifying CRM and ERP capabilities seamlessly, Dynamics 365 empowers every employee to be a potential thought leader who can seamlessly switch personas within the software. No matter their role, employees can powerfully assist customers by handling a service request, tip off the sales team to a cross-sell opportunity, or share insight based on product performance and IoT-enabled supply chain data. By integrating with investments you’ve already made and scaling on-demand, Microsoft Dynamics 365 accelerates your digital transformation to ensure that every employee can generate maximum value. A digitally empowered workforce sets up your business to anticipate, adapt, and thrive given changing customer needs and new opportunities.

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The question isn’t “should you innovate?” it’s “what do you want to achieve by innovating?”
Though we often treat it as such, innovation isn’t a value on its own. True innovation means transforming your business to achieve a valuable outcome. In manufacturing, innovative thinking has led to significant developments such as connected factories and servitization—the strategy of selling services rather than discrete assets. Unsurprisingly, businesses that embrace these opportunities have an obvious competitive edge.
Every manufacturer has different questions to answer in order to identify what innovation means to them. Sometimes those questions are tactical, such as “will installing this new technology create a significant disruption to order fulfillment?” Sometimes they’re strategic, as in the case of “How do we expand our business model without weakening the core attributes that make us successful?” Whatever the answers, there are a few common factors every successful innovation strategy shares. First, enable a culture of innovation. Second, use data as a strategic asset to guide priorities and decision-making. Third, build the foundation for future business transformation into your core production processes through IoT and cloud-enabled analytics.

 
Successful innovation must be both strategic and tactical
The most fundamental factor is facilitating a culture of innovation. This doesn’t mean increasing the number of team-building exercises. It means connecting teams so delays or disruptions don’t spread throughout your entire supply chain and service force. Instead, employees have anywhere-anytime methods for communicating and resolving issues across and within teams, and are poised to contribute thought leadership beyond their role. It also requires establishing and maintaining personalized relationships with customers and viewing them as strategic partners in innovation.
Next, innovation must go hand in hand with a strategy for how to best use your data. We’ve reached a point where IT and operational systems are sufficiently mature enough to enable digitization end-to-end, enhancing sales, operations, and service through a common, scalable, and cloud-backed platform. In doing so, manufacturers are poised to use data strategically, shifting the way they manage processes from reactive to proactive. The outcome is consolidated, real-time, and mobile-friendly ways to generate insight for every aspect of a business, letting decision makers understand and adjust at the speed that’s right for them. No matter what objectives a manufacturer has, embedded intelligence and advanced analytics help to achieve them by processing more data and generating more business insight.
Finally, investing in a technology foundation now sets you up to embrace future advances. It’s never been easier to connect devices, factories, and resources all over the world thanks to the affordability of scalable cloud storage, analytics, and IoT sensors. These technologies enable manufacturers to capitalize today: delivering remote monitoring, self-healing capabilities, and predictive maintenance. Looking forward, these investments also serve as a basis for the innovative technology on the horizon. That could mean supporting collaboration through augmented or virtual reality connections between technicians and experts, or integrating smart materials and new engineering advances with existing analytics platforms to create more intelligent, adaptive, and efficient devices.

 
It becomes clear that achieving any of these business outcomes centers on weaving advanced technology seamlessly into how you do business
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is designed to help manufacturers find the answers they need in their innovation journey. This is the next generation of intelligent business applications that enable organizations to grow, evolve and transform. By unifying CRM and ERP capabilities seamlessly, Dynamics 365 empowers manufacturers to adapt and grow. It helps you engage customers, empower employees, optimize operations, and reinvent products and business models. Whether you’re just starting to retrofit with IoT or you have already digitized your operations, Dynamics 365 helps you accelerate your digital transformation to meet the changing needs of your customers and capture the new business opportunities of tomorrow.

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Service isn’t a cost of doing business, it’s a part of your business
As a manufacturer, there is constant pressure to do something better, faster, or cheaper. But how often do you get a chance to differentiate your business by shifting or expanding your business model?
Historically, disruptive forces such as industrialization have given manufacturers opportunities to adapt business in pursuit of new profits or increased margins. Today, the disruptive forces of physical and digital innovation have created the opportunity for servitization—the process of generating revenue from services instead of discrete products.

