Field service​ - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/industry/field-service/ The future of agentic CRM and ERP Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:09:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/cropped-cropped-microsoft_logo_element.png Field service​ - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/industry/field-service/ 32 32 .cloudblogs .cta-box>.link { font-size: 15px; font-weight: 600; display: inline-block; background: #008272; line-height: 1; text-transform: none; padding: 15px 20px; text-decoration: none; color: white; } .cloudblogs img { height: auto; } .cloudblogs img.alignright { float:right; } .cloudblogs img.alignleft { float:right; } .cloudblogs figcaption { padding: 9px; color: #737373; text-align: left; font-size: 13px; font-size: 1.3rem; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-center { text-align: center; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-left { padding: 20px 0; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-right { padding: 20px 0; text-align:right; } .cloudblogs .cta-box { margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 20px; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-image { position:relative; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-image>.link { position: absolute; top: auto; left: 50%; -webkit-transform: translate(-50%,0); transform: translate(-50%,0); bottom: 0; } .cloudblogs table { width: 100%; } .cloudblogs table tr { border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding: 8px 0; } ]]> Listening, Learning, and Delivering: New Schedule Board Enhancements for Everyday Scheduling http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/07/07/dynamics-365-field-service-schedule-board-enhancements/ http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/07/07/dynamics-365-field-service-schedule-board-enhancements/#respond Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0000 Discover the latest Dynamics 365 Field Service Schedule Board enhancements designed to help schedulers work faster. Explore Move To, Reassign To, Map View, week numbers, and partial cancellation capabilities that simplify scheduling and improve operational flexibility.

The post Listening, Learning, and Delivering: New Schedule Board Enhancements for Everyday Scheduling appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

At Microsoft, our commitment to continuously improving the Dynamics 365 Field Service scheduling experience is rooted in a simple principle. We listen to users, learn from their feedback, and deliver enhancements that make their work easier and more efficient. 

As we invest in larger innovations like the Scheduling Operations Agent, our team remains focused on strengthening the core product. We address the real-world needs of dispatchers, resource managers, schedulers, admins, and frontline teams. Today, we are excited to share new Schedule Board enhancements that make common scheduling tasks faster, clearer, and more flexible.

What’s New for Scheduling Users?

Move To: Adjust Multiple Bookings in One Action      

Plans change. Weather delays, customer reschedules, project shifts, and operational disruptions can all require schedulers to move several bookings at the same time. Until now, users often had to update each booking individually, which was time consuming and increased the chance of errors. 

With Move To, schedulers can select multiple bookings( using ctrl+click on a PC or cmd+click) on a Mac and move them together. Whether work needs to shift by a day, a week, or another consistent offset, this enhancement reduces repetitive manual effort. It helps teams keep bookings accurate without rebuilding schedules one booking at a time. 

Reassign To: Move Multiple Bookings to a New Resource

When a resource becomes unavailable or work needs to be consolidated under a different person, schedulers need a faster way to update assignments. Reassigning bookings one by one can slow down operations, especially for teams managing large projects or multiple resources across several days. 

With Reassign To, users can select multiple bookings bookings (using ctrl+click on a PC or cmd+click on a Mac) and assign them to a new resource through a streamlined Schedule Board experience. This reduces manual updates, avoids unnecessary back and forth in dense editing panels, and makes it easier for schedulers to keep work moving when team assignments change.

Map View: Focus on Location Based Scheduling

For dispatchers and schedulers who rely on geographic context, the map is more than a supporting visual. It is central to understanding where work is happening, where resources are located, and how routes can be planned effectively. 

The new Map view gives users a cleaner, more focused way to work with location based scheduling. By making the map a primary view option, users can better visualize work and resource locations, plan routes with more context, and spend less time navigating around limited map space. Of course, users can still use the map panel alongside the existing List and Gantt views.

Week Numbers on the Schedule Board: Plan by the Calendar Language Your Team Uses.

Many organizations plan work using week numbers rather than date ranges alone. For teams that coordinate around Week 42 or Week 15, switching between date based views and week based planning can add unnecessary translation work. 

With the option to show week numbers on the Schedule Board, users can see week numbers alongside the scheduling experience, making it easier to plan, communicate, and coordinate work using the same calendar language their teams already use. This is especially helpful for organizations where week based planning is a standard part of operations. This feature is controlled with the existing Dynamics personalization settings so that your experience is consistent across Dynamics applications.

Partial Cancellation: Update the Right Part of a Long Running Booking

Long running and multi day bookings often need precise midstream adjustments. A resource may be unavailable for a specific week, a project may be paused, or one segment of a booking may need to be cancelled while the rest remains intact. Previously, these changes could require workarounds, manual edits, or cancellation and rebooking.

With Partial Cancellation, users can make more precise changes to multi-day bookings by cancelling only the portion that needs to change while preserving the rest of the booking. This helps schedulers work more naturally in aggregate views and reduces the risk of errors when managing complex, long-running work.

Keep Telling Us What You Need

Each of these enhancements reflects the same goal: make everyday scheduling easier, clearer, and more efficient. Some improvements help users act faster when plans change. Others make the board more readable, more flexible, or better aligned to regional planning practices. Together, they continue our investment in strengthening the core scheduling experience for the people who rely on it every day.

We’re grateful for your feedback, whether it comes through direct customer conversations, support channels, partners, surveys, or the Dynamics 365 Field Service Ideas Portal. Please keep telling us what you need and sharing the scenarios that matter most to your teams. Your feedback helps shape the future of scheduling in Dynamics 365 Field Service.

The post Listening, Learning, and Delivering: New Schedule Board Enhancements for Everyday Scheduling appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/07/07/dynamics-365-field-service-schedule-board-enhancements/feed/ 0
What’s New in Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/19/field-service-mobile-updates-dynamics-365/ Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:00:00 +0000 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/?p=202520 Field Service Mobile just got smarter.
New updates help technicians work faster, stay connected, and handle jobs with fewer clicks.

The post What’s New in Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

Field service organizations rely on accurate, timely information to support day‑to‑day operations. With the latest improvements to the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app, we’re helping frontline workers stay productive and connected on the job.

Optimized for mobile experiences on iOS, Android and Windows, focusing on usability improvements designed to make the Field Service mobile app easier, faster, and more intuitive for frontline workers to use.

Enhanced Mobile Lists

The Power Apps Grid on Mobile can now display more information directly in lists and subgrids. These updates allow lists to show more than three columns of data, remove row avatars, and display column labels alongside values. As a result, frontline workers can better scan relevant information, reducing the need to open individual records to find key details.

Documentation: Show more data in grids

Improved Booking Status Updates with Custom Icons

The Booking Status control has been updated to better align with mobile interaction patterns. Instead of a traditional dropdown, now access status through a clearly visible button that opens a drawer based selection experience. Plus, use custom icons for booking status types.

Documentation: Configure booking statuses with custom icons

A Modern, Mobile‑First Note‑Taking Experience

Instead of relying on desktop‑style timelines that can feel cumbersome on a phone or tablet, technicians now get a mobile‑optimized note‑taking experience that makes capturing information fast and timely.

What’s in the new note taking control:

  • Streamlined, user-friendly experience for consuming past notes
  • Multiple photos and videos per note, ideal for proof of work, and complex issues
  • Capture notes in low‑ or no‑connectivity environments with offline support
  • Seamless integration with the Timeline, ensuring notes are visible to the back office and managers
  • Stores notes in the same table used by Timeline, allowing technician notes captured in the mobile control to remain visible to back-office staff who work in Timeline

Documentation: Add a control for note-taking

Phones showing Field Service updates

Faster, Smarter Lookups on Mobile

With lookup enhancements in Field Service mobile, technicians can quickly find and select related records without breaking their flow.

Disable Clickthrough to Reduce Unnecessary Navigation

Disable lookup hyperlink click‑through. This helps reduce accidental miss‑clicks that lead to unnecessary navigation.

Documentation:  Disable clickthrough on lookup

New Mobile Lookup Control

By streamlining lookups, the new mobile lookup experience reduces cognitive load through a modern bottom sheet design, improving overall efficiency and ease of use when selecting values. Lookup clickthrough can also be disabled within this new control, so technicians can avoid unnecessary clicks.

Documentation: Add a mobile lookup control

image

Ready to Adopt these Controls?

These updates reflect ongoing improvements to the Field Service mobile user experience, with a focus on making common interactions simpler and more efficient for frontline workers.

