Enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms were designed to help integrate the fragmented processes that comprise the operation of a large enterprise. But the way we do business keeps fundamentally changing. New business models disrupt the way companies sell products and services, blurring industry lines and transforming customer experiences.

Business complexity continues to intensify, and the rise of data as a driver of business—plus the attendant proliferation of data streams—means reaping the full promise of comprehensive ERP platforms can still be elusive.

In fact, according to a Gartner® Research report, “by 2027, less than 30% of customers who adopted new solutions from ERP platform mega-vendors will have proven their original adoption business case.”¹

The arrival of generative AI brings hope of renewed promise. AI is elevating performance and creating advantages for those who understand how to apply it to data-centric systems like ERP platforms. By 2027, according to the same Gartner report, at least 50 percent of ERP systems with AI-enabled features will be enabled through generative AI capabilities.¹

People often think of generative AI as a tool to automate routine tasks, but its capabilities are so much broader. Improved decision-making is an area where AI becomes a valuable tool. In fact, a report from the market research firm IDC found that, by mid-2024, 30% of global organizations will take advantage of human-like interfaces in their enterprise applications to gain more insights quickly, improving decision velocity.²

While AI can inform and enhance any number of operations across an enterprise, it’s worth looking at some specific processes in detail to see how much AI can elevate ERP solutions. Learn more about current trends in ERP platform modernization in the age of generative AI in this webinar.

How AI creates a better plan-to-produce process

Most manufacturing firms implement a plan for how they will schedule production runs to meet materials capacity, deliver quality products on time, and maintain cost-effectiveness.

Sometimes, though, this plan-to-produce process becomes an accretion of good ideas at the time, a fragmented assemblage of tools and strategies trying to work together to paint the big picture of what’s happening on the production floor. This can lead to quality control issues, and manpower and equipment shortages that fail to meet production surges, or inaccurate forecasts that waste resources or leave customers high and dry—among other issues.

Generative AI integrated with a robust ERP system can aggregate data from across an enterprise—even data residing in multiple clouds—in real time, so managers have a clear picture of the state of play at any given moment, allowing them to reduce lead times necessary to plan or alter production runs.

The complicated interdependence of tasks on a manufacturing floor—for example, Part A must be installed before Part B can be attached—is a perfect puzzle for AI to help solve. The predictive analytics capacity of generative AI allows it to better forecast demand and synch production with supplies, and then optimize timing to match resource availability with manpower. AI can also forecast and build scenarios for supply chain disruption or changes in demand.

Whether a manufacturer needs to increase production volume to meet increasing demand or build whole new facilities, AI excels at building scalable networks, finding efficiencies, and reducing costly interventions.

Learn more about how Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and other applications optimize the plan-to-produce process.

Optimizing the procure-to-pay process

Another process most large organizations seek to optimize is the integration of procurement with accounts payable. When you need to spend the money, it’s good to know that you have the money. IDC reports that, by mid-2025, 70% of global businesses will use embedded financing to collect and make payments.²

More than most industries, healthcare organizations must reckon with a complex field of myriad payers, purchasers, and suppliers. Healthcare organizations face layers of challenging regulatory compliance and the need to control ever-rising costs. Many organizations in this field still rely on antiquated, paper-based invoicing and payables.

Fragmented processes and siloed data make regulatory issues more fraught, while also increasing attack surfaces to create security risks. AI can remove complexities by integrating processes in one ERP platform, helping to reduce vulnerabilities. By mapping operations to standards, AI supports compliance efforts, efficiently creating the audit trails and tedious reports that often take staff hours to produce.

AI streamlines procurement, reducing the potential for human error present when ordering supplies and equipment from a diverse range of providers. It tracks expenses to help control costs, providing easily accessible price information about competing products and services so the organization can continually find cost efficiencies.

An ERP solution enhanced with AI allows planners to automate the maintenance of inventory with both real-time and predictive information, reducing the risk of stockouts or overstock situations and more effectively communicating with suppliers.

Quicker quote-to-cash with personalization and automation

AI integrates and improves the sales, finance, and supply elements of an ERP platform by increasing automation in negotiations, contract lifecycles, production, order management, billing, and delivery. For businesses with retail components, making the quote-to-cash cycle faster and more accurate creates efficiencies—which can help keep customers happier.

Automating price and quote information speeds up the resolution of even highly complex deals. The same is true once a quote is accepted—an accurate, automatically generated proposal follows immediately. AI-generated purchase orders and invoices free sellers to spend more time interacting with customers and accounting teams to focus on tasks that increase the organization’s productivity.

AI’s predictive analytics ensure on-time delivery of products but also allow firms to quickly identify current and future trends and make data-driven decisions about ordering and pricing. Automating invoicing tracks payments accurately and creates a real-time picture of cash flow. AI can continually improve cash flow forecasts by comparing projections with results and adjusting from the outcomes over time. And analytics enabled by AI offer suggestions for improving sales performance and strategic decisions.

Learn more about how Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance optimizes the quote-to-cash and other retail business processes.

Get more from your business data with AI-enabled ERP processes

Across the organization, optimizing finance and supply chains can create a connected enterprise that allows enterprises to infuse AI, automation, and analytics into ERP processes. Today, companies can confidently move to the cloud with AI-powered ERP solutions, modernize business processes, and unlock the agility needed to lead the way in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. 

A recent Forrester Research study interviewed IT leaders and professionals who had experience using Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP software.³ Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that has 5,000 employees and generates USD1 billion in annual revenue. Forrester found that, over a three-year period, the value added to the composite included:

• USD1.2 million in increased profitability from real-time visibility and enhanced decision-making.
• USD8.9 million in increased productivity from unified data access, streamlined processes, automated workflows, and other gained efficiencies.
• USD3.9 million in reduced infrastructure and IT operations spend from cloud migration.
• USD8.9 million in productivity improvements in finance/accounting, supply chain/logistics, and other personnel.

The study estimated a net present value of USD8.1 million and an ROI of 106%, as well as additional benefits like an improved cybersecurity posture and enhanced employee experiences. The composite organization would pay back its investment in Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP software in 17 months.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP software

Learn more about the total economic impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP software

Read the report

AI-enabled ERP platforms allow you to protect, connect, and get more from your business data while gaining security. With the right ERP solution, you can scale globally to drive business expansion and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) while ensuring regulatory compliance, supercharging productivity, and realizing the business impacts of generative AI even faster.

Sources

¹ Predicts 2024: ERP Evolves Planning With Automation and AI, Denis Torii, Gartner Research, April 5, 2024

² IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Intelligent ERP 2024 Predictions, doc #US51300923, October 2023

³ The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP, Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Dynamics 365 ERP, a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study commissioned By Microsoft, April 2024

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Transforming ERP, and the speed of business, with generative AI appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is about knowing today the best way to approach tomorrow. It’s about collecting accurate snapshots of various business functions at any point in time, so leaders can make clear, careful decisions that poise the organization to thrive in the future.    

ERP sprang from systems designed to help manufacturers track inventory and raw material procurement. As businesses have become more complex and computing more ubiquitous, ERP platforms have grown into aggregated tech stacks or suites with vertical extensions that track data from supply chain, logistics, asset management, HR, finance, and virtually every aspect of the business. But adding all those facets—and their attendant data streams—to the picture can clutter the frame, hampering the agility of an ERP platform. 