 
Why servitization now?
While the possibility of selling services has always existed, it is only now that it has become profitable. There are three fundamental factors driving this new opportunity. The first is the ability to connect devices at radically lower costs through IoT consumables and cloud infrastructure. The second is the scale and power of data ingestion, management, and analysis capabilities. The third is the market desire to purchase a service rather than own a product, enabling customers to mitigate high total cost of ownership and primary responsibility for servicing devices.
The key to servitization is the way IoT enables the creation of automatic, remote, and guided service options. Remote monitoring and self-healing minimize the number of technicians dispatched. Imagine the dramatic reduction in costs when more problems can be fixed without even scheduling a service visit. Preventative maintenance also prevents downtime and diminishes the need for costly break/fix, enhancing customer satisfaction and successful case resolution. When on-site service is required, optimized scheduling enables dispatch to send the right technician with the right resources to the job. Where additional support is needed, mobile technicians draw on machine learning-assisted troubleshooting and connect with experts back in office to increase first time fix rates.
Still, what makes servitization profitable is how it expands a manufacturer’s business model. The margin on discrete sales will always grow linearly—after all, you can’t sell half a device. By supporting value-added services around a device, manufacturers can increase the margins around each of those devices sold. On top of that, the servitization infrastructure that supports discrete sales also enables cross-sell of a la carte services, ranging from analytics and support to consultation and advising.

 
Accomplishing transformation with Microsoft Dynamics 365

By combining ERP and CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives technicians, service agents, and sales people complete visibility across customer assets and work history. Customer satisfaction will go up when service reps have the visibility to resolve cases quickly, suggest fast troubleshooting steps, and provide visibility with rich diagnostics. This not only builds loyalty through consistently personalized services but also better utilize resources and experts.
Dynamics 365 also enables you to schedule and equip technicians, providing insight not just into the device but the supply chain. With the appropriate platform to coordinate technicians in the field and the use of mobile applications to connect them with visualization and advanced analytics in the office, your service center can balance optimizing for cost and providing a consistent, high level of service to all customers.
Together, these capabilities enable manufacturers to differentiate themselves in a variety of ways for customers. Through additional asset services, managed services providing capabilities, and advisory or consulting services, manufacturers can focus on building a relationship with customers as a trusted advisor. The Microsoft vision for manufacturing services is not just as a profit center, but a generator of new business itself.

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Customers don’t just want a product; they want a relationship with manufacturers

Once upon a time, making and selling a good product was enough. Today, it takes more than a good product to stand out in a crowd. Customers have access to more research, and options, and expect the convenience of B2C customer engagement models. A whopping 86% of B2B buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. [1]

Richer engagement fundamentally differentiates businesses

Imagine this scenario: A new version of your best-selling industrial robot has just launched. A customer learns about the product through the channel of their choice—whether that is a company portal, online knowledge base, or community forum. Once the customer contacts you, your sales team is empowered by machine learning to quickly identify, customize, and quote the right product and service recommendations.

Everything you learn about the customer during this initial engagement becomes part of their customer profile, letting the sales teams seamlessly share and collaborate with both supply chain and service personnel. Successful tactics and engagements become part of a cross-referenced set of data from sales, logistics, service, and product usage to improve the next sales cycle.

This collaboration also provides a seamless transition from sales to fulfillment. The ability for any employee to access order details and account history ensures the customer feels supported throughout the process of sale and delivery.

Once the robot is installed, the customer has a tricky challenge, so they call for help. Regardless of whether they call the wrong department, or a rep who isn’t assigned to them, your service representative has access to all relevant customer information, including purchases, service requests, and asset performance. This deep visibility also includes a list of suggested, contextual fixes generated by machine learning and based on previously resolved, similar cases.  After relaying the suggested troubleshooting steps to their production team, the customer observes real-time updates on the robot’s working condition, productivity compared to other assets, and service history through a single interface.

Let’s say that although the suggested troubleshooting steps worked for most assets, the customer notices one of the robots is still at risk for downtime. You dispatch a technician to the customer with exactly the right parts and expertise to achieve a first-time fix. The customer is impressed at the speed and ease with which the issue was resolved, and experiences no disruption to uptime.