To take advantage of these enhancements, review the documentation linked throughout this article and update the environment to configure and enable the desired controls. Because these updates are opt-in and configurable, controls can be adopted based on organizational needs.

We’re actively listening and would love your feedback as you explore these capabilities. Please share your suggestions via the Ideas portal.

The post What’s New in Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
Managing Complex Service Work with Financial Clarity http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/02/unified-financial-model-service-work-dynamics-365/ Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000 Learn how Dynamics 365 unifies field service and project financials, enabling real-time profitability tracking, accurate billing, and connected service delivery.

The post Managing Complex Service Work with Financial Clarity appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

Unifying service activity into a continuous, connected experience

Service work rarely happens in isolation. What looks like a single repair or maintenance visit is usually one step in a broader process that spans both service execution and financial tracking.

In many organizations, those two halves stay disconnected: work orders are completed in the field, while costs, revenue, and progress are tracked separately. The result is limited visibility into the true financial impact of service work as it happens and reconciliation after the fact instead of managing operational and financial data together in a single, continuous process.

Enabling a unified financial model for service work

At the end of January 2026, we introduced interoperability between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations generally available (GA), enabling service organizations to manage execution and financial outcomes as part of a single, connected model.

Within this model, work orders are no longer isolated, one-off transactions. They become part of a broader financial and operational framework that connects service activity over time. Organizations can maintain a continuous view of work performed across assets, contracts, or long-running service engagements while improving financial visibility, operational traceability, and billing accuracy.

For more information about the GA release, see the release plan documentation:

Contoso scenario: managing parts usage across a project

Consider Contoso Energy Services, a provider that installs and maintains industrial refrigeration systems for large grocery chains. Their work often involves multi-week preventive maintenance, complex repairs, and large-scale equipment installations, scenarios where coordinating service execution and financial tracking is critical.

In this example, Northwind Grocers engages Contoso to replace refrigeration equipment across multiple store locations. Contoso structures the engagement under a project contract, with contract lines defining how parts used during installation and maintenance are priced and billed

Contoso creates a project representing the overall equipment replacement program. This project serves as the financial structure for the engagement, tracking service activity across multiple locations and work orders within a single, governed view.

Contoso then executes individual store visits through work orders linked to this structure. For example:

  • Work order – replace refrigeration parts at Store #102
  • Work order – replace refrigeration parts at Store #118

Planning material usage before execution

Before technicians arrive on site, the team captures the parts they expect to use as estimates on the work order. For Store #102, this includes two refrigeration compressors and four refrigerant valves.

Once entered, these estimated quantities automatically flow from the work order into Project Operations, where they appear as material estimates on the associated project.

In Project Operations and Dynamics 365 Finance deployments, those material estimates also generate demand forecast lines.

Converting parts usage into financial transactions

Technicians record the parts they use directly on the work order as they complete the work. Through the interoperability, this usage is translated into financial records within the project. Material usage is processed through standard approval workflows and recorded as project actuals, representing the financial impact of materials consumed during service execution.

Tracking project profitability

As work orders progress across multi-month installations, the financial impact becomes continuously visible throughout execution. This gives organizations an ongoing view of profitability, so they can track performance as work progresses spot trends early, such as parts consumption running ahead of estimate, cost overruns, or margin erosion, while the engagement is still in flight.

Posting transactions to finance

After approval, the system creates project actuals linked to the appropriate contract line accurately reflecting the financial impact of the completed work. From here, the invoicing and posting process depends on the organization’s deployment model.

Project Operations Core deployments: Contoso uses actuals to generate a draft pro forma invoice within Project Operations. This invoice previews what will be billed, and users can review and finalize it directly in Project Operations.

Project Operations and Dynamics 365 Finance deployments: Approved actuals are transferred to Dynamics 365 Finance through the Project Operations Integration Journal. Finance users can review and post these transactions, then handle invoicing within Finance.

Organizations working with other ERP systems can apply a similar pattern to transfer approved financial data for downstream invoicing and posting.

Once processed, transactions flow into the project subledger and then into the general ledger.

Capabilities enabled by the Field Service and Project Operations interoperability

These capabilities connect planning, execution, and financial processing within a single operating model.

Service work no longer generates disconnected operational records that require downstream reconciliation. Instead, execution flows through a unified financial lifecycle, from estimates and forecasts to actuals, invoicing, and revenue recognition.

CapabilityWhat Happens
Multi-Work Order Project LinkingMultiple Work Orders including Field Service Agreement-generated work can be linked to a single Project, so reactive and planned service contribute to the same project delivery.
Project ReassignmentA Project can be updated or removed from a Work Order before financial posting if the wrong project was initially selected.
Organization-Level Pricing SourceOrganizations can configure whether pricing originates from Dynamics 365 Field Service or Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Support for Discount %Discounts % applied on the work order line flow through to financial records and invoicing.
Material Estimates from Work OrdersEstimated quantities entered on Work Order products are reflected as material estimates in Project Operations, providing early visibility into expected costs and revenue.
Material Usage to Project ActualsWhen Work Order products and services are marked as used, they are captured as material usage logs in Project Operations, once approved, generate project actuals representing the financial impact of the work performed.
Quantity Used vs Quantity BilledTechnicians can record the quantity used while billing for a different quantity.
Configurable Approval ControlsMaterial transactions can be approved manually or automatically, depending on what works best for your organization.
Mobile OfflineTechnicians can capture material usage offline and sync once connectivity returns.
Finance-Controlled Inventory DimensionsIn deployments that use Project Operations and Finance, Work Order transactions respect finance-defined sites, warehouses, and financial dimensions.
Serial and Batch Inventory TraceabilityIn deployments that use Project Operations and Finance, parts tracked through serial and batch control remain traceable across service and financial records.

Deployment models and modern architecture alignment

The Field Service and Project Operations interoperability supports multiple deployment models, allowing organizations to align with their broader operational and financial landscape.

Organizations can choose how they structure financial management and system ownership within Dynamics 365 or other ERP systems while maintaining a consistent operating model for service execution.

Project Operations Core: In this model, Project Operations manages project financials and invoicing, while Field Service remains the system of record for inventory.

Project Operations and Finance deployments: In this model, Finance and Supply Chain Management become the system of record for inventory and accounting. Finance processes financial postings and final invoicing, while Field Service and Project Operations manage operational execution and track project financials.

Both deployment models rely on the modern Project Operations architecture, which introduces a structured financial hierarchy designed for service-centric operations.

PMA guidance and manufacturing deployments

The Field Service and Project Operations interoperability relies on the modern Project Operations architecture, where PMA projects are largely read-only and limited to financial activities. As a result, transactions post only to modern Project Operations projects, not PMA projects. Use modern projects for service-based scenarios and keep PMA projects for reference or limited financial activities.

Learn more: Move to the modern architecture

Ready to get started?

Please visit our learn more documentation: Set up Field Service interoperation with Project Operations. For detailed licensing guidance, see the Dynamics 365 licensing documentation.

The post Managing Complex Service Work with Financial Clarity appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
Becoming a Frontier Manufacturing Firm: Agentic decisions across the manufacturing value chain http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2026/04/16/becoming-a-frontier-manufacturing-firm-agentic-decisions-across-the-manufacturing-value-chain/ Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000 At Hannover Messe 2026, Microsoft is showcasing how agentic ERP with Copilot, agents and Dynamics 365 helps manufacturers replan faster, make better production tradeoffs, and meet or exceed customer service SLAs.

The post Becoming a Frontier Manufacturing Firm: Agentic decisions across the manufacturing value chain appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

Manufacturing leaders today are under constant pressure: volatile demand, fragile supply networks, inventory risk, and zero tolerance for missed customer commitments. Plants must protect margins and maintain uptime while responding to disruption with incomplete or delayed information. 

To lead in this environment, manufacturers need decision-making that surfaces risk earlier, absorb supply shocks faster, and replans quickly, so production stays aligned to demand and customer commitments. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is your agentic enterprise resource planning (ERP) foundation

Dynamics 365 gives manufacturers a connected foundation where signals from demand, supply, capacity, and cost can drive action. As part of the Microsoft platform, it brings together data, analytics, automation, and collaboration across the business. 

Imagine a manufacturing stack where every part of the business is connected, where data isn’t fragmented across systems but unified into a shared understanding of operations, and where insights don’t sit in dashboards but show up in context, in the flow of work. Where your teams can build AI agents and adapt processes in real time rather than reengineering them months later. Where every person operates with the full context of the business, demand, supply, capacity, and commitments, every decision drives aligned action across the company. This is what it means to close the gap between knowing and doing. 