Generative AI helps restore clarity. One of the animating features of AI lies in its ability to process data that lives outside the ERP—all the data an organization can access, in fact—to output efficient, error-free information and insights. AI-enabled ERP systems increase business intelligence by aggregating comprehensive data sets, even data stored in multiple clouds, in seconds, then delivering information from them securely, wherever and whenever they may be needed.  

Today we’ll examine a few of the many ways AI elevates ERP functionality. 

Transform your business

Perform better with AI-powered ERP.

View the infographic

AI tailored to modern business needs

ERPs began as ways to plan material flow to ensure smooth manufacturing runs. Today’s supply chains remain as vulnerable as ever to price fluctuations, political turmoil, or natural disasters. In many firms, buyers and procurement teams must handle fluctuations and change response in large volumes of purchase orders involving quantities and delivery dates. They frequently have to examine these orders individually and assess risk to plans and downstream processes. 

Now, ERPs can use AI to quickly assess and rank high- and low-impact changes, allowing teams to rapidly take action to address risk. AI-enabled ERPs like Microsoft Dynamics 365 allow users to handle purchase order changes at scale and quickly communicate with internal and external stakeholders.  

Using natural language, an AI-assistant can bring relevant information into communications apps, keeping all parties apprised of, say, unexpected interruptions in supply due to extreme climate events or local market economics—and able to collaborate to find a rapid solution.  

Planners can proactively stress-test supply chains by simply prompting the AI Assistant with “what-if?” scenarios. Risk managers might ask, “If shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf is interrupted, what are our next fastest supply routes for [material] from [country]?” Empowered with AI’s ability to reason over large volumes of data, make connections, and then deliver recommendations in clear natural language, the right ERP system could help provide alternatives for planners to anticipate looming issues and downgrade risk. 

Learn more about Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

AI enables better project management 

Supply chain may be where ERPs were born, but we’ve come a long way. ERPs now contribute to the run of business across the organization—and AI can make each of these more powerful.  

Whether you call them project managers or not, every organization has people whose job it is to manage projects. The chief obstacles for project managers typically involve completing projects on time and on budget. An AI-enabled ERP can cut the time project managers spend compiling status reports, planning tasks, and running risk assessments.  

Take Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365 Project Operations, for instance. With Copilot, creating new project plans—a task that used to take managers hours to research and write—now takes minutes. Managers can type in a simple description of the project, details of the timeline, budget, and staff availability. Then, Copilot generates a plan. Managers can fine-tune as necessary and launch the project. Along the way, Copilot automatically produces real-time status reports in minutes, identifies risks, and suggests mitigation plans—all of which is updated and adjusted on a continuous basis as the project progresses and new data becomes available. 

Learn more about Copilot for Dynamics 365 for Project Operations.

Follow the money: AI streamlines financial processes  

Timely payments, healthy cash flow, accurate credit information, successful collections—all of these functions are important for competitive vigor. All are part of a robust ERP, and all can be optimized by AI.  

At the top of the organization, real-time, comprehensive snapshots of the company’s financial positions enable leadership agility. But at an ongoing, operational level, AI can improve financial assessments for every department as well. By accessing data streams from across the organization—supply chain, HR, sales, accounts payable, service—AI provides financial planners with the ability to make decisions about budgets, operations planning, cash flow forecasting, or workforce provisioning based on more accurate forecasts and outcomes.  

AI can help planners collaboratively align budgets with business strategy and engage predictive analytics to sharpen forecasts. Anywhere within an ERP enhanced visibility is an advantage, AI provides it—and more visibility enables greater agility. AI can, for instance, mine processes to help optimize operations and find anomalies the human eye might fail to catch.  

An AI-enabled ERP system also elevates the business by closing talent gaps across the organization.  

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP.

The future of smarter: Finding new workflows with generative AI  

These are just a few of the ways AI eases current workflows. The untapped strength of AI in an ERP lies in companies finding new workflows enabled by AI that add value—like predictive maintenance algorithms for machines on a factory floor, or recommendation engines to find new suppliers or partners, or modules that aid in new product design enhanced by customer feedback. 

The future rarely looks simpler than the past. When faced with increasing complexity, a common human adaptation is to compartmentalize, pack information into silos that we can shuffle around in our minds. In a business context, ERP platforms were conceived to integrate those silos with software, so people can manage the individual streams of information the way a conductor brings the pieces of a symphony together, each instrument at the right pitch and volume, in the right time.   

Generative AI helps us to do just that, collecting all the potential inputs and presenting them in a relationship to each other. This frees planners to focus on the big picture and how it all comes together, so we can decide which elements to adjust and where it all goes next.   

Learn more about Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365.

Using generative AI responsibly is critical to the continued acceptance of the technology and the maximizing of its potential. Microsoft has recently released its Responsible AI Transparency Report for 2024. This report details the criteria for how we build applications responsibly, decide when to release generative applications, support our customer in building responsibly, and learn, grow, and evolve our generative AI offerings.   

The post Generative AI in ERP means more accurate planning across the organization   appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In recent years, disruptions like COVID-19, geopolitical conflict, and natural disasters have challenged organizations to improve their supply chain resilience. A Microsoft-sponsored Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey from October 2022 indicates that 94 percent of respondents view supply chain operations as a higher priority than they did three years ago. Moreover, 97 percent agree that a resilient supply chain positively affects a company’s bottom line.¹ However, many organizations struggle to achieve this resilience due to technological challenges and a shortage of qualified talent. AI and related emerging technologies are helping businesses overcome these challenges by empowering teams with solutions that amplify and extend current capabilities. With this in mind, we’re excited to attend Hannover Messe from April 17 to 21. Join us at Hannover Messe, where we’ll showcase the latest updates as part of release wave 1 through three cutting-edge demos highlighting the power of the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform in unlocking supply chain resilience.

Planning to attend? Join Microsoft, Accenture, and Avanade at Supply Chain Reimagined to learn how your team can use the power of copilot assistance with AI to proactively mitigate disruptions and improve productivity.

Supply Chain Reimagined at Hannover Messe

Wednesday, April 19, 10:00 AM–12:00 PM CEST at Microsoft Stand, Hall 17, G06

Register for the session

AI-powered risk mitigation

Seventy-one percent of companies experienced supply chain disruptions in recent years, causing many to rethink their supply chain technology.¹ At Hannover Messe, attendees will see how the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform enables manufacturing organizations to use AI copilots to reduce risk across complex supply chains. For example, supplier networks can benefit from a global monitoring solution that automatically detects and reports events that might potentially disrupt your suppliers. By pairing around-the-clock, end-to-end visibility with AI-based recommendations and generative AI communications, collaboration is more kinetic, automated, and seamless––providing organizations with the advantage they need to more effectively mitigate risk and make better, faster decisions.

The open platform of Microsoft Supply Chain Center integrates with existing supply chain systems, allowing organizations to meet their unique needs without replacing current systems. At the event, we will share how manufacturers can use Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center to proactively flag external issues such as weather, financials, and geography that may impact key supply chain processes. Predictive insights then surface affected orders across materials, inventory, carriers, distribution networks, and more. Supply chain planners can then automatically draft an email generated by Dynamics 365 Copilot to alert impacted partners and mitigate potential disruptions before they happen.

As you saw in the overview, customers like Kraft Heinz could see the value in seamless supplier collaboration––especially before disruptions happen. With a massive global footprint and complex operations, supply chain leaders need agility and visibility across countless scenarios.