After a few months of receiving similar service requests from other customers, your engineering team analyzes patterns in usage and repair history, determining that updating the device’s design would decrease downtime and necessary service. This improvement in engineering is then passed to the customer in savings, as well as increased energy efficiency.

From sales to product design, you have the power as a manufacturer to engage with customers in a truly collaborative way. No matter what channel customers prefer to use and what level of service they need, be ready to win customers over through a relationship-focused model that positions your company as a responsive and proactive partner in their business.

Invest in customer engagement with Microsoft Dynamics 365

The future for manufacturers is all about understanding and managing both the product lifecycle and customer experience as part of a single end-to-end process. By connecting your factories to your customers, manufacturers can connect disparate and siloed functions into a single intelligent platform. The key is a system that allows you to build and adapt to individual customer profiles and empowers every possible point of contact across every channel. Microsoft Dynamics 365 combines ERP and CRM functionality with rich data visualizations and the ability to do just that. Dynamics 365 enables the consistent, personalized experiences that customers want.

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How can a manufacturer take advantage of new technology to solve the old challenges in operations?

Manufacturers are always looking to squeeze efficiency out of their operations. There’s a constant battle to minimize work stoppages, wasteful production techniques, and other profit drains. Too often that has taken the form of patchwork or piecemeal improvement, due not only to differences in maturity across operational technology but also potentially high costs. Now, the economics are right for smart manufacturers to make investments in low-cost IoT sensors and cloud-based predictive analytics to retrofit old facilities and enhance operations end-to-end.

The key to successfully transforming production management is a consistent approach that leverages technology to connect factories while providing predictive analytics and logistics capabilities across the supply chain and customer engagement. Rather than be hamstrung by a patchwork of different systems, manufacturers who choose a consolidated platform can dynamically evolve production in response to conditions on the ground, systematize and coordinate maintenance to expand service business, and deepen customer relationships.

Find a solution that attacks inefficiency by managing and integrating the right technology

Manufacturers have a basic need for timely and predictable production, but often underestimate the efficiency that could be gained through a better management platform. It starts with managing and visualizing real-time asset performance data, correlated with data from sales and across the supply chain. This data often reveals more efficient sourcing for parts or uncovers a costly, redundant step. Additional data sources and deeper analysis might uncover the possibility for a value-added service offering around a product to pass that visibility on to customers. The same data-driven approach helps manufacturers to understand how an underperforming or overperforming asset could affect cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Supporting expansion of service offerings isn’t just about supplementing products, but also expanding access to products or capabilities through the “as a service” model—also known as servitization. Capitalizing on this idea of servitization requires an approach that can systematize and coordinate service delivery, turning maintenance into a manageable and cost-effective process rather than an emergency. IoT-enabled devices can produce tremendous amounts of new data, but collecting data doesn’t immediately translate into insight. By integrating IoT with predictive analytics to sort through and identify patterns, a company can detect, troubleshoot, and resolve asset issues remotely, as well as gain a more granular understanding of performance. That shifts operations from a reactive to a proactive posture and helps to increase margins at scale.

Ultimately though, the greatest source of profit comes from deepening the relationship between customers and manufacturers and building trust through visibility and proactive engagement. That can mean alerting a customer to a delay, identifying a new lead based on a service visit, or recommending a new product to a returning customer. The infrastructure that supports better customer engagement also helps build a 360-degree view of customers, including their product performance, engagement history, and service records. With better visibility and internal collaboration, decision makers and service reps alike gain the ability to understand what is happening, why, and how to address it as a team.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365, a single platform connects each part of your business

Siloed project and process management adds conceptual overhead and prevents your business from being agile. Fast, cloud-delivered, and analytics-supported project and process management is necessary to position manufacturers for success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 ends the artificial separation of front and back office, providing a single unified service delivery, sales, and production management platform.

Backed by the most flexible and largest enterprise cloud, manufacturers have the capability to seamlessly scale and manage even the most complex workflows or projects. Extending the investment is easy with a common data service to assist integration, and additional capabilities or business applications can be optimized or deployed, using PowerApps from within Dynamics 365, to digitally improve manual or paper processes. No other company provides you with powerful capabilities and an interconnected set of technology like Microsoft, natively integrating your productivity and office tools into your combined CRM and ERP systems.