At Hannover Messe 2026, Microsoft is showcasing how agentic ERP with Copilot, agents and Dynamics 365 supports these operational decisions amid constant change, helping manufacturers replan faster, make better production tradeoffs, and meet or exceed customer service SLAs.   

From sensing demand shifts to mitigating supplier delays, production constraints, and equipment downtime, these signals must translate into real-time fulfillment and order promise decisions. Agentic ERP can connect planning, sourcing, production, fulfillment and service commerce to execute these decisions across the manufacturing value chain. 

Agentic demand planning can sense shifts earlier  

Demand planning can help you forecast demand, applying a structured phase in/phase out with external signals to account for market dynamics. Copilot accelerates this data analysis, scenario modeling, and incorporates market intelligence. For structured planning, Demand Planning in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides an agentic collaborative demand planning solution, powered by best-in-class forecasting algorithms and models, an immersive user experience with AI, intelligent segmentation and signal analysis, and analytics.  

“Now, we can see the item-level details and the solution populates Dynamics 365 with that information for master planning. That’s a big step forward because now we essentially have a planned budget and we can easily produce the next production cycle’s budget without manually exporting the data.” 

Patrick Keller, Head of ERP, Poloplast | Read more about how Poloplast modernizes manufacturing and streamlines forecasting and planning with Dynamics 365

Agent evaluates supplier disruption impact enabling operational resilience 

A delayed component or supplier exception is not a paperwork problem. It is a production and operational risk. Today, Microsoft announced the Procurement Agent in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is available in public preview. The Procurement Agent helps teams respond faster to supply disruption by decoding supplier communications and identifying which production orders, inventory positions, and customer commitments are at risk, while keeping humans in control. Beyond triaging supplier communications, the Procurement Agent performs impact analysis so teams can assess downstream effects and act before a supplier issue turns into an on time, in full (OTIF) failure.

“Across the team, Dynamics 365 will save us a total of 20 hours weekly. The big benefit in time savings is that the agent has read the email, found the order, found the lines affected, decoded what the vendor is trying to say, and recommended actions.”

Sean Barrett, Inventory and Analytics Manager, Farmlands Cooperative | Read more about Farmlands Cooperative: Sowing the seeds of innovation with autonomous agents in Dynamics 365

Agent mitigates production constraints 

For the shop floor, Copilot, connected to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management via Dynamics 365 MCP Server (Model Context Protocol), can provide AI-generated insights to schedules, inventory, and orders. Copilot can also surface quality-related alerts and can suggest targeted inspections to prevent recurring recalibration issues enabling supervisors to proactively mitigate resource constraints and shortages before they impact production schedules, triggering downstream inventory repositioning and order promise adjustments across fulfillment and customer commitments. 

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides near real-time visibility to the production floor; with agentic experiences, supervisors can spend less time gathering data and more time on proactive exception management. This translates to higher Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), fewer unplanned stops, and better on-time delivery to customers. 

Agent protects production uptime 

Equipment uptime and asset health are critical inputs to manufacturing performance. Unplanned downtime, delayed service, or poorly coordinated technician schedules can quickly cascade into constrained capacity and missed production targets. The Scheduling Operations Agent in Dynamics 365 Field Service can help maintain equipment availability for constrained production schedules by dynamically coordinating technician assignments based on geography, skills, certification requirements, capacity, travel time, and SLA commitments.  

Today, Microsoft announced Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot is available in public preview within Dynamics 365 Field Service. With Microsoft 365 Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service, manufacturers can use Researcher to quickly view operational information across work orders, asset and service history, and parts availability. Researcher surfaces relevant context from Field Service data and Microsoft 365 signals to help teams understand situations as they arise.

“The field technicians understand that AI can be a benefit for them. It’s really about trying to improve their overall experience as well as the customer’s”

Matthew Hashenberger, Head of Service Excellence, Siemens Smart Infrastructure (U.S.) | Learn how Siemens elevates field service operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Agentic warehouse management can fulfill demand faster  

As finished goods hit the warehouse, intelligent inventory on-hand balancing in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management warehouse management updates slotting to align demand with pick zones. When inbound put-away happens, workers are directed to the best locations based on the intelligent inventory balancing, keeping the warehouse organized dynamically. On the outbound side, optimized pick routes shorten travel distance. The combined outcome is higher throughput with the same labor—faster fulfillment, lower picking cost.  

With Dynamics 365, we trust the system. It’s easy to retrieve information and know it’s correct; people can just drive the forklift over. All the considerations we have for our picking, packing, and customer details, the system is doing it for us. 

Niclas Strand, Warehouse Manager, KåKå, Orkla Food | Read more about why Orkla Food Ingredients’ Dynamics 365 transformation is a sweet upgrade

Agentic B2B Commerce aligns customer orders to production reality 

As manufacturers and industrial distributors modernize how they sell, serve, and scale, digital ordering is becoming a core capability of the ERP rather than a standalone channel. Dynamics 365 Commerce enables manufacturers to support complex buying and selling models including business-to-business (B2B), business-to-business-to-business (B2B2B), and multioutlet ordering across direct customers, distributors, and dealer networks. 

Agentic B2B commerce can help automate routine ordering, replenishment, and quote-to-order processes while remaining tightly connected to pricing, inventory, warehousing, and production planning. This can allow manufacturers and distributors to accelerate order cycles, strengthen partner collaboration, and scale indirect growth with accuracy and control. 

Diagram illustrating a B2B2B commerce network, showing relationships between a manufacturer, distributors, a field seller, an outlet, and an end customer, with arrows indicating interactions across planning, sales, distribution, and purchasing roles.

Partner agents to empower manufacturers and solve unmet needs 

Frontier Manufacturing Firms can extend ERP embedded‑operational decisioning using Copilot and agents built with the Dynamics 365 ERP MCP Server. Microsoft’s partners are building agents to solve high friction manufacturing workflows, including engineering change impact analysis, product recalls, and configure-price‑quote‑ processes, enabling manufacturers to execute operational decisions across sourcing, production, and fulfillment within the systems they use to run their business. 

“With the Experlogix CPQ MCP Server and Dynamics 365 ERP manufacturers can turn Copilot into a revenue agent that understands complex configurations, validates engineering rules and constraints, and generates accurate quotes instantly. This accelerates sales cycles, with many customers reducing time to quote by well over 90%.”

Louis-Philippe Perras, CTO, Experlogix 

Cegeka’s Quality Impact Recall Agent turns disruptive recall events into a controlled, orchestrated process for manufacturers reliant on end-to-end traceability. Running inside Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, companies handling batch- or serial-controlled products can identify affected materials across plants and distribution channels in minutes, trigger automated communication flows, and accelerate quality-investigation cycles. This approach supports manufacturers in maintaining continuity, reducing risk, and protecting both customers and brand reputation.” 

Stijn Geeroms, VP Business Solutions, Cegeka

“The most expensive moment in manufacturing isn’t when something breaks. It’s when an engineering change gets approved without anyone understanding the impact. Manufacturers don’t need another disconnected AI tool to fix that. They need intelligence embedded where they already work. That’s why we built the Staedean ECM+ Impact Agent natively on Copilot inside Dynamics 365 – your rules, your data, your answer – without asking teams to leave the system they run their business in.”

Michiel Toppers, Chief Product Officer, Staedean

These agents extend ERP-embedded decision execution into engineering, quality, and configure-to-order workflows that directly impact production scheduling and customer commitments. 

Become a Frontier Manufacturing Firm 

The manufacturers that lead this next era will be the ones who can respond to demand shifts, supplier delays, and equipment constraints by coordinating planning, production, fulfillment, and customer commitments across the value chain in real time. 

Microsoft is committed to helping manufacturers make that transition, combining a connected Dynamics 365 foundation with Copilot and agents embedded in everyday workflows plus a partner ecosystem that brings manufacturing expertise to the front line. Join us and become Frontier.  

Join us in person at Hannover Messe 2026: 

Register to watch a series of executive conversations recorded at Hannover Messe 2026: Executive Insights: Unlock the Future of Industrial Intelligence 

The post Becoming a Frontier Manufacturing Firm: Agentic decisions across the manufacturing value chain appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot Studio offerings http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2026/03/18/2026-release-wave-1-plans-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-microsoft-power-platform-and-copilot-studio-offerings/ Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000 We’re excited to publish the 2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The post 2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot Studio offerings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

We’re entering a new era of AI-powered business applications, and today we’re excited to publish the 2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, outlining a broad set of capabilities slated for release between April 2026 and September 2026. These updates reflect our ongoing commitment to making AI an essential partner in how organizations operate, innovate, and grow.