Optimize fulfillment with warehouse automation

Automation can drive improvements for manufacturers beyond factory walls. At Microsoft, we’re collaborating with Toyota Material Handling Europe (TMHE) to bring warehouse automation to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Autonomous guided vehicles like those from TMHE can perform repetitive tasks quickly and accurately. In combination with their integrated warehouse execution software (WES) T-ONE, Toyota’s simplicity and flexibility in design flows and better integration of system components are leading to increased efficiency and productivity. Businesses like those managing aftermarket parts for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can meet customer demands faster and with fewer errors by automating processes such as picking. Moreover, robotics technology can help manage inventory levels, resulting in better stock control and reduced carrying costs.

Microsoft empowers manufacturers to build agile distribution processes by rapidly deploying warehouses with preconfigured equipment. The Warehouse Management mobile app (WMA) for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can be installed on almost any mobile device (Windows and Android), with support for iOS devices now available as part of the latest product update. This allows manufacturers to scale operations quickly without investing in new equipment.

With improved flexibility, manufacturers are positioned to support demand spikes, optimize picking through wave or batch processing, maximize order line shipments, and increase inventory turns––all while reducing labor costs. At Hannover Messe, you can get up close and personal with Toyota’s newest automated guided vehicles and also see a real-life example of a warehouse-in-a-box for quickly onboarding new facilities in remote locations.

Rapid enterprise standardization

When BPW Aftermarket Group (BPW AMG) needed to upgrade seven outdated enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, it chose Dynamics 365 as its cutting-edge cloud solution. With an impressive 90 percent standard fit, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management covered sales order management, procurement, and logistics. Despite an ambitious timeline, BPW AMG successfully launched the new system in under 11 months, a feat many thought impossible. Today, the system provides enterprise standardization, enhanced transparency, and virtually error-free automated workflows, replacing obsolete and error-prone manual processes.

Learn more about how BPW Aftermarket Group drives enterprise standardization with Dynamics 365.

Keep customer promises with improved asset availability

Companies that invest in digital transformation can reduce asset downtime by up to 50 percent.² At Hannover Messe, attendees will learn how innovative manufacturers like Northvolt are maximizing asset uptime to meet ever-changing customer demands on time while enhancing employee experience through AI, mixed reality, and low-code tools. By collaborating with Microsoft, Northvolt is jointly developing innovative solutions using Microsoft Dynamics 365, HoloLens 2, and Power Apps, all integrated with next-generation AI capabilities, to establish a seamlessly connected factory for the future.

For example, imagine a scenario where a field service technician arrives at a customer’s site to repair a complex piece of machinery or a sophisticated Northvolt battery pack. The technician may have limited knowledge about the equipment and its underlying systems, making diagnosing and resolving issues efficiently difficult. However, the technician can apply AI capabilities to quickly identify potential problem areas by analyzing images uploaded with the recently released Asset Management mobile app for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. With this information, technicians can focus on resolving the root cause of the problem rather than just fixing the symptoms, leading to faster repairs and improved first time fix rates.

Come try it for yourself! Join us at the booth to don a HoloLens and put yourself in the shoes of a maintenance technician using mixed reality and AI. You can also sign up online for a free trial.

Next steps

Through these three demos, attendees will gain insights into the transformative capabilities of the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, enabling them to build resilient, efficient, and future-ready supply chains for their organizations.

Learn more about Microsoft at Hannover Messe 2023. Additionally, we invite you to join us alongside Accenture and Avanade as we look inside the latest trends and best practices shaping the supply chains of today and tomorrow. You’ll hear from experts and peers how to transform your supply chains to be agile, connected, and sustainable. Details and registration link are below.

Register: Supply Chain Reimagined – Take control of your supply chain
Date: Wednesday, April 19, 10:00 AM–12:00 PM CEST
Location: Microsoft Stand, Hall 17, G06

Attend to:

• Experience Dynamics 365 Copilot and learn to unlock productivity improvements
• Hear essential insights from industry leaders
• Join the Q&A chat in-person

End notes

¹Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 2022. A Resilient Supply Chain Built for Competitive Advantage.

²McKinsey & Company. Capturing the true value of Industry 4.0.

The post Microsoft Supply Chain Platform at Hannover Messe 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Retail executives have long understood the critical role that supply chain management plays in their organization’s ability to meet customer demand. Yet, as central as the supply chain is to success in most companies, customers rarely consider it when placing an order. This status quo shifted dramatically during the pandemic as high-profile disruptions and global shortages pushed supply chain from the boardroom to the forefront of consumer awareness. It has also cemented supply chain as a top priority for retailers, direct-to-consumer manufacturers, and distributors in the consumer goods sector––many of whom are embarking on enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernization. In this blog, we discuss composability for retailers alongside three customer success stories that showcase how Microsoft Dynamics 365 breathes composability into ERP modernization.

Composability for retailers

A composable business is an organization consisting of modular building blocks that can be orchestrated to rapidly adapt operations to changing market conditions, new business opportunities, and unpredictable disruptions. Unfortunately, while many sectors are reaping large benefits from composability, retailers have been slower to adopt a flexible approach. When Gartner® asked retailers if they accept the risk and costs of new technology and deploy it as early as possible, only eight percent of retailers agree, compared to 21 percent for highly composable business.¹ One company that certainly exemplifies the value that a composable approach can create is Signature Cosmetics.

Signature Cosmetics

Signature Cosmetics, a leading cosmetics and fragrance group, based in South Africa, began a modernization program in 2019 to rationalize the complexity that years of steady growth brought to its supply chain. When they embarked, the retailer was hard pressed with even simple tasks, like determining accurate product cost and margin. Operating three divisions (manufacturing, imports, and retail) in four countries, each with siloed and separate systems, had made even routine decision making extremely difficult.

When the company began its modernization program by implementing Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, it was not immediately clear the value that a composable solution would provide. As the pandemic hit, it quickly understood that a pivot in strategy was necessary. Because of the composable nature of the Dynamics 365 platform, it was able to rapidly stand up a new e-commerce site in less than two months, becoming the first Dynamics 365 e-commerce solution in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. The company quickly went from zero online sales at the onset of the pandemic to a 20-30 percent revenue growth in its first few months.

“Pivoting to an e-commerce platform has really opened the doors for them for new revenue opportunities.”—Mario Engelbrecht, Chief Technology Officer, Parity Software (Implementation partner).

Learn more: Signature Cosmetics customer story.

Inventory visibility

At Microsoft, we believe in the value that composability can bring to retailers. With new enhancements to our solutions, such as our Inventory Visibility Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, retailers can begin their composability journey without significant risk or cost.

Our Inventory Visibility Add-in is a highly scalable microservice that enables real-time on-hand inventory tracking. The solution can easily connect and pull inventory from multiple third-party systems, allowing companies to create a single, global view of all inventories. By creating one pool of global inventory from which all orders can pull, companies can often increase inventory accuracy and thereby maximize sales opportunities. Plus, when coupled with the soft reservation capability, sales order fulfillment can avoid over-selling, effectively mitigating the risk of missed sales opportunities that may challenge some organizations. Ultimately, with the Inventory Visibility Add-in, users can compose a bespoke inventory system that delivers superior business value by meeting the unique needs of your operating model.

Learn more about composable solutions and microservice architectures in our blog: Dynamics 365 composable approach enables rapid deployment of a supply chain control tower.