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When you lack deep visibility and insight into your supply chain, you leave money on the table

It turns out what you don’t know as a manufacturer can and will hurt you. For too long, manufacturers have settled for siloed and inconsistent information, as well as manual processes, to understand and manage their supply chain. Why? Because for a long time, these systems were good enough to keep production going.

But plenty of manufacturers don’t want to settle for good enough. IDC predicts that by 2019, 50% of manufacturing supply chains will have benefited from digital transformation, and the remainder will be held back by outdated business models or functional structures.[1] Smart manufacturers understand that supply chain transformation is necessary. They are connecting assets across their factories, gaining visibility into their supply chain, and acting on insights from increased visibility to address inefficiency, as well as increase customer satisfaction and margins.

The post Is your business ready to take supply chain management to the next level? appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This begins a new blog series for the manufacturing industry. Over the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting different benefits and aspects of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for manufacturers, centering on the value that Dynamics 365 can deliver as an end-to-end combination of CRM and ERP systems combined with next-generation business applications targeted at core industry capabilities.

The future of manufacturing will be defined by the quality of investments companies are making today

In the not too distant past, efforts in manufacturing to optimize productivity and increase customer satisfaction were viewed as separate endeavors. Today, the convergence of physical and digital trends is disrupting these kinds of assumptions.

Manufacturers today care about integrated digital and physical systems, improved visibility, increased efficiency, additional flexibility, and lower costs. They want to connect equipment and factories, leveraging data from the factory floor to the customer call center to improve every aspect of their operations.

But this is just the beginning. Digitization is fundamentally changing the way manufacturers do business, enabling a customer-centric approach while optimizing operations. Digitally empowered manufacturers engage customers throughout the product lifecycle from design to field service. They sell value-add services to complement the product sales, opening new revenue streams and strengthening their customer relationships. And they are revolutionizing delivery of these differentiated services, using technology like augmented reality to combine the eyes of a technician in the field with the insights of an expert back at headquarters.

Capitalizing on these trends isn’t limited to large, well-resourced manufacturers. Across all kinds of manufacturing operations, the opportunity to digitize and transform your business has never been more accessible.

Imagine your business transformed

The Microsoft vision for supporting digital manufacturing embraces the seismic shifts in the industry today. We’ve created solutions that provide a unified and flexible approach across front office and production floor processes. Our approach enables transformation in six ways:

Optimize supply chain operations through better visibility and collaboration. By collecting, integrating, and visualizing global supply chain data worldwide, manufacturers gain better visibility into their operations from production to sales. For example, one of the world’s largest industrial automation firms found that by automating the collection and analysis of data from remote installations across the petroleum supply chain, they strengthened their competitive advantage with a faster time to market. Improved access to supply chain data is also the basis for better collaboration across production, supply, service, and sales. 

Streamline the management of assets, products, and production. With a consolidated view that unifies process oversight and provides real-time insight, manufacturers can institutionalize efficiency gains and use connected devices to monitor and resolve issues remotely. One leading manufacturer of industrial robots enabled 24-hour continuous uptime using this approach. The additional insights into production and customer usage also allow manufacturers to provide value-added services like ongoing monitoring and proactive support.

Engage customers in powerful new ways. To deliver personalized and contextual engagement across any channel, manufacturers must provide customers with more visibility and build trust through fast and convenient responses. This engagement approach is built on a combination of predictive analytics, the ability  to deliver value-added services at scale, and guided or self-directed service that’s relevant to customer needs. With the implementation of a connected platform for sales through service, a leading home technology manufacturer not only solved potential problems remotely before customers ever felt the impact, but provided custom differentiated offerings based on unique customer usage and purchasing history.

Transform service centers into profit centers. Thanks to the ever-decreasing cost of IoT sensors, sophisticated mobile devices, and cloud-based data aggregation, manufacturers can improve service quality and margins by offering remote monitoring and proactive maintenance services that supplement break/fix support. By more intelligently coordinating technicians equipped with mobile and virtual reality tools, companies can leverage existing expertise and minimize costly engagements. A leading tire service and manufacturing company found that by combining customer records, technician availability, and back-end inventory in a single mobile-friendly system, it could provide a seamless user experience as well as improve its service delivery.