Dynamics 365 leads this wave with AI-powered, agentic innovations across sales, service, finance, supply chain, human resources (HR), and commerce—helping organizations unify data, automate processes, and elevate customer and employee experiences. Microsoft Power Platform continues to expand modern app development, intelligent automation, and enterprise-grade governance to empower makers and developers to innovate with confidence. Role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot further evolve into intelligent daily command centers, helping to deliver richer, data-grounded insights and extensibility that help teams work smarter across every role.

To help you stay current on the most important and innovative capabilities, we’re moving beyond bi-annual launch events to lighter, more frequent business applications updates, featuring expert insights and demonstrations from Microsoft product leaders and engineers.

Be sure to stay updated on the latest features and create your personalized release plan using the release planner.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

2026 release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 deliver AI-powered, agentic experiences across sales, service, finance, supply chain, commerce, HR, projects, sustainability, and enterprise resource planning (ERP)—bringing deeper Copilot integration, intelligent automation, unified customer and operational data, and enhanced cross-app capabilities to help organizations drive efficiency, elevate customer and employee experiences, and operate with greater agility and confidence.

Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of AI to help sellers build their pipeline, enrich opportunities, and accelerate deal closure, while helping sellers easily access accurate, up-to-date information and recommending high-impact actions that sellers can take. Copilot experiences in Dynamics 365 Sales can draw on data spanning customer relationship management (CRM) and Microsoft 365 signals, like email and meeting recaps, to deliver actionable insights across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 experiences.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to enhance agentic capabilities across case management, email, customer intent, quality evaluation, and knowledge management. AI-infused admin and supervisor help to provide more transparency and quicker time-to-value. These investments strengthen end-to-end service orchestration, from helping identify customer intent to driving autonomous workflows that elevate service quality and responsiveness.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Dynamics 365 Contact Center advances the agentic contact center in 2026 release wave 1 with new AI-powered capabilities that improve self-service, support accelerate assisted service, and help organizations run contact center operations more intelligently in 2026 release wave 1. It expands to include emerging channels, supervisor insights, and extensibility, giving organizations a unified, AI-powered system to elevate the customer experience.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Dynamics 365 Field Service strengthens service execution across technician productivity, resource scheduling, and work order management. Investments focus on mobile usability and reliability, intelligent scheduling through the Scheduling Operations Agent, and end‑to‑end execution across assets, projects, and financial operations in this release wave. Together, these updates help organizations manage service complexity and deliver consistent service outcomes.

Dynamics 365 Sustainability

Dynamics 365 Sustainability introduces more intuitive reporting navigation, advanced calculation versioning, and granular data‑locking to reinforce governance and regulatory confidence in this wave. Expanded finance integration, streamlined workflows, and updated templates and factor libraries will further empower organizations to make informed decisions and support progress toward their sustainability goals.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Dynamics 365 Finance delivers continued global scale enhancements that drive greater financial automation, strengthen global regulatory compliance posture, and enhance financial planning and analytics—helping organizations operate more efficiently and achieve their financial and operational goals with confidence.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management’s 2026 wave 1 enhances supply and demand planning with price-demand correlation and capacity-to-promise (CTP) date protection. Supplier communication and engagement are streamlined, while warehousing gains AI-powered picking, inventory rebalancing, and hands-free scanning—driving supply chain efficiency.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Dynamics 365 Project Operations brings rich capabilities in 2026 release wave 1—from change order support and smarter project planning to smoother quoting, budgeting, and contract workflows. New enhancements streamline item consumption, mobile expense management, subscription billing, and modern-architecture migration—delivering connected project experience.

Dynamics 365 Commerce

Dynamics 365 Commerce strengthens business-to-business (B2B) with multi-outlet ordering, unified sign-in, outlet-specific catalogs, and built-in credit management to help reduce friction and protect cash flow. It modernizes order management and assisted-selling workflows in retail stores, helping to improve associate productivity, and customer experiences across channels. It also enables cross-legal-entity inventory lookup and flexible, attribute-based pricing to help accelerate mass updates and help drive higher sales.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to advance in areas such as recruitment, onboarding, reporting, and integrated workforce management. By merging enhanced user experiences with broader ecosystem integration and expanding regional payroll collaborations, the platform enables organizations to optimize employee engagement, support operational accuracy, and confidently achieve their workforce objectives.

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities will introduce new enhancements that strengthen the foundation for AI experiences across Dynamics 365. These updates include improvements to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, as well as the general availability of immersive home, which is an AI-powered workspace designed to help users stay focused and prioritize what matters most.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data acts as the grounding layer for CRM copilots and AI agents, delivering real‑time, unified customer profiles that help power accurate decisions. With enriched data, teams can act on insights directly in their workflow to deliver timely, personalized experiences that deepen engagement and drive better outcomes. The result is an AI-ready data core that elevates agents and helps deliver more connected, intelligent CRM experiences.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys empowers end-to-end, agentic customer engagements across sales, marketing, and service, allowing businesses to proactively react to customer behavior using Copilot and AI agents. With smarter orchestration tools, teams can deliver impactful campaigns at scale to drive stronger relationships, higher efficiency, and revenue growth. Part of Dynamics 365, every interaction within your organization benefits from shared data and consistent intelligence across Microsoft CRM applications.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central accelerates the move to agentic ERP with enhancements to our AI‑powered agents that automate sales and purchase scenarios in 2026 release wave 1. Alongside new business capabilities, we invest heavily in developer productivity to support extensibility—improving advanced language (AL) testing, debugging, Copilot extensibility, and agent design.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio

2026 release wave 1 updates for Microsoft Power Platform deliver modernized app experiences across Power Apps and Power Pages, AI-powered automation and agent innovation in Power Automate and Copilot Studio, enhanced Dataverse intelligence and programmability, and strengthened governance, security, and cost management capabilities to help organizations build, scale, and manage intelligent solutions with confidence.

Power Apps

Power Apps continues to modernize app experiences with a refreshed model-driven user interface (UI), improved mobile and offline capabilities, streamlined search, and expanded AI features. This release brings standardized modern theming to everyone, real-time Dataverse access for offline-first canvas apps, enhanced search in grids and lookups, and broader availability and extensibility of generative pages to help teams build and scale intelligent apps faster.

Power Pages

Power Pages will further empower pro-developers and low-code makers to build intelligent business portals for your employees, customers, citizens, and partners through better integration with market leading AI tools. Additionally, enhanced security agent features will further support low-code makers, pro-developers, and admins with actionable insights and abilities for securing their websites.

Power Automate

Power Automate is Microsoft’s comprehensive automation platform for cloud flows, desktop flows, and process mining. This release introduces AI agent authoring, optimization, and self-healing capabilities for desktop flows, Copilot Studio-powered actions in cloud flows, enhanced maker and collaboration tools across both, general availability of object-centric process mining, and consolidated governance reporting.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studiocontinues its journey to make agent and agentic workflows even easier to build and more powerful. Now you can further customize agents built with Agent Builder in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and power your automation with high value AI actions. Deeper governance, multi-agent orchestration, and evaluations enable further scaling. With connections to Microsoft Foundry and Work IQ, your agents can use the latest AI technology in coordination with your organizational data.

Microsoft Dataverse

Microsoft Dataverse continues to invest in enterprise-ready agentic and low-code data platform capabilities. The spotlight is on Work IQ and Copilot integration, delivering organization-specific decisions with adaptive learning and full auditability. We’re also enhancing agent programmability with Dataverse APIs, MCP servers, and Python SDK, plus new storage management tools for enterprise-grade compliance at scale.

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administrationintroduces admin controls for agent security, real-time risk assessment in Copilot Studio, and AI-powered governance agents that automate tenant monitoring and remediation in this release. Enhanced visibility into usage patterns, granular Copilot credit usage with pay-as-you-go (PAYG) caps, and connector dependencies help you optimize costs, demonstrate return on investment (ROI), and enforce compliance with organizational policies using features within the Power Platform Admin Center. GitHub integration and deploy from Git mature your application lifecycle management (ALM) practices with full audit trails.

Business Applications Update

Power Platform &

Copilot Studio edition

Decorative abstract gradient background.

