Umran Hasan, Author at Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Technology

Umran Hasan — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 11:00:00 +0000

July 12, 2017, 10:00 – 11:00 AM PDT

While enterprises worldwide embrace digital experiences to meet rising customer expectations, they are also applying digital transformation strategies to remain competitive and drive revenue growth.

Microsoft recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to better understand how enterprises across the globe are pursuing digital strategies. This global study focuses on the outcomes they sought, the challenges they faced, and the improvements they are realizing.

More specifically, this study highlights the role that technology (CRM, ERP, business intelligence and productivity) has played in accelerating digital transformation efforts.

Join us for a webinar with Forrester vice president and principal, Nigel Fenwick, where he will reveal the study results, which showcase specific benefits being realized by digital transformation leaders including:

increased customer engagement
increased customer acquisition
increased operational efficiency
increased employee productivity
increased overall revenue
and the development of new revenue streams

Join us July 12th for this free webinar!

The post Accelerating Digital Transformation with Technology appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

How the New Dynamics AX Redefines Leadership

Umran Hasan — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 09:00:00 +0000

ERP is changing the roles of business leaders. Gone are the days of CIOs solely pushing papers and overseeing maintenance—systems like Dynamics AX take care of the menial tasks, giving leaders from both the business and tech areas an opportunity to drive productivity, cross-department integration and thought leadership.

To learn more about how ERP is disrupting the way leaders think and act, we talked to analyst Joshua Greenbaum. Josh has covered the business applications space for more than 17 years and is a principal analyst and founder of Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC). With early insight into the development of Dynamics AX, he provided his view on the big bets Microsoft made with the ERP solution. He also discussed some of the key capabilities the solution delivers, including its new user experience and use of Microsoft Azure and Dynamics Lifecycle services—and what it all means for business leaders. [Watch the video]

“Today, companies need to think of ERP software as a living, breathing system that changes with you as a company,” Josh said. “It evolves with business. This is a fundamental difference in thinking from even a few years ago.”

Several shifts are at play here, including the need for leaders to:

Take a collaborative approach. ERP software is no longer just the CIO and IT department’s prerogative. Successful companies also encourage other business leaders to help strategically manage the technology. “We’ve talked about alignment between IT and business for years and it’s no longer theoretical,” Josh said. “It’s real and the stakes are extraordinarily high. You need to evolve your business with the times, otherwise you will become irrelevant.”
Keep tabs on tech trends. The cloud is a good place to start. “If you haven’t figured out what’s going on with the cloud, go find someone between the ages of eight and fifteen and watch what they do – they’ll show you,” Josh said. Other trends to watch include mobile and IoT, which, through the power of the cloud, help businesses effectively integrate across departments. “We can’t have these silos of functionality that we had in the back office of 20 years ago—we have to have deep integration,” he said. “Look at the cloud as a new way of interoperating multiple functions and multiple people in ways that just weren’t possible before.”
Rethink the CIO’s job description. The infiltration of technology in everyday business is also expanding the role of the CIO. According to Josh, with the help of Dynamics AX, CIOs have an opportunity to be an “ally and influencer of business change.” “[Dynamics AX] changes how CIOs and their business-level executives interact—suddenly the CIO is no longer the just the person who’s maintaining things and making them run, they’re part of the ultimate, full lifecycle solution, from order to cash, from customer engagement to customer success, and that’s a big shift.”

Watch the full video of Josh discussing the ERP market, the evolving role of CIO, and the new Dynamics AX in his breakout session at the Dynamics AX virtual launch event site. To view the video, register or enter your email address and click “Watch Now.”

For an in-depth view of Josh’s view on the new Dynamics AX, download the whitepaper he wrote earlier this year which takes a closer look at the key capabilities delivered by the new service.

This is the latest in a series of blogs about the new Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft’s flagship ERP solution in the cloud.

Past posts in the series:

The New Dynamics AX for Retail & Commerce Brings the Power and Intelligence of the Cloud to Retailers
It All Adds Up: New IDC Analyst Connection Discusses the Value of ERP
Is this the Future of Financial Data Visualization?
Dynamics AX Lends a Personal Touch to Hagler Systems
Microsoft Dynamics AX—Making People Love ERP

The post How the New Dynamics AX Redefines Leadership appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics AX Lends a Personal Touch to Hagler Systems

Umran Hasan — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 08:00:00 +0000

Microsoft Dynamics AX early-adopter Hagler Systems is an engineering and manufacturing company specializing in dredging and mining equipment. But what’s equally important to know about the business isn’t so easily summarized in a fact sheet.

If you were to visit Hagler Systems in its early days at the Augusta, Georgia headquarters, you would find a single office, three Hagler brothers (Bob, David, and Ben) and an extra controls engineer. The brothers, longtime associates of pump manufacturer GIW Industries and all graduates of Georgia Tech, bought a building and machine tools and started manufacturing their innovative designs. Before long, business skyrocketed and new experts were added to the team; even greater success seemed imminent.

Ben Hagler, Vice President of Hagler Engineering and Operations recalled the challenge of dealing with a fledgling infrastructure and outdated process system that could no longer sustain their growth. “We started growing fast, but once we started growing fast we were totally out of control,” he said.

Changes Afoot

Though the Hagler business was rapidly changing, one thing stayed the same: their commitment to quality products and exceptional customer service. With these values in mind, Dynamics AX on Azure was a natural fit to help the company streamline its processes. Since initially adopting Dynamics AX in 2012, Hagler Systems has continued to be a Microsoft customer, most recently adopting and testing the forthcoming Dynamics AX, the cloud ERP service built on and for Azure.

Ben Hagler recently shared a few of the ways Dynamics AX has helped his business continue to grow, while maintaining a personal touch with customers.