Accelerate innovation for a competitive edge. The best way for manufacturers to pursue innovation is to understand their business more deeply, from customer usage through supply chain sourcing and production. With IoT-enabled parts, assets, and products, manufacturers can gain the insights needed to innovate. Data from connected products and equipment can empower developers, engineers, and technicians to collaborate. For example, teams can identify overengineered or faulty components and track product usage in the field to improve future designs. When a leading information and communication technology company implemented remote monitoring, they decreased time to production as well as accelerated the cycle of innovation using a data-driven approach.

Empower employees to work more effectively. When a company can provide 360-degree views of customer assets and work order history, technicians are empowered by a better understanding of not only the job in front of them, but of other similar and successful field service engagements. This goes hand in hand with empowering service agents to provide instant feedback, using machine learning to find and follow similar cases for successful troubleshooting, and scheduling a visit or evaluation. A leading auto manufacturer wanted to save money by unifying their siloed customer service and customer engagement while providing employees with better tools to understand customer sentiment. To accomplish this, it implemented a system to connect production and project management with their customer relationship management systems in order to deliver personalized service and recommendations to their customers.

Introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365

For manufacturers, Microsoft Dynamics 365 ends the artificial divide between CRM and ERP systems and supplements necessary capabilities with rich analytics, embedded intelligence, and the convenience people expect from consumer apps on their phone or tablet. Dynamics 365 unites the front office and the back office with a single end-to-end system for managing every aspect of your business, at the pace and scale that’s right for you. Digital transformation isn’t accomplished overnight and leveraging current investments is a key component of any successful approach. With Microsoft, you can optimize across all your processes while laying the foundation for connecting advanced technology in the future.

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Today is a great day for manufacturers. They have more comprehensive offerings available to them than ever before. Connectivity options enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing adoption and the emergence of powerful business applications allow manufacturers to be closer to the marketplace and build better products more effectively than ever before. Sometimes, however, faster, better, and cheaper is simply not enough. Manufacturers need to delight their customers while satisfying the needs of their internal employees and business partners. They need more…and Microsoft Dynamics AX has arrived to help achieve that goal.

On Thursday November 19, 2015 Microsoft announced the next release of Microsoft Dynamics AX and its availability in the first quarter of CY2016. While this might seem like a generic announcement of a product, in fact, it’s truly a momentous announcement reflecting years of effort by the Microsoft R&D team to build a transformative ERP solution that addresses the needs of customers and Microsoft partners. This next release of Dynamics AX is a significant first step in Microsoft’s redefinition of the ERP space for manufacturers. No longer will your ability to respond to customer requirements and market changes be limited by your software solution. Au contraire mon ami: you’ll now have a modern application built and architected on Azure that brings the speed, scale, and flexibility of the Microsoft cloud to life for manufacturers.

For businesses the importance of speed, connectivity, business insight, and operating intelligently cannot be overemphasized, but for manufacturers there are additional needs for more connected operations.  Whether they need to accelerate new product introductions, agilely execute on the shop floor, effectively and intelligently fulfill orders, or other traditional needs as detailed in the Microsoft Dynamics AX Factsheet, manufacturers using Microsoft Dynamic AX will have more options and power than ever before…for example here’s a walk-through on how to Simplify Production Floor Management.

It all starts with having a system that empowers users to work the way they want to work. As Mike Ehrenberg explains in his blog, there’s an expectation that for a tool to be effective it must be able to address “the right scenarios with the right experiences on the device of the user’s choice.” When user expectations are fulfilled by a solution like this, improvements happen across the board. We see visibility throughout the organization, business productivity and process optimization become the norm, and key insights are gained through enhanced analytics. With Microsoft Dynamics AX manufacturers will prosper.

Microsoft Dynamics AX is an enabler to the next generation of businesses as outlined by Christian Pedersen. We’ve validated our research with customers and partners to get direct feedback into our R&D process. When manufacturing customers said we want more powerful analytical capabilities and recommendations…we listened. You now have the ability to analyze your supply chain and make predictive determinations to ensure you have the right product, in the right quantity, arriving in the right place at the right time. This is not just the power to view or have access to data, but now having the ability to take this information and turn it into action.

It’s real…it’s now…and it’s enabled by a Microsoft solution built on Dynamics AX and the cloud.