Updates to role-based agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

2026 release wave 1 updates for Microsoft role-based agents transform Sales Agent and Finance Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot into intelligent daily command centers, helping to deliver richer, data-grounded insights, enhanced chat and mobile experiences, contextual support across Outlook and Teams, and strengthened governance and extensibility to help organizations drive productivity and scale AI responsibly.

Sales Agent

Sales Agent becomes the seller’s daily command center with richer Sales Chat and Sales Home experiences across desktop and mobile in 2026 release wave 1. Sellers will gain streamlined access to deal and account insights through configurable record summaries, contextual support in Outlook and Teams, and improved email and meeting intelligence. New governance and extensibility controls will also help organizations scale AI responsibly.

Finance Agent

Finance Agent helps finance professionals and their stakeholders interact with financial information from their ERP within the flow of work. In 2026 release wave 1, we continue expanding how this financial assistant supports common finance tasks such as reconciliation, variance analysis, and data preparation in Excel, as well as customer communications in Outlook. By bringing financial insights and assistance directly into familiar productivity tools, the Finance Agent helps teams investigate issues faster, respond to stakeholders more efficiently, and spend less time manually preparing or reconciling data so they can focus more on financial analysis and decision support.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please refer to the Dynamics 365 2026 release wave 1 plan, the Microsoft Power Platform 2026 release wave 1 plan, and role-based agents 2026 release wave 1. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Business Applications Update

The Business Applications Update offers an early preview of new capabilities coming in the months ahead. This refreshed structure is designed to reflect the reality of our time: innovation does not happen twice a year; it is constant. Whether you are a strategic leader or a hands-on practitioner, this new cadence is built to get you quickly up to speed.

The post 2026 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot Studio offerings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
The era of agentic business applications arrives at Convergence 2025 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2025/12/09/the-era-of-agentic-business-applications-arrives-at-convergence-2025/ Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:00:00 +0000 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/?p=197006 At Convergence 2025, December 9–12, we’ll explore how organizations can build an AI-first autonomous enterprise powered by data, copilots, and agents working together across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Cloud.

The post The era of agentic business applications arrives at Convergence 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

The way we work is transforming. Generative AI and agentic business applications are catalysts for a profound shift in how we create, collaborate, and make decisions. What once took hours now happens in moments. Ideas move faster, insights surface sooner, and the boundaries between human creativity and machine capability are blurring. This isn’t the future—it’s unfolding now, and it’s changing the very fabric of how businesses operate.

It’s a move from systems of record to systems of action. In this new era, AI agents go beyond support—they help interpret signals, uncover patterns, and initiate actions and continuously optimize processes on your behalf. At Convergence 2025, December 9–12, we’ll explore how organizations can build an AI-first autonomous enterprise powered by data, copilots, and agents working together across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Cloud.

From automation to autonomy: The AI-first organization

Businesses have long pursued automation to streamline operations. The next leap is autonomy—systems that interpret signals across the business, adapt workflows in real time, and anticipate decisions. Autonomous enterprises go beyond efficiency—they are driven, adaptive, and human-centered, with intelligent systems that understand context, collaborate across processes, and deliver measurable outcomes.

We believe the recognition of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Leader placement in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ and IDC MarketScape reports reinforces our ability to connect front-end and back-end operations into one intelligent ecosystem. Our leadership is grounded in the breadth of the Microsoft Cloud, the depth of our data estate, and our ability to bring AI, analytics, and business applications together as a unified platform to accelerate end-to-end AI transformation.

Agentic business applications are built on three connected pillars: data, Copilot, and agents—working together to change how work gets done.

1. Data: The foundation of agent autonomy

Most business processes begin with data. Finance close, order-to-cash, customer insights, case resolution, supply chain planning, field service, HR workflows—each depends on complete, connected, trusted information. When this data is fragmented across systems, agents can’t act with autonomy, and AI can only answer questions instead of accelerating outcomes.

Dynamics 365 spans both front-office and back-office operations—customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP)—providing a continuous, end-to-end view of customers, employees, finances, supply chain, and operations. This structured, governed, and auditable data is the backbone of business processes—how work flows, how controls are enforced, and how organizations maintain compliance at scale.

As business model innovation becomes even more important, we continue to invest deeply in these core applications. We’re expanding capabilities across ERP and CRM, investing in bringing Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and Microsoft Power Platform closer to Dynamics 365 than ever before. From connected frontlines to adaptive supply chains, business applications are becoming composable, intelligent, and outcome-driven—helping customers innovate more quickly while maintaining trust, security, and governance, adapt faster, redesign workflows, and build the operational integrity required for agent-powered processes. At Convergence 2025, you’ll see how Dynamics 365 continues to evolve as the operational engine of AI-first organizations.

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we announced major advances in how agents connect with ERP systems. The Dynamics 365 ERP Model Context Protocol (MCP) server is evolving from static actions to a dynamic, configurable framework that adapts as business needs evolve. A new analytics MCP server extends this capability to structured metrics and insights, supporting agents to reason over governed operational and financial data—not snapshots or exports, but live business signals. Together, these updates unify data, logic, and actions into a common protocol that can simplify integration and accelerate automation.

And with MCP designed for massive scale—including support of millions of ERP actions—organizations gain the performance and extensibility required for agent-powered business processes at enterprise scale.

People collaborating in an office setting.

The entire Microsoft data and application stack—Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM, Dataverse, Fabric, and more—forms the operational engine of agentic transformation. It provides the structure, governance, and adaptability required to support AI-powered business models and next-generation workflows.

2. Microsoft 365 Copilot: Your strategic productivity partner

microsoft 365 copilot: built for work

Get started ↗

Copilot continues to help transform productivity across many roles. It helps sales teams move deals forward, finance teams accelerate reconciliation, and service teams resolve issues before they escalate. But Copilot is more than an assistant—it’s the connective layer that links people, data, and systems, understanding intent, orchestrating workflows, and guiding decisions across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365.

3. Agents: Plan, decide, and act

We expect AI agents will be core to how businesses operate—planning, deciding, and acting across systems to accelerate outcomes. These agents will interpret signals, identify patterns, and initiate actions to keep the business in motion.

Microsoft’s strategy spans the full agent ecosystem: first-party embedded agents inside Dynamics 365, agents for specialized industries that can be customized and extended by partners, specific partner-built agents, and custom agents created by organizations through Microsoft Copilot Studio. All share the same security, governance, and identity foundation.

For small to mid-sized businesses, Dynamics 365 Business Central brings agents directly into everyday finance and operations. The Sales Order Agent creates, validates, and updates sales orders which can help improve accuracy and speed by reducing manual entry and exception management. The Payables Agent automates vendor invoices and reconciliations, improving control while freeing finance teams from repetitive tasks. Together, these agents help Business Central customers modernize core processes with governed, AI-powered actions that keep work flowing across purchasing, sales, and accounting.

Across Dynamics 365 finance and operations, embedded agents are transforming core processes—from time and expense entry in Project Operations, to supplier outreach in Supply Chain Management, to reconciliations in Finance and technician scheduling in Field Service. These agents help reduce manual effort and bring greater precision and autonomy to everyday operations.

At Convergence 2025, we’re also thrilled to announce the public preview of the Product Change Management Agent Template—an AI-powered solution that transforms how manufacturers manage the process of change across equipment, products, and processes changes. Built on Copilot Studio, the agent automates workflows and connects critical systems, helping teams cut approval times from weeks to days, reduce errors, and bring innovations to market, faster. Learn how customers like Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) are using this agent template to optimize their manufacturing operations.

Partner-built agents that extend industry workflows

Partners are building agents that extend domain workflows and connect directly to Dynamics 365 through the MCP. These solutions show how agent-to-agent coordination and cross-system reasoning will define the next era of enterprise automation.

Shop Floor by RSM helps manufacturers gain real-time visibility across production by bringing job details, quality checks, and operational signals into one experience. It can surface issues as they occur and support teams in resolving them quickly, helping to reduce disruptions and maintain consistent output. By connecting workers, data, and actions on the floor, the agent can support more resilient, adaptive manufacturing operations.

The PayFlow Agent by HSO helps finance teams manage vendor payment inquiries with greater speed and accuracy. It analyzes incoming emails, retrieves live payment data from Dynamics 365, and responds with up-to-date status information—which can reduce manual effort and help vendors receive clear, timely communication. The agent streamlines payment cycles and can improve transparency across accounts payable.

The Quality Impact Recall Agent by Cegeka helps organizations identify product quality issues and trace their impact across inventory and customer shipments. It coordinates notifications, guides corrective steps, and streamlines recall preparedness, which can help teams act quickly when risks emerge and maintain trust in the products they deliver.