Post-purchase experiences

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), total returns increased from $428 billion in 2020², to $761 billion in 2021³, an increase of more than 65 percent. While the growth in retail sales certainly accounts for a corresponding rise in returns, this may not be the entire story. Indeed, a 2021 Incisive survey of over 6,000 consumer transactions found that 73 percent of returns occurred due to a retailer-controlled action or inaction.⁴ In light of this fact, it is not surprising that savvy consumer goods companies are not inclined to treat returns as a necessary cost of doing business. Instead, they are working aggressively to stop returns from ever occurring while also focusing on reducing the operational cost of supporting the returns that they must support.

After all, it isn’t realistic to reduce returns entirely, which is why providing a quick and easy return mechanism is an essential part of delivering a quality post-purchase experience to consumers, particularly for online buyers. Still, e-commerce complexity and digital demand continue to grow, and many organizations are challenged to provide a seamless returns process. With initiatives such as our multiyear collaboration with FedEx, Microsoft is changing this situation for retailers.

We recently announced that the next step of our partnership with FedEx brings a unique integration to Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management. The integration, which begins the preview on April 30, 2022, will help brands deliver modern, high-value post-purchase experiences directly to their customers, including convenient, seamless returns. Users of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management will gain the ability to allow their customers to take advantage of over 60,000 FedEx drop-off locations, convenient at-home pick-up, and paperless/label-less returns with easy-to-use QR codes, at no additional cost. One company that is leveraging Dynamics 365 to overcome the unique challenges of today’s retail supply chain is FOCO.

FOCO

As you saw during the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, FOCO, which is a leading manufacturer of sports and entertainment merchandise, including apparel, accessories, toys, collectibles, novelty items, and more, needs to provide a seamless returns experience for its customers. They can use the new FedEx integration returns management app to do so. As others discussed here, this composable microservice solution plugs into its existing e-commerce application.

FOCO can provide its customers with an intuitive, guided self-service returns experience. The process captures just enough information to coordinate a refund or exchange, requiring customers to visit a drop-off location of their choice and scan a simple QR code to complete the return––meeting consumer expectations with minimal effort. The process wraps up neatly for FOCO too. The solution combines multiple return items across multiple return points into a consolidated return shipment to the warehouse. Composable solutions like these make the post-purchase experience delightfully simple for the customer while also reducing the operational burden of the returns process for companies.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernization

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Dynamics 365 Finance offer businesses two standardized ERP capabilities on a composable ERP platform, functioning as stand-alone solutions or as a tightly integrated and extensible system. As product-centric enterprises look to renovate their existing ERP platform to improve systems and processes by moving them to the cloud, Dynamics 365 is enabling the transformation and improving IT agility to deliver business outcomes in the process. Another company using Dynamics 365 for ERP modernization is Simply Good Foods Company.

The Simply Good Foods Company

The Simply Good Foods Company was formed by merging two well-known brands, Atkins and Quest. Before the merger, Quest modernized its ERP system by upgrading to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Dynamics 365 Finance. One of the aims of the merger was to standardize business operations between the two companies, which led Atkins to join the implementation of the new ERP solution.

While challenging to complete alongside the merger, broadening the implementation enabled The Simply Good Foods Company to consolidate master data, increase third-party logistics, and improve its sales order process productivity—all without sacrificing reporting independence. Today, the company goes to market as a multi-brand retailer, presenting a unified face to its customers but reaping the operational benefits from economies of scale created by the merger.

Learn more: The Simply Good Foods Company customer story.

What’s next?

In addition to the customer stories and new features covered here, we are honored that Gartner has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises for Microsoft Dynamics 365. To learn more, please check out the Gartner Magic Quadrant and visit our Build a Resilient and Sustainable Supply Chain webinar.

Sources:

1- Gartner, Retail CIOs: A Composable Approach Should Top Your Agenda for the Next 24 Months, Robert Hetu, 10 November 2021.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER and MAGIC QUADRANT are trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

2- NRF, 2021. $428 billion in Merchandise Returned in 2020.

3- NRF, 2022. Retail Returns Increased to $761 Billion in 2021 as a Result of Overall Sales Growth.

4- Incisiv, 2021. State of the Industry Report: Retail Returns.

The post Dynamics 365 breathes composability into enterprise resource planning modernization appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

With more and more customers looking to digital channels for product information, feedback, and insights, the role of the store is changing from a place that simply houses and transacts products to another integral step in building and differentiating customer experience. While this transformation has been taking place these past several years, the recent impact to in-person sales has accelerated the discussion for more retailers in what the role of the retail store will be in the future. Customer experience has been top of mind for retailers for years, but experience means different things to different people. In-store experience for a fashion retailer is dramatically different from that of a grocery store, however, this is something that each retailer has to define for their business. Microsoft sets out to help retailers bridge the gap between customer expectation and delivered experience. By utilizing the intelligent and connected tools available in Microsoft Dynamics 365, retailers can streamline the buying journey and ensure consistent and personalized customers experience across all relevant channels.

Dynamics 365 Commerce combined with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables retailers to streamline in-store practices and bring relevant customer data to sales agents, when and where needed, to deliver real-time personalization for customers in-store.

Transforming retail experiences to meet customer’s expectations

Mattress Firm is a great example of a retailer that has redefined their role as part of the customer sleep journey. By moving their focus from selling mattresses, to helping customers gain a better night’s sleep, it transformed their perspective on the experiences needed in store to reflect this focus.

“Customers are just asking for these elevated retail experiences, and all of these things require technology, data or both.”—Jonathan Sider, CIO and COO of e-commerce, Mattress Firm.

To evolve the retail store, organizations need to deliver more robust, sensory experiences and personalized customer service. The main ways through which this can be accomplished are personalization, seamless purchasing, and expanded in-store experiences.

The value of data and personalization

Consumers today respond better to personalized experiences. In the context of brick-and-mortar retail, this means being able to connect a customer’s online activities and past purchases with an in-store team member. One means of effective personalization is to deliver customer intelligence data, such as tailored recommendations, to the point in the customer journey where this information will have the greatest impact, such as point of sale (POS) terminals in-store or to sales associate handheld devices. Automation in the retail store is about improving the customer journey while also simplifying and removing as many low-value manual processes as possible from team member responsibilities, such as inventory management, ordering, and fulfillment.

Retailers like GNC are looking to Microsoft and Dynamics 365 to help meet and exceed customer expectations at every touchpoint.

“We expect to provide our customers with a highly personalized experience tailored to their wellness journey. Whether they’re an 18-year-old high school athlete or a 70-year-old retiree, we want them to get the right message about products, programs, or deals that will appeal to them. We chose Customer Insights because with it, we have the data infrastructure to really do that right.”—Lauren Mannetti, Vice President, Marketing, GNC.

These forms of automation have rapidly become vital to providing the seamless omnichannel experience that customers demand. But, as we’ve discussed before in our Exceed customer expectations with seamless and unified commerce experiences blog post, this requires connecting data across back-end systems, which companies often overlook while focusing on their front-end process and online sales channels.

Seamless, frictionless purchasing is now an expectation

Consumers have mostly moved away from cash and now desire a fast, contactless, friction-free buying process—ideally without lines. For retail, this requires truly “instant checkout,” which means: Scan. Pay. Done. No lines. No hassle. No wait. The entire process occurs through the mobile point of sale application on a phone or tablet. Combining this with checkout stations and roaming team members positioned throughout the stores allows customers to bag their purchases and go on their way.