1. A Robust Solution

Hagler Systems uses Dynamics AX in the cloud as an end-to-end solution, from scouting opportunities with new customers to tracking the opportunities as they move into projects, monitoring the projects as they move through engineering, logging the bill of materials and overseeing the source suppliers and cost index. It all adds up to a quality product delivered on time, on budget. “We chose Dynamics AX because of its robustness,” Ben said. “An enterprise resource planning system is the core of all the company’s business products and is the centerpiece of their standard work.”

2. Powerful Data, Anywhere

Savvy business leaders know the impact of the right data delivered at the right time. Whether it’s an investment prospect or, an incremental change that adds up over time, Power BI captures that impact by putting the power of information in the hands of user. Ben said he plans to delve into it more with his team.

“In the upcoming year we’re looking to take more advantage of Power BI,” he said. “Having data, having information at your hands and reacting at the times you’ve promised are essential. As we moved AX in to the cloud, and taken full advantage of Office 365, we’re looking forward to measuring what we want to manage and Power BI is the perfect tool.”

3. A Personal Touch and Broad Reach with the Cloud

It’s hard to automate the tailored attention customers love. Dynamics AX in the cloud allows the company to spend more time with those essential person-to-person interactions. “We were looking to find a solution that didn’t require a large IT staff to maintain,” Ben said. “As we move into the cloud . . . we’re beginning to minimize our footprint locally which is allowing our team to focus on our customers and provide more value out of the usability of Dynamics AX.”

It’s not just the customers who benefit from Dynamics AX’s cloud availability. According to Ben, the improvements are felt company-wide. “Our focus in moving to the cloud was to allow our team to access our data anywhere,” he said. “Dynamics AX on Azure is allowing us to be at the customer site in Canada, in North Carolina, and reach any document we need easily from a cell phone, Surface pad or laptop . . . [it] is revolutionizing our relationship with our customers and it’s empowering us with information on hand to answer questions anytime, anywhere.”

Learn how Dynamics AX helps take businesses like Hagler Systems to the next level

Click Here

The post Dynamics AX Lends a Personal Touch to Hagler Systems appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Is this the Future of Financial Data Visualization?

Umran Hasan — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 10:19:00 +0000

CFOs and finance leaders today have more data available to them than ever before. This data brings huge opportunities for those who can harness it to improve the speed and accuracy of decision making. A recent IDC study predicted that “by 2020, organizations able to analyze all relevant data and deliver actionable information will achieve an extra $430 billion in productivity benefits over their less analytically oriented peers.”

Unfortunately, collecting, modeling, scoring, and analyzing millions of pieces of data with hundreds of different attributes can be an arduous task for even the most data-driven finance professional.

At Microsoft, we are leveraging our deep heritage in productivity to empower finance leaders with intuitive and – dare we say it? – fun tools for the data tasks that lay before them. We envision a future where finance leaders can not only synthesize all the data they have from disparate sources but also visualize and interact with it in new ways. What does the future of data visualization look like for today’s modern finance leader? We have a few ideas.

1. End-to-end Visualization

The future of successful data visualization starts with establishing a single unified view of your business. As organizations grow, the data they produce typically scales with it. Expanding an enterprise across multiple countries and many lines of business requires finance leaders to first put in place systems that connect data, organize it, and share it in standard ways. ERP systems, like Microsoft Dynamics, can deliver these end-to-end insights by providing cross-department teams with dashboards designed specifically for the various roles in the company.

2. Data Visualization For All

After implementing systems to manage and standardize data, the next step toward the future of data visualization is equipping everyone in an organization with self-service tools that surface meaningful insights quickly. For many finance professionals, Excel is the tool of choice for day-to-day data management projects. Though it's been an integral part of businesses for years, the modern Excel is much more powerful than its predecessors. Today’s Excel can take millions of rows of data and convert it into touch-enabled, interactive visual data that can be embedded into PowerPoint. It can also integrate with many popular business intelligence tools, like Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Dynamics business solutions, and solutions from vendors such as Salesforce, SAP and Oracle to uncover deeper insights. This flexibility makes it possible for everyone, from the data-savvy to the data-novice, to query and visualize the data they need to get their jobs done.

3. Predictive Analytics

Examining the current data of an organization is only one piece of the data visualization puzzle, however. Finance leaders also need to predict and view where their business is headed. This means tapping into machine learning algorithms, like those offered in Microsoft Azure, to forecast and visualize future trends. From predicting regional market economic conditions to determining future investment scenarios, machine learning algorithms can provide the underlying intelligence necessary to visualize the financial future.

4. An Augmented Finance Reality

Imagine if data visualization for finance wasn’t just for PCs and mobile devices anymore. The augmented reality (AR) that was once relegated to only a gamer’s dream is now rapidly becoming a commercial reality. And while we don’t see any finance leaders projecting financial charts on boardroom walls using augmented reality headsets just yet, hold onto your HoloLens because the future of financial data visualization definitely has some disruptive AR changes ahead.

With the rise of big data and the Internet of Things, finance leaders are busier than ever managing vast quantities of data—making innovative data visualization technologies a greater priority. By selecting technology vendors that not only harness data but also empower everyone in their organization to securely access it, finance leaders can drive more informed decision making. Disruption is all around us and finance leaders who embrace a future forward approach to data visualization have the power to lead their organization into the next decade and beyond.

To learn more about Microsoft’s offerings for the finance professional, visit http://approjects.co.za/?big=finance. Also, register today to attend the virtual launch of the new Microsoft Dynamics AX and learn how this latest cloud release of Microsoft enterprise ERP solution can help take your business to the next level.

Citations:
IDC, FutureScape: Worldwide Big Data and Analytics 2016 Predictions, November 4, 2015

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