Factorial connects to the Dynamics 365 Business Central MCP Server to deliver a new agent-to-agent experience. You can use a single Copilot interface to pull, exchange, and act on data across the systems. For example, within expense workflows, Factorial’s agent can request, validate, and reconcile financial data directly with Business Central.

Zensai’s agent integrates with Dynamics 365 Business Central to transform an organization’s operational signals into aligned goals and check-ins inside Microsoft 365. Built in Copilot Studio and connected through MCP for Dynamics 365, the agent converts finance, compliance, HR, and sales insights into structured, cascaded goals within Perform 365. At Convergence 2025, you’ll see how these first-party, partner, and custom-built agents form a connected ecosystem—and how organizations are already using them to move from automation to autonomy.

Convergence 2025

Convergence has always been where our community comes together to learn, connect, and imagine what’s next—and this year we’re reigniting that tradition at a moment of extraordinary change.

Throughout the event you’ll see how organizations are moving from systems of record to systems of agency, and how you can apply these ideas to accelerate your own AI transformation. I’m excited for you to experience everything we’ve been building.

The post The era of agentic business applications arrives at Convergence 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
2025 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based Microsoft Copilot offerings http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2025/07/16/2025-release-wave-2-plans-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-microsoft-power-platform-and-role-based-microsoft-copilot-offerings/ Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:00:00 +0000 The 2025 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot offerings introduces new capabilities that help organizations harness the potential of AI.

The post 2025 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based Microsoft Copilot offerings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

We’re entering the age of AI agents, a transformative moment reshaping the landscape of business applications and platforms. AI agents aren’t just making incremental improvements, they’re helping to redefine productivity and can fundamentally change how work gets done.

Published today, the 2025 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Copilot offerings introduces new and improved capabilities that help organizations to harness the full potential of this new era. These plans compile new capabilities slated for release between October 2025 and March 2026.
Integral to the wave 2 plans, AI assistants and agents not only help humans with day-to-day tasks, but also act as proactive partners to drive better business outcomes. Our upcoming release brings that vision to life, helping to make AI not just accessible but an essential component in daily operations. Whether it’s enabling sellers to close deals faster, providing service teams real-time trusted knowledge, or empowering finance professionals with AI-driven reconciliation and analysis, these enhancements can be transformative to the way we all work.

Be sure to stay updated on the latest features and create your personalized release plan using the release planner.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

The 2025 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 brings new innovation to transform functions across your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data enhances Microsoft Copilot and agents with real-time, unified customer profiles, enabling teams to act on insights within their workflow. With enriched data, seamless platform integration, and faster processing, businesses can deliver timely, personalized experiences that boost engagement and conversions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys empowers businesses to craft personalized, AI-driven customer experiences across all touchpoints. With Copilot, agents, and enhanced orchestration tools, teams can engage the right audiences at scale, streamline lead generation, and accelerate growth.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of AI to help sellers achieve their targets and automate busywork. Microsoft Copilot delivers actionable insights in the flow of work, while AI agents research and engage leads, drive purchase intent, and proactively bring key insights and emergent deal risks—helping sellers close more deals faster. A reimagined interface reorients sellers from data to insights. Watch this video to discover the new and enhanced features in this release wave for Dynamics 365 Sales.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to enhance agentic and Copilot capabilities for case and knowledge management, as well as AI-driven routing.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center continues to enhance agentic and Copilot capabilities to automate the service journey across digital and voice channels, along with the introduction of new omnichannel and supervisor capabilities in the 2025 release wave 2.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will deliver AI agents, enhanced scheduling tools, mobile usability improvements, and deeper Microsoft 365 integration in the upcoming release wave. With innovations across inspections, vendor coordination, and connectivity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Field Service empowers organizations to deliver smarter, faster, and more seamless service at scale.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance brings global-scale finance and agentic operations to our customers, including agents that can lead to faster financial close, and provide additional automation and optimization across large scale operations, as well as enhancements to business performance analytics and planning solutions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can enhance demand planning with event and promotion forecasting, and help improve quality management for sample handling; and the Supplier Communications Agent will automate vendor interactions. New supplier engagement tools and warehouse app upgrades will also be introduced to further streamline operations and boost efficiency.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations will continue to deliver powerful enhancements across the project lifecycle. These include improved mobile and browser experiences for time and expense, better project planning with enterprise custom fields, streamlined billing and invoicing workflows, and expanded support for stocked items, investment projects, and migrations to the modern architecture.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources can enhance the hire-to-retire journey with Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Viva Connections integration to help reduce duplication. New agentic capabilities will be introduced to streamline onboarding with guided experiences and automation. Recruiter assist will also now support job description generation and interview assistance, helping to improve efficiency across hiring and onboarding.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce advances in-store experiences by providing a mobile-first point-of-sale that provides business continuity even during a business outage. Improvements to the Adyen payment connector allows modern payments like Pay by Link across channels, offering more purchasing options for omnichannel customers. Additionally, omnichannel unified pricing enables retailers to establish more intricate pricing structures, helping them remain competitive.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces AI agents to enhance efficiency and automation in the 2025 release wave 2. These agents seamlessly integrate to execute complex tasks, generate reports, automate processes, and optimize order creation using natural language processing. Additionally, this release focuses on quality management, subcontracting, sustainability, and e-document capabilities.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Copilot Studio

2025 release wave 2 updates for Microsoft Power Platform bring new and updated ways for organizations to analyze, act on, and automate data to digitally transform their businesses.

Microsoft Copilot Studio continues its journey to make agent creation and operation even easier and more powerful with autonomous agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, the ability to build complete teams of agents that work seamlessly together, and improved governance for enterprise scalability. Copilot Studio will offer even deeper integration with Azure AI Foundry and the Microsoft Graph, helping to ensure your agents can use the latest AI technology in coordination with your data in Microsoft Graph. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Copilot Studio can benefit your business.

Microsoft Power Apps enhances human and agent collaboration with a new agent feed to supervise the work of agents and extensible built-in agents for common tasks like enter, explore, visualize, and summarize data. Bring business problems to Plan Designer and a team of agents will help you build enterprise solutions, including apps, agents, Microsoft Power BI reports, and more. Vibe code with the App Agent to create data-connected experiences—just describe what you need or provide an image, and it can be done.

Microsoft Power Pages enables businesses to build secure, data-driven portals effortlessly. In this wave, we will further expedite site building for low-code makers and pro developers to help build intelligent sites for your employees, customers, and partners. The introduction of enhanced security agent features will further empower low-code makers, pro developers, and admins with actionable insights and abilities for securing their websites.

Microsoft Power Automate is transforming how enterprises automate complex business processes through new human-in-the-loop experiences, such as advanced approvals and AI-native capabilities, such as generative actions and intelligent document processing. To manage complex automations at scale, a comprehensive suite of governance, observability, and security controls will be introduced to the Automation Center and Power Platform admin center.

Microsoft Dataverse continues to serve as a trusted low-code data platform, enabling the creation of scalable agents, Copilot applications, and automations. This update introduces enhancements to core agentic capabilities, including Dataverse for Agents and Dataverse Search to support smarter, AI-ready experiences. New features such as Dataverse Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server and AI-powered business logic tools further expand the ability to build dynamic, intelligent solutions grounded in enterprise data.

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration will become the unified governance hub for managing intelligent agents, agent-driven apps, and automated workflows across the Microsoft ecosystem in this release wave. This will provide a secure, governable, reliable platform for agent development.

Updates to Copilot offerings

Agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot help maximize business impact across sales, service, and finance. Learn more about the 2025 release wave 2 updates for Copilot offerings. Agent updates for sales will help sellers work smarter, engage strategically, and close deals faster. Agent updates for service will expand CRM connectivity and enhance email insights and drafting—all within the tools reps use daily. Updates for finance will offer easily customizable agents that can be launched from familiar tools like Excel, boosting efficiency and insight.

Early access period

Starting August 4, 2025, customers and partners can validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These updates include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled in production environments by October 2025. Take advantage of the early access period to test these updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Explore the 2025 release wave 2 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page for more information.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please refer to the Dynamics 365 2025 release wave 2 plan, the Microsoft Power Platform 2025 release wave 2 plan, and Copilot offerings 2025 release wave 2. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

The post 2025 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based Microsoft Copilot offerings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
The future of manufacturing with Microsoft Dynamics 365 is here—are you ready? http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2025/03/25/the-future-of-manufacturing-with-microsoft-dynamics-365-is-here-are-you-ready/ Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000 This week, thousands of manufacturers will gather at Hannover Messe 2025 for insights into the changing manufacturing landscape. Top of mind for many attendees is how AI will impact the manufacturing industry.