Customers like LIDS are using Dynamics 365 Commerce to get out from behind the counter and engage with customers in the isles with a user-friendly, touch-based point of sale device. With a wide variety of products and sizes, transactions are smoother when the employee can work with a customer and look up what’s in stock right from the sales floor.

“Our greatest assets are our store employees and managers, they care about the POS, and they want technology. When they walk into the store and see something that’s not a touchscreen, they kind of disconnect.”—Nick Corthier, Chief Financial Officer, Lids.

Dynamics 365 also simplifies the payment experience with native integration with payment providers like Adyen, thereby enabling an easy and truly unified commerce solution for retailers.

Expanding in-store experiences

It’s up to every retailer to define what the role of their stores will be given the range and variety of retail offerings. One thing is for sure, retailers that adapt quicker are more likely to create differentiated value in the market and ultimately define what the future of their ‘retail vertical’ should look like. Technology is helping these retail leaders set the pace and standing up new models and raising the bar, especially for premium brands.

Gibson Brands is looking to lead the way in building a best-in-class retail experience for music enthusiasts. Gibson Garage, a new entertainment and retail outlet in downtown Nashville, features digitally fueled in-store experiences for customers. The Gibson Garage allows customers to see the guitar they’re buying, hear somebody play it, get excited about their purchase, and enjoy the entire music-centered hangout experience, complete with musicians and iconic gorgeous instruments. It becomes a place that musicians and music lovers alike want to gather and spend time; the way book lovers would a bookstore and café.

“Our legacy systems were unstable, unsustainable, and not optimized for the current ways of working…They weren’t talking to each other. Dynamics 365 has brought the company to the leading edge of technology in terms of enterprise resource planning (ERP). It’s stepped up our game and unlocked so many possibilities that we’re just scratching the surface. We’re continually going through, refining processes, and unlocking different aspects of the ERP to figure out what works for us in a system.”—Mallory McClain, Dealer Service Supervisor, Gibson Brands.

These are examples of combining theatre-like retail settings, personalization, and automation to create a retail sales experience that is differentiated and pushes the boundaries of what we typically think of as shopping.

What’s next?

Many companies have merged data across disparate systems to rise to the new expectations of retail as an experience. These merchants have made investments in technology to move to an integrated unified commerce solution, like Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Visit our Dynamics 365 retail page to learn how Dynamics 365 can help you deliver on your customers’ expectations by evolving your retail experiences and how Microsoft can support your business for growth.

The post The evolution of retail store into an experience center appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Omnichannel has been around for more than a decade now, so it might be surprising to realize that there are still gaps in a strategy that has become table stakes for most retailers. The gap that does exist presents a lack of clarity about what omnichannel retail is and the inability of organizations to deliver on the strategy. With retail in the midst of one the largest transformations we have seen in decades, many organizations are trying to understand where to start bridging the gap between traditional and modern retail experiences. Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings together a unique set of capabilities and services that allow retailers to streamline buying experiences for customers across channels while empowering organizations to gain a deeper understanding and ownership of their sales, operations, and customer data. 

Disconnected data disrupts the modern buying journey

The lack of unified data in a retailer’s current systems still proves to be a significant roadblock to providing omnichannel experiences to consumers. Like many retailers, the U.S. national retailer GNC, which specializes in health and nutrition-related products, also struggled with disconnected data across its systems. This meant, among other things, that GNC found it challenging to provide a single source of truth about its customers that would allow them to communicate efficiently and effectively. The siloed data affected customer communications, but it also kept the retailer from gaining real-time insights into things like customer preferences and inventory.

The ultimate solution for GNC and for any business looking to leverage data across systems is to use a single collection of data automatically updated across applications in real-time. This is one reason why GNC deployed Dynamics 365.

“With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, we’re going to have a single, reliable view of each customer that updates in real-time…We’ll use the AI capabilities in Customer Insights to better define our customer segments and ensure that every customer gets the right communication at the right time.”—Lauren Mannetti, Vice President, Marketing, GNC.

Microsoft also continues to help retailers adjust to customer needs with tools like intuitive customer segmentation and experimentation capabilities. Dynamics 365 Commerce enables organizations to increase customer engagement and satisfaction by using tools in e-commerce site builder to target specific customer segments with different experiences based on the shopper’s device, geo-location, and other dynamically derived attributes from their browser request.

Regardless of the solution you choose, you need to be able to pinpoint a customer all the way through their journey, from browsing online to asking each customer for feedback. Increasingly, retailers will be tasked with offering ever-more personalized experiences—and that requires sophisticated and connected data that overcomes the limitation of siloed separate systems.

Complexity of legacy solutions

Many businesses have invested heavily in their current legacy solutions. Rightly so, most wish to maximize the benefit of these investments. Unfortunately, businesses can end up dealing with the complexity of their existing systems far longer than necessary as they attempt to avoid investing in a new unified solution. Sometimes, though, adding additional visibility and integration on top of existing solutions works well to address this problem without having to scrap the current systems being run for separate functions.

This is how Khaadi, a large Pakistani fashion retailer, figured out how to get its complex incumbent solutions to work together to keep operations going during the pandemic. It needed to be able to integrate data so that it could continue selling in-store inventory online during pandemic shutdowns.

To make this pivot, the company chose Microsoft Power Apps, which helps companies build custom apps that connect existing data, to create the brand’s integrated sales services in-house. Then, three months later, the company scaled the roll out ten times with the help of Dynamics 365 Commerce to make these capabilities—and more—part of its new operating norm.

“It’s incredible because we know of some similar retail businesses who started their omnichannel journey 14 to 15 months back but have not yet implemented similar capabilities.”—Muhammad Rehan Qadri, Chief Information Officer, Khaadi.

Using Microsoft Power Apps coupled with Dynamics 365 Commerce allowed the company to continue using its existing systems by allowing those systems to better “talk to each other” and leverage the data across them. This provides a solution that many other retailers can turn to make immediate use of their data that otherwise is isolated in separate systems—without replacing those systems.

Inability to adapt to changing customer habits

Another roadblock to providing omnichannel experiences is an inability to adapt to changing customer needs. This can result from a business that isn’t using the right technology to streamline operations and connect all of its data. The need to streamline backend operations is just as critical to customer experience when the goal is being able to adapt to rapidly changing customer behaviors and habits.

Now, more than ever, consumers seek out reviews and social proof before making a purchase. In fact, social commerce sales in the U.S. were an estimated $36.62 billion in 2021.¹ It is not surprising then that businesses without the technology infrastructure required to connect these new sources of demand and customer intelligence may fall behind.

Dynamics 365 enables retailers to easily adjust and meet customers where they are through a common data model and a natively headless commerce engine. Easily connect with customers on new and emerging platforms to ensure your business stays competitive and relevant in an ever more competitive retail environment.

Along with this, it is essential for retailers to be able to automatically track reviews across platforms, monitor them, and automate the solicitation of reviews from customers through post-shipping emails and other such activities. Also, monitoring and identifying how specific customers respond to social storytelling requires deep data that connects across platforms. This is another area where Dynamics 365 Commerce can help.

Learn more in our recent blog, Exceed customer expectations with seamless and unified commerce experiences.