This is definitely an exciting time. Manufacturers are now right smack in the middle of the convergence of many technologies like IoT, Business and Operational Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, and advanced production capabilities. Now manufacturers have an ERP solution in Microsoft Dynamics AX that can take advantage of these technologies to make them industry leaders.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX…this next generation in business solutions is going to be fun!

The post The Next Generation Manufacturer appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Delight the customer and you have a customer for life: this mantra for sales and marketers is a recipe for success in today’s business environment. No longer limited to sales and marketing, it is now even more predicated on a company’s ability to deliver highly differentiated products, services, and exceptional experiences to the customer during the buying journey.

The term “Customer Delight” is an interesting concept. For purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that it’s the process of totally blowing away a customer’s expectations by giving them more than they could have ever hoped for and in the process making the customer say “WOW”.

How does a manufacturer or distributor make a customer say “WOW”? Well…it’s not a single thing. It’s actually doing a lot of little things better than the competition. It can be through providing a superior product quality or simply a better return policy. Maybe it’s a quicker turn-around time on deliveries or if design-on-the-fly capabilities are important, having a way to modify production to meet special needs may win customers. It can even be a simply offering customers a one-stop shop for everything they might need related to the core items being offered including a service offering for installations on the products. The combination of these activities and deliverables to the customers add up and gradually build a value proposition separating you from the competition.

All too often though, companies excel at only one or two of these areas…what originally seem like good individual ideas end up being siloed activities that don’t work together cohesively. Somewhere along the line the customer is let down and inevitably doesn’t have a good experience. In a competitive marketplace you can’t afford to have too many of these low value business interactions.

To resolve this challenge businesses need to make customer delight a core part of their value statement and must build a strategic approach to ensuring it happens.

To resolve this challenge businesses need to make customer delight a core part of their value statement and must build a strategic approach to ensuring it happens. Businesses need to ensure that processes work together in a connected and streamlined approach that builds value throughout the customer interaction. They need a solution that connects each of these business functions together…a solution that follows the customer journey from Marketing to Sales and through Service.

We at Microsoft and our entire Microsoft Partner Ecosystem are innovators, problem solvers, and great tool builders. When we see problems like this, we build solutions. In November 2014 we announced our work on the Industry Templates for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 release. These industry templates leverage xRM and include data models, key business processes, industry specific business rules, automated workflows, and even sample data for the specific industry related scenarios.

One of the key industry templates we’ve provided for Manufacturers and Distributors is the Connected Marketing, Sales and Service Template for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

This template provides a blueprint for organizations to maximize effectiveness by engaging the marketing, sales, and service departments in a single solution environment. It’s ideal for manufacturers and distributors or any organization with separate marketing, sales, and service departments. Imagine a scenario where the marketing department sees a sudden uptick in social interest in an item, they are able to proactively analyze the market opportunity and then define and execute on a new campaign. The sales department is then able to monitor this new campaign, manage the new pipeline and close more deals faster. Finally, customer service is able to proactively monitor, assign, and then escalate cases to ensure world-class service.

Included in the template are predefined dashboards, demo data, and process flows for the following roles:

• Marketing Account Manager and New Business Development Manager
• Area /Territory Sales Manager and Sales Representative
• Customer Service Manager and Customer Service Representative

The scenarios that we’ve leveraged within this template include:

• Campaign Management Process
• Consumer Products Sales Process
• Design Win Process
• Proactive Service Process
• Case Resolution Process

What do these templates mean to businesses? It means that you no longer have to customize your CRM solution to match up with industry specific business processes. Now you’ll have functionality that matches standard industry requirements with little need for lengthy implementation and business process analysis efforts. You now have standardized industry best processes in place within your systems ad a roadmap to success.

We are working on other scenarios as well that will be released in Phase 2 of this effort. One of the key areas that I’m excited about personally is how we incorporate the Internet of Things (IoT) into this connected business scenario. Imagine an environment where sensors in customer products are communicating with your own systems telling you information about how the customer is actually using the product or identifying potential service opportunities in advance of a breakdown. Now consider the value you can build if you could take information being shared through digital channels and digital devices and make decisions and even adapt business operations based off this digital interaction and listening. This is a level of connecting that has been previously unachievable…but as they say…the times, they are a changing.

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