The post The future of manufacturing with Microsoft Dynamics 365 is here—are you ready? appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

This week, thousands of manufacturers will gather at Hannover Messe 2025 for insights into solutions to unprecedented challenges, from rising energy costs to supply chain disruptions, workforce shortages to geopolitical conflicts. Top of mind for many attendees is how AI agent-led automation, production, and supply chain processes can help empower a high-performance and sustainable industry.

To help answer these questions, Microsoft leaders and industry partners will showcase the very latest AI innovation for manufacturers designed to help address today’s most critical challenges.

Dynamics 365 ERP solutions

Infuse AI across business processes and workflows.

Portrait of woman in a pensive moment of focused work holding a laptop.

AI agents will transform manufacturing in 2025 and beyond

Moving forward, four transformative trends will set the pace of growth and success in the evolving manufacturing landscape:

  • Improving supply chain operations
  • Driving operational excellence with operational technology data from siloed sources
  • Delivering great customer experience
  • Increasing energy efficiency and employee productivity

At the Microsoft expo booth, manufacturers will learn how they can achieve these trends by using agents across critical business processes and workflows with Microsoft Dynamics 365 autonomous ERP solutions.

Improving supply chain operations with AI agents

Manufacturers face increasing supply chain challenges, from fluctuating customer demand to geopolitical uncertainties that can pressure organizations to restructure supply chains or reshore operations to unaffected regions. It’s imperative to have the agility to adapt to rapid demand shifts while operating profitably and keeping costs in check.

AI agents can play a crucial role in manufacturing operations, autonomously monitoring processes for potential disruptions, with the ability to proactively mitigate potential issues before they’re serious issues.

The Supplier Communications Agent in Dynamics 365 autonomously manages interactions with vendors and suppliers to help ensure on-time delivery of purchase orders helping to avoid downstream delays to customers. The agent provides visibility into the supplier’s supply chain and allows teams to spend more time improving supplier relationships and negotiating better contracts, rather than firefighting shortages.

Lifetime Products—a global manufacturer of products ranging from basketball hoops to picnic tables, sheds, and kayaks—depends on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to optimize operational capabilities. In addition to handling logistics and supply chain management more effectively, the manufacturer is implementing AI agents to “rebalance” its knowledge workforce to do more with same and be more efficient rather than reduce labor.

“One of our biggest learnings has been to let the autonomous agent run its own calculations. You’ll get a more comprehensive, better result.”

—Sinahi Lopez, Global IT Functional Manager at Lifetime Products

The company is now preparing to deploy the Supplier Communications Agent in Dynamics 365, to autonomously communicate with suppliers to proactively mitigate order delays and supply chain disruptions.

Based on study with IDC, $3.5 million in annual inventory-related cost savings, using Dynamics 365, optimizing working capital​.1

Achieving operational excellence with operational technology data from various silos

To stay competitive, manufacturers need to optimize operations by reducing costs, minimizing downtime, improving agility, and ensuring efficient production. This requires data-driven decision making that takes advantage of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT), AI-driven automation, integrated data clouds, and edge-to-cloud architectures to enable real-time insights, predictive maintenance, and quality control. Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes applications to manage finance, supply chain, sales, and customer relationships, designed to unify business data, improve efficiency, and simplify decision-making. The applications work seamlessly with Microsoft 365, which enhances productivity and collaboration with leading applications like Word, Excel, and Microsoft Teams, while Azure provides cloud infrastructure and IoT capabilities.

A key innovation is the AI agent, powered by Microsoft Copilot Studio, that automates tasks and streamlines workflows, securely grounded on data sourced from various systems by using Microsoft Dataverse as a central hub. Microsoft Fabric enhances analytics, helping businesses turn data into insights. For customization, Microsoft Power Platform offers low-code tools to build apps and automate processes, while Microsoft AppSource provides industry-specific solutions from Microsoft partners.

Together, these technologies create a connected ecosystem, reducing data silos and enabling businesses to operate more efficiently. With everything working seamlessly, organizations can focus on growth, innovation, and smarter decision-making.

Enerjisa Üretim, Türkiye’s largest private electricity generation company, replaced its legacy asset management system with Dynamics 365—a modern, user-friendly solution that provides end-to-end lifecycle management of all 312,500 assets across 29 power plants.

The organization is also transforming operations with Dynamics 365 and Azure, achieving efficiency, cost reduction, and workforce empowerment. Integration of asset management, IoT, and Microsoft Azure Digital Twins provides real-time insights for predictive maintenance. Unified systems improve data consistency, streamline workflows, and enhance collaboration, setting new standards for operational excellence in energy.

“Our equipment data is the key to operational efficiency. The Asset Management [capabilities] in Dynamics 365 extends the lifespan of critical infrastructure. By leveraging real-time data and advanced analytics, we can predict equipment failures before they happen.”

—Alper Serçe, Deputy General Manager, Enerjisa Üretim

Dynamics 365 integrates seamlessly with Enerjisa Üretim’s external systems like SAP, streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency. Real-time inventory updates from SAP into Dynamics 365 helps ensures that technicians have the right materials. And integration with HRweb and Yüklenici Entegre Sistemi (YES) optimizes resource allocation, matching skills and qualifications to work orders.

Based on study with IDC, 85% reduction in unplanned asset downtime, using Dynamics 365, ensuring smoother operations​.1

Deliver better customer experiences

Manufacturers are facing intense global competition, making customer experience essential to maintain relevance. To differentiate and retain customer trust, they must reconsider traditional business models and explore new revenue streams like product-as-a-service and aftermarket services.

Dynamics 365 assists manufacturers in transitioning to a product-as-a-service (PaaS) model by integrating IoT, AI, automation, and flexible financial frameworks.

  • Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Microsoft Azure IoT enable real-time product performance monitoring and predictive maintenance, reducing downtime, helping to ensure timely spare parts delivery and streamlined logistics, which are important for service-based models.
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service uses AI and IoT data for a predictive service model, enhancing efficiency and optimizing service contracts to improve customer satisfaction.
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance supports flexible pricing, pay-per-use, and subscription models, converting products into ongoing services.

Hobart Corporation, a provider of commercial food equipment, needed to modernize its field operations to better support nearly 400,000 customers across the United States and Canada and solve inefficiencies in service delivery.

By adopting Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service, Hobart standardized processes, improved dispatch accuracy, and provided field technicians with mobile access to real-time inventory and customer data. This transformation enabled quicker response times, improved first-time fix rates, and better parts availability. The solution also facilitated predictive maintenance, ensuring proactive issue resolution before failures occurred.

As a result, Hobart significantly enhanced operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and workforce productivity, reinforcing its reputation for high-quality service.

Organizations facing similar issues can also use the recently announced Scheduling Operations Agent (SOA) for Dynamics 365 Field Service, now in preview. This AI agent creates optimized schedules for technicians, even as conditions change throughout the workday. Whether it’s traffic delays, double bookings, or last-minute cancellations, the SOA helps ensure that schedules remain efficient.

The SOA uses advanced algorithms to address common scheduling challenges. By considering factors such as technician skill sets, territories, and promised time windows, the SOA maximizes technician utilization and prioritizes work orders effectively. This enhances productivity and helps ensure that customer commitments are met accurately.

Based on study with IDC, 40% faster order and product delivery times, using Dynamics 365, increasing customer satisfaction.1

Operating sustainably by driving energy and employee efficiencies

Manufacturers are under increasing pressure to improve energy efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint while maintaining productivity. By integrating Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP solutions and Sustainability Manager in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, manufacturers can gain real-time visibility, AI-driven insights, and automated tracking to drive sustainability at scale.

Dynamics 365 ERP collects energy consumption data from IoT sensors, smart meters, and production systems, offering a comprehensive view of energy usage across facilities. This data flows into Microsoft Sustainability Manager, where AI-powered analytics identify inefficiencies, benchmark performance, and recommend optimizations. Manufacturers can track carbon emissions in real time, ensuring they meet sustainability targets.

With predictive analytics and AI-driven workload balancing, manufacturers can optimize machine usage, reduce energy waste, and lower costs. Additionally, optimized supply chain operations help minimize environmental impact through smarter logistics and material sourcing.