Increased demands and customer expectations

Consumers today understand that retailers can capture data of how, what, when, and where they make purchases. Not only do they understand this point, but they also expect it. This is one reason retailers face increased demands to understand consumers better and personalize experiences accordingly.

An area where customer expectations have evolved and increased is the desire for convenience. According to the National Retail Federation, 97 percent of consumers have backed out of a purchase because it was inconvenient to them.²  This can be seen by the popularity of curbside pickup, next-day delivery, and easy returns. Yet even though businesses can lose sales if they inconvenience consumers, many companies are still challenged to provide the options that customers have come to expect.

Retailers like Aubainerie are using Dynamics 365 to improve customer experience and personalize customer engagements across channels. The company’s apparel designers are using Dynamics 365 Commerce combined with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to include more product information for staff and customers at the point of purchase. They are also able to fine-tune their understanding of customer needs to deliver more personal customer buying experiences and exceed customer expectations.  

“We can designate activity filters in Dynamics 365 and then plan in advance for e-commerce and in-store displays based on those data points, which improves our omnichannel capabilities.”—Simon Jacobsen, Director of e-commerce, Aubainerie.

For companies to offer these convenience features to customers and meet the expectations for personalized and relevant shopping experiences, retailers can look to Dynamics 365 to help bridge the omnichannel gap for long-term business success.

Learn more in our blog, Deliver personalized customer engagement with Dynamics 365.

What’s next

We’re ready to help you evaluate the best ways to unify and connect data by leveraging technology to overcome these four major roadblocks so that you can bridge the omnichannel gap in retail. To see how Dynamics 365 can help your retail business succeed, see how you can get started with Dynamics 365 or give our Dynamics 365 Commerce free trial a try today.

Sources:

1- eMarketer, 2021. Social commerce surpasses $30 billion in the US.

2- National Retail Federation, 2020. Consumer View Winter 2020: Convenience and the Consumer. January 14, 2020.

The post Bridging the omnichannel gap in retail with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As the retail industry rebounds from the unparalleled disruptions to store operations over the last year, the store’s role in merchant strategy is evolving and being reimagined. For retailers to thrive in ever more competitive marketplaces, they must embrace technology solutions that enable a modern and intelligent store. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce stands ready with the capabilities to accelerate and empower retailers in their digital transformation journey.

Enhance customer shopping experiences

As physical stores return to pre-pandemic operating capacity, retailers realize the extent to which a new normal for store operations has taken hold. The result is that they are searching for opportunities to leverage technology to improve and automate the in-store experience, reduce costs, enhance operational efficiencies, and ultimately, enhance customer shopping experiences.

As the amount of data generated is growing exponentially across the customer journey, from online to in-store and beyond, retailers need to leverage this data to bridge the digital to physical divide in a seamless and frictionless way. Dynamics 365 Commerce assists companies in these efforts with solutions that deliver curated customer interactions, enable contactless selling, maximize physical store revenue, streamline store operations, and reduce loss due to fraud.

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

Curated customer interactions

We have previously talked about how Dynamics 365 can deliver personalized digital customer engagement. The natural extension of personalized digital customer engagement is to bring the same strategy to the physical store. In this case, we speak about curating customer interactions by augmenting store associates with an unprecedented view of consumers, also known as clienteling.

This strategy is not new. Retailers have long sought ways to build long-term relationships with their most important customers. In the days before box store chains, repeat customers could reasonably expect sales associates to remember who they were, what their preferences were, and even have a good sense of the items in which they might be interested. As retail chains grew and expanded into e-commerce marketplaces, in-store associate turnover and customer mobility also increased. The result is the personalized experiences that customers desire decreased due to a lack of continuity of in-store associates and, to a lesser extent, the different stores that customers may visit. Another factor at work here is the disconnect between e-commerce marketplaces and physical stores, leaving frontline workers lacking critical data about customer purchases and preferences.

At Microsoft, we are actively enabling technologies such as AI and machine learning to change this situation by empowering store associates with better customer insights based on data gathered across every customer touchpoint. And by connecting the once siloed data of digital and physical enterprise systems, we are helping merchants provide an end-to-end digital buying experience across every stage of the customer journey. In physical stores, this means that associates can utilize handheld digital shared devices to access a full 360-degree customer profile. This provides frontline teams with AI-driven recommendations, access to real-time up-sell and cross-sell guidance, and even unlocks customer brand affinity or product preferences.

Enable contactless selling

One of the trends we highlighted in our recent blog on the 4 post-pandemic retail trends was contactless payments. And with good reason. Market studies in recent months found that a large percentage of consumers were still anxious about shopping in stores. One way that retailers can reduce this anxiety is by enabling seamless contactless selling experiences.

By enabling contactless payments, either via store associate handheld devices or with automated checkout systems, consumers have one less physical surface to touch. While no panacea for eliminating consumers’ health risk and associated anxiety, contactless selling has other benefits like reducing time spent in checkout lines and eliminating a point of friction in the purchase process. Ultimately, Dynamics 365 Commerce enables contactless selling with mobile point-of-sale (POS) and contactless payment solutions so that merchants can deliver safe and secure shopping experiences.

Learn more about contactless payments and other retail trends in our recent e-book: The Future of Commerce in a Post-Pandemic World.

Maximize physical store revenue

Successful merchants understand the importance of maximizing physical store revenue. With Dynamics 365 Commerce, retailers have a deeper understanding of purchasing habits that allow them to tailor product selections, offer timely and data-driven recommendations, and access any relevant promotions. Additionally, by developing a single view of customers for use at physical POS and connecting this with a real-time view of cross-store inventory and purchasing options, merchants can enable endless aisles to ensure that they never miss a sales opportunity. This translates into increasing the number of units sold per transaction and maximization of sales per square foot. Plus, Dynamics 365 Commerce also helps boost in-store team member productivity with inventory, shift, and cash drawer management actions across all role-specific workspaces.

Streamline store operations

Retailers that are seeking to streamline store operations should look to utilize edge-based technology to unlock new insights, such as identifying and responding faster to in-store profit gaps and improving the efficiency of store team members­-actions that ultimately serve to improve overall store profitability.

A byproduct of streamlining store operations by adopting innovative and connected technology solutions is that it decreases the time required to open new stores or add new franchises by removing friction from every part of business operations and processes. This is a pivotal area where the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Commerce can help to optimize retail operations and deliver friction-free shopping experiences to customers.

Reduce fraud loss

While retailers are rightly focused on reducing loss due to fraud, they must also focus on delivering data privacy and security. Dynamics 365 Commerce helps merchants maximize profitability by providing loss prevention tools that combat internal fraudulent practices. At the same time, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection provides even greater protection for purchases and accounts with industry-leading enterprise-grade security that also reduces losses due to return fraud.

Learn more: Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

Creating the store of the future

By connecting digital and physical store systems, unifying the data that these systems collect, leveraging that data with AI and machine learning, and connecting that data to in-store team members, Dynamics 365 Commerce is helping retailers to create the store of the future. We believe that the modern and intelligent store is one where retail operations are transformed and reimagined, and we are enabling merchants on this journey to deliver curated customer interactions, enable contactless selling, maximize physical store revenue, streamline store operations, and reduce loss due to fraud.

What’s next?

At Microsoft, we will continue to deliver timely and innovative solutions that help companies enable the modern and intelligent store. If you are ready to start delivering unified, personalized, and seamless buying experiences for your customers and partners, we invite you to try a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce today.

The post Dynamics 365 Commerce enables the modern and intelligent store appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Consumers and businesses are increasingly turning to digital platforms for relevant product and service information, making it critical for companies to effectively meet and exceed customer expectations through digital services and technology. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is helping organizations meet this challenge by connecting and unifying commerce and marketing activities.

By bringing together solutions such as Dynamics 365 Commerce and Dynamics 365 Marketing, businesses can more effectively target and deliver engaging, intuitive, and user-friendly digital commerce buying experiences. These tools allow organizations to leverage machine learning models, artificial intelligence infused-personalization, and event and data-driven customer journeys, to deliver bespoke buying experiences across B2B and B2C markets.

Personalized and intuitive experiences

To effectively compete in omnichannel retail, businesses need technology solutions that allow them to deliver personalized and intuitive shopping experiences. Many customers want their shopping experience to be somehow personalized. Effective personalization can also increase store revenue. Yet, delivering personalized and intuitive experiences can be challenging for businesses that, despite multiple in-person interactions with customers and ongoing engagements with them online, cannot collect and connect the data from these experiences.

By unifying the data from every customer touchpoint, retailers can develop a more meaningful and holistic understanding of their customers. This deeper understanding can then be leveraged to quickly move customers from evaluation to purchase decision, regardless of the channel in which the customer chooses to engage. Ultimately, by delivering personalized and intuitive shopping experiences, retailers can improve overall conversion rates and maximize the lifetime value of their customers.

Ste. Michelle Wine Estates

One retailer that is seeing the benefits of delivering personalized and intuitive experiences is Ste. Michelle Wine Estates. Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, one of the largest premium wine companies in the United States, prides itself on superior consumer experiences. To unify its consumer data and provide opportunities for innovation, Ste. Michelle deployed Dynamics 365 Commerce across all of its wine brands.

“The more we know about the consumer—and the more adept we can be at using that information in intelligent ways—the better we can make technology an enabler of consumer satisfaction.” —Joe Gregg, Chief Information Officer, Ste. Michelle Wine Estates

Learn more: Ste. Michelle Wine Estates customer story

Seamless omnichannel services

Personalized digital customer engagement extends well beyond the confines of online marketplaces and digital storefronts. To deliver a fully seamless and frictionless buying experience, merchants must be able to effectively transition from online to brick-and-mortar and back again—and do this without losing the personal touch.

Consumers are more likely to buy from retailers who reference past purchase experiences. These are easy feats for properly configured information systems in online environments, but transitioning to in-store, team member-led experiences can be tricky.

To be effective in this effort, retailers need to empower in-store team members with relevant and timely consumer data. Providing the correct data at the right time can be difficult when retailers are amassing a large amount of consumer data. Fortunately, Dynamics 365 Commerce can leverage AI and machine learning capabilities to deliver personalized recommendations, insights, and loyalty programs access directly into the hands of brick-and-mortar team members. Ultimately, by connecting digital, in-store, and back-office operations in a single retail platform, merchants can deliver the seamless purchase journeys that modern consumers and businesses have come to expect.

Signature Cosmetics & Fragrances

A retailer positioning itself to take advantage of the benefits of seamless omnichannel service is Signature Cosmetics & Fragrances. Signature Cosmetics & Fragrances, a leading cosmetics and fragrance group, understood the impact the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns would have on its network of more than 170 stores across South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia.

When the company began its modernization program by implementing Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, it did not immediately consider the benefits of connecting its commercial activities in a seamless omnichannel service. As the project moved forward and they gained experience in e-commerce, they quickly grasped the value of such an approach. By implementing Dynamics 365 Commerce, Signature Cosmetics & Fragrances can now deliver a seamless experience across product categorization and loyalty programs in its brick-and-mortar stores and online. One example is that the company can now directly connect a customer’s online wish list with in-store sales opportunities.

“Part of the project plan is once we have all this data following through the productivity software in retail, e-commerce, and supply chain, we will have Power BI sitting above everything and drawing from various departments to present it as reports that really help us make decisions.” —Akheel Pragjee, Managing Director of the Signature Group

Learn more: Signature Cosmetics & Fragrances customer story

Next steps

As we have seen, delivering a personalized digital customer engagement is a fundamental necessity for modern retailers. Dynamics 365 provides the ability to adapt and innovate with the only portfolio of business applications that empowers your organization to deliver operational excellence and delight every customer. Two of our solutions, Dynamics 365 Commerce and Dynamics 365 Marketing, combine to allow your company to provide a unified, or connected, commerce solution. Try our free Dynamics 365 Commerce trial today to get started creating personalized and friction-free digital commerce experiences for B2C and B2B businesses.

The post Deliver personalized digital customer engagement with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today’s consumers want the flexibility to buy and fulfill where, when, and how they choose. As retailers have expanded on purchasing options for customers—like buy online pick up in-store—they have quickly gone from value adds or differentiators, to baseline customer expectations. For many retailers, enabling omnichannel experiences is not only a means to grow; it is critical to surviving in a modern sales environment. Over the last year, retailers have moved quickly to meet customers on new and emerging channels to drive customer conversion and sales growth. Improving front-end experiences were often prioritized over establishing connected back-end systems that powered these new purchasing experiences and as a result, many retailers failed to deliver on a promise of seamlessly connected shopping for their customers due to siloed and disconnected data including cross-channel transactions and customer visibility.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce is built on a modern, intelligent, and headless platform that natively connects commerce systems, such as payment processing, fraud protection, along with easily extending to 3PL logistics. By looking across all facets of the customer journey, businesses can enable true omnichannel commerce across traditional and emerging channels, through a unified commerce platform. This ultimately allows retailers and consumer goods organizations to meet customers where they are, allow them to pay however they want, and make returns through whatever channel they choose to offer. It also provides managers and sellers with complete visibility of customers and business data. This connected data platform can help fuel your business for future innovation and growth across all relevant purchasing channels.

Let’s take a closer look at how data has transformed the way we perceive, power, and drive innovation across customer purchasing experiences.

Seamless journeys

Consumers expect seamless and frictionless experiences and have seemingly endless options of products and places to purchase. This means that even a single broken step in the customer journey can lead customers to move to another brand or retailer. In a recent PwC survey of 15,000 consumers, they found that one in three people will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience.¹

Savvy retailers understand the value of a seamless journey and are making investments to make this a reality. They know that consumers will continually evaluate their brand experience against the best they’ve ever had, not against their idea of what their average experience has been. For example, consumers see no issue comparing smaller and medium-size companies against the most successful e-commerce and omnichannel retailers.

To help businesses compete effectively in this climate, Dynamics 365 Commerce can connect all the steps and touchpoints across the customer journey, from payments to returns, both online and in-store. It empowers retailers to drive a connected commerce experience, providing increased cross-channel visibility, improving customer retention rates and helping businesses gain the necessary insights to offer increasingly personalized experiences.

Personalized experiences

Considering consumers’ low tolerance for bad experiences, businesses of all sizes, even small to medium-sized, must create outstanding customer experiences across platforms, from social to in-person, to check out and returns. Customers spend up to 40 percent more,² when they consider the experience highly personalized. Moreover, these types of integrated, seamless journeys lead to positive customer experiences that can also increase spending by as much as 140 percent.³

Truly connected systems

Achieving unified commerce requires integration across all systems and databases utilized in making omnichannel commerce a reality. Let’s consider payment systems to understand the benefits of integrating back-end systems.

Many businesses continue to use traditional payment gateways that route payments through a separate risk management system before passing them to another third party for payment authorization and completion. Typically, these legacy systems rely on numerous payment processors and processes for each different channel and region.

This type of disconnected system is inefficient and costly for businesses to operate. When systems are disconnected in this manner, it limits improvements to customer experiences because of a lack of insights and visibility. In addition, users will often have to run dozens of reports to stay on top of sales information from all channels and payment providers, and worse, these reports remain disconnected from ERP and CRM systems.

Integrated payments

Integrating payments is about more than consolidating all payments with one provider. It’s about ensuring all of your payment systems are integrated with other systems, including ERP systems, the point-of-sale platform, and the customer relationship management system. If businesses could integrate payment systems, they can enable the level of visibility necessary to provide more personalized customer experiences and move one step closer to true omnichannel retail.

Businesses can integrate payments in three ways: create a custom integration, use a plugin, or use a native integration. Custom integrations can be expensive due to integration and ongoing maintenance costs, pushing many retailers to opt for prebuilt plugins if a native integration was unavailable. Using plugins carries risk, however, as it means relying on yet another third party to build and maintain a vital link in your commercial processes. Native integration is a superior option as it reduces reliance on an additional third party and is also more affordable and reliable.

With Dynamics 365 Commerce, we offer the ability to work with a variety of payment providers, but we have invested in natively integrating payments to Adyen. Adyen (AMS: ADYEN) is the payments platform of choice for many of the world’s leading companies, providing a modern end-to-end infrastructure connecting directly to Visa, Mastercard, and consumers’ globally preferred payment methods. Adyen delivers frictionless payments across online, mobile, and in-store channels.

Because this integration is built and supported by Microsoft, you can depend on it to be an always up-to-date, seamless working solution while also delivering faster implementation for new businesses. For example, a retailer who recently chose Adyen on Dynamics 365 started accepting and testing payments within 38 minutes, compared to weeks with other providers.

Learn more about the Microsoft and Adyen partnership or check out our free Payments Webinar.

Build connected and seamless experiences today

Businesses across the globe have been challenged to adapt rapidly to changing customer needs and demands accelerated by the pandemic. Consumers and business-facing organizations are embracing digital transformation on a massive scale to compete and thrive in complex commerce environments. Dynamics 365 solutions enable retailers and consumer goods organizations to combine the best of digital and in-store to deliver personal, seamless, and differentiated customer experiences. With Dynamic 365 Commerce, businesses can streamline business processes, turn data into insights, and take advantage of dynamic, agile systems that adapt to customer needs on a proven and secure data platform.

Ready to take the next step with Dynamics 365 Commerce? You can take advantage of a free Dynamics 365 Commerce trial or check out our webinar, Get Full Control of Your Payments with Adyen and Dynamics 365.

1- “Experience is everything. Get it right.,” PwC

2- U.S., Business Impact of Personalization in Retail study, customer survey, Google, 2019

3- The true value of customer experiences, Deloitte

The post Exceed customer expectations with seamless and unified commerce experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The last few decades have seen monumental change in the retail industry. Specifically, technology has untethered the shopper from the store and allowed retail to take place anywhere, at any time. When viewed through hindsight, these changes occurred just in time, for without the e-commerce revolution during the past two decades, retailers would have faced a significantly more difficult situation during the recent pandemic. Nonetheless, innovative companies have been able to adapt and adjust to these challenging times.

Businesses looked to the role of technology in enabling the agility to not only meet emerging customer needs but also to drive lasting impact in their organization’s business efficiency, customer experience, and market position. Patagonia partnered with Microsoft and Dynamics 365 to help navigate through the market turmoil and continue to innovate and drive to meet their business goals.

The pandemic forced many retailers to rethink almost everything related to the purchase experience. Where and how can customers pick up and return their purchased items? How can they pay? What is the utility of a store in an online-first shopping environment? Questions like these are now being answered in ways that will reverberate through the industry long after the pandemic has receded.

Dynamics 365 has helped equip retailers with a flexible, unified, and seamless buying experience for customers and partners. With Dynamics 365 Commerce, businesses have been able to engage across traditional and emerging channels while allowing consumers the option to buy when, how, and where they want—on any device—by delivering a frictionless and consistent experience across online and offline channels.

As we continue through the pandemic, both shoppers and retailers will have to adapt to a new normal. Let’s take a closer look at some trends that will persist in retail for the time to come.

1. Flexible order fulfillment

2020 ushered in the mass adoption of non-traditional fulfillment opportunities. One of these new methods that became essential during the past year is BOPIS, or buy-online-pick-up-in-store. As the pandemic unfolded, retailers saw a 208 percent increase in BOPIS from the previous year as customers gravitated to the increased convenience and choice that flexible order fulfillment offered. This accelerated a trend that had been gaining ground in some industries, like grocery, and saw it spread to retail sectors of all kinds.

2. Flexible returns

Like flexible order fulfillment, flexible returns provide the customer with increased convenience, this time related to items they no longer need or are not satisfied with. Returns are costly, and COVID-19 supercharged their numbers, with 2020 seeing consumers return $428 billion in merchandise, with $102 billion attributed to online purchasing, up 38.5 percent from 2019. As we move forward, the challenge will be for retailers to manage costs around returns without depriving consumers of the ease of returns they came to expect during the pandemic.

3. Contactless payments

Of all the trends mentioned in this blog, contactless payment via radio frequency identification (RFID) and near-field communication technology was perhaps the most widely adopted before the pandemic. Even at that, the need for increased cleanliness protocols and a desire to avoid touching surfaces where possible meant that the use of contactless payments has increased by 30 percent since COVID-19 started. With continued growth expected, savvy retailers will no longer allow the purchase experience to be tethered to specific locations or modes of payment.

4. Omnichannel retail

Like contactless payments, omnichannel retail plans had already been a high priority for many companies pre-COVID-19. However, the pandemic forced many retailers to speed up transitions from mostly brick-and-mortar to a proper omnichannel solution. Omnichannel has become an absolute requirement for modern retailers to survive. Part of this transition includes a re-thinking of the physical store itself. Rather than acting as the critical location in the retail journey—a place for customers to browse for and purchase items—the store now serves as a place for customers to see, touch, and feel items they have discovered through other shopping channels before final purchase.

Microsoft is helping retailers deliver on their brand promises

In each of the trends mentioned, consumers rushed to welcome the added flexibility to the retail experience. As we continue through the pandemic and return to a new normal, consumers will be reticent to give their newfound conveniences.

At January NRF we announced Microsoft Cloud for Retail to help retailers deliver seamless experiences across the entire buying journey, and recently we announced even more capabilities within the Microsoft Cloud for Retail public preview to help businesses build flexibility into their systems in order to thrive in the post-pandemic world.

What’s next?

• Register for NRF Retail Converge and join our Big Ideas Session on June 21, 2021.
• Join the Retail Digital Forum on June 22, 2021.
• Contact Microsoft Dynamics 365 to get more information about Dynamics 365 solutions and capabilities.
• Stay informed about Microsoft Cloud for Retail. Learn how you can connect your customers, your people, and your data.
• Follow Microsoft Retail on social.
• Learn more about Dynamics 365 Commerce.

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