Camfil, a leading manufacturer of premium clean air filtration solutions, is using Dynamics 365 to enhance sustainability and profitability. By implementing Dynamics 365 with a standardized data model, Camfil has harmonized its processes across more than 30 production facilities and nearly 6,000 employees.

The integration of Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Sales has improved operations such as ordering, manufacturing, warehousing, shipping, and invoicing. This harmonization enabled by Dynamics 365 has led to better resource utilization, improved energy efficiency, a more connected and collaborative culture, and enhanced customer satisfaction through continuous innovation in air filtration systems—all contributing to a more sustainable and cost-effective manufacturing operation.

A well-empowered workforce can better manage inventory, demand planning, and supplier interactions, reducing waste and inefficiencies.

Based on study with IDC, 27% more manufacturing processes automated, 20% improvement of productivity across supply chain, procurement, and inventory management teams by using Dynamics 365 AI-powered ERP solutions.1

Future-proof your manufacturing operations in 2025 

AI-powered solutions for ERP and service systems are more than a technological upgrade. They’re a strategic imperative for manufacturers aiming to improve the supply chain, drive operational excellence on the factory floor, deliver great customer experience, and operate sustainably and efficiently.

If you’re registered for Hannover Messe, we invite you to visit the Microsoft booth (#G06, hall 17) and join Sameer Verma, Microsoft’s GM, Dynamics 365 AI ERP, to learn how Dynamics 365 drives manufacturing excellence with AI agents. The session will take place on Monday, March 31, 2025, at 12 PM Central European Time (UTC +1).

Also, continue to visit the Dynamics 365 blog to learn more about how Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform are helping retailers reimagine the road ahead; and feel free to contact us to learn more about the Dynamics 365 AI-powered ERP system solutions. 


Source

1 IDC White Paper, sponsored by Microsoft, The Business Value of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Manufacturers, doc #US53226425

The post The future of manufacturing with Microsoft Dynamics 365 is here—are you ready? appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2024/01/25/2024-release-wave-1-plans-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-and-power-platform-now-available/ http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2024/01/25/2024-release-wave-1-plans-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-and-power-platform-now-available/#comments Thu, 25 Jan 2024 16:00:00 +0000 On January 25, 2024, we published the 2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between April 2024 and September 2024. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and improvements.

The post 2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

On January 25, 2024, we published the 2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between April 2024 and September 2024. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and improvements, showcasing our ongoing commitment to fueling digital transformation for both our customers and partners.

This release reinforces our dedication to developing applications and experiences that contribute value to roles by dismantling barriers between data, insights, and individuals. This wave introduces diverse enhancements across various business applications, emphasizing improved user experiences, productivity, innovative app development and automation, and advanced AI capabilities. Watch a summary of the release highlights.

Explore a heightened level of convenience when examining Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans using the release planner. Enjoy unmatched flexibility as you customize, filter, and sort plans to align with your preferences, effortlessly sharing them. Maintain organization, stay informed, and remain in control while smoothly navigating through various active waves of plans. For more information, visit the release planner.

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

Dynamics 365 release wave

Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features.

Field engineer inspects electrical substation server room on a wind farm using remote assist with HoloLens2

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enhances customer understanding and boosts sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences. The 2024 release wave 1 focuses on providing sellers timely customer information, expediting deals with actionable insights, improving productivity, and empowering organizations through open configurability and expanded generative AI leadership. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching the Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities with sales specific skills, data, and actions. Additionally, the team will focus on assisting sellers on the go within the Outlook and Microsoft Teams mobile apps.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through Copilot, filtering response verification, diagnostic tools for admins and agents, and usability improvements to multi-session apps. Additionally, we’re making enhancements to the voice channel, and improving unified routing assignment accuracy and prioritization. Watch this video about the exciting new features in Customer Service.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service is a field service management application that allows companies to transform their service operations with processes and experiences to manage, schedule, and perform. In the 2024 release wave 1, we’re introducing the next generation of Copilot capabilities, modern experiences, Microsoft 365 integrations, vendor management, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Operations integration.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance continues on its journey of autonomous finance, building intelligence, automation, and analytics around every business process, to increase user productivity and business agility. This release focuses on enhancing business performance planning and analytics, adding AI powered experiences, easing setup of financial dimension defaulting with AI rules guidance, increasing automation in bank reconciliation, netting, expanding country coverage, tax automation, and scalability. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Finance can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enhances business processes for increased insight and agility. Copilot skills improve user experiences, while demand planning transforms the forecast process, and warehouse processes are optimized for greater efficiency and accuracy. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is focused on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability in key areas such as project planning, invoicing, time entry, and core transaction processing. The spotlight is on core functionality improvements, including support for discounts and fees, enhanced resource reconciliation, journals, approvals, and contract management, with added mobile capabilities to handle larger projects and invoices at an increased scale. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Project Operations can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is bringing several new capabilities and enhancements including supporting high-detail 3D model support through Microsoft Azure Remote Rendering and greatly improved web content support that enable customers to build mixed reality workflows that are integrated with their business data. Additionally, support for Guides content on mobile will be generally available in the coming wave through a seamless integration with the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile application.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources will continue to improve recruiting experiences with functionality to integrate with external job portals and talent pools and offer management. We will continue to expand our human capital management ecosystem to include additional payroll partners and build better together experiences that span the gamut of what Microsoft can offer to improve employee experiences in corporations of any size and scale across the globe. See how the latest enhancements to Dynamics 365 Human Resources can help your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce continues to invest in omnichannel retail experiences through advancements in mobile point of sale experiences like Tap to Pay for iOS and offline capabilities for Store Commerce on Android. The business-to-business buying experience is enhanced with new capabilities, and a streamlined order management solution for buyers who work across multiple organizations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is delivering substantial enhancements, with a central emphasis on harnessing the power of Copilot. Available in more than 160 countries, the team is focused on Copilot-driven capabilities to streamline and enhance productivity through enhanced reporting and data analysis capabilities, elevated project and financial management, and simplified workflow automation. We have also upgraded our development and governance tools and introduced improvements in managing data privacy and compliance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, using it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. With this release, we’re making it easier and faster to ingest and manage your data. AI enables quick insights and democratized access to analytics. Real-time data ingestion, creation, and updates further enable the optimization of experiences in the moments that matter. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys brings the power of AI to revolutionize how marketers work, enabling businesses to optimize interactions with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels. With this release, we empower marketers with a deeper customer understanding, we enable them to create new experiences within minutes, reach customers in more ways, and continuously optimize results. Thanks to granular lead qualification, we continue to boost the synergy between sales and marketing to achieve superior business outcomes. Check out this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform

Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features.

Close-up of hands holding a tablet.

Watch this video about the most exciting features releasing this wave in Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Apps focuses on integrating Copilot to accelerate app development with AI and natural language, enhancing user reasoning and data insights in custom apps. The team is also simplifying the creation of modern apps through contemporary controls, responsive layouts, and collaboration features. Additionally, they’re facilitating enterprise-scale development, enabling makers and admins to expand apps across the organization with improved guardrails and quality assurance tools.

Microsoft Power Pages interactive Copilot now supports every step of site building to create intelligent websites—design, page layouts, content editing, data binding, learning, chatbot, accessibility checking, and securing the site. Connect to data anywhere with the out-of-the-box control library and secure the website with more insights at your fingertips.

Microsoft Power Automate is bringing Copilot capabilities across cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining. This will allow customers to use natural language to discover optimization opportunities, build automations, quickly troubleshoot any issues, and provide a delightful experience in managing the automation estate. For enterprise-scale solutions, maintenance is made easier with improved notifications on product capabilities.

Microsoft Copilot Studio brings native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilot, general availability for generative actions, and geo-expansions to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Norway, Korea, South America, and South Africa. We’re also introducing rich capabilities to integrate with OpenAI GPT models, along with new channels such as WhatsApp, and software lifecycle capabilities such as topic level import/export and role-based access control.

Microsoft Dataverse continues to make investments focusing on enhancing maker experience by improving app building productivity infused with Copilot experiences, seamless connectivity to external data sources, and AI-powered enterprise copilot for Microsoft 365.

AI Builder invests in three key areas: prompt builder for GPT prompts, intelligent document processing with new features and models, and AI governance improvements, including enhanced capacity management and data policies. These initiatives aim to empower users with advanced generative AI, streamline document processing, and strengthen governance across AI models within Power Apps.

Early access period 

Starting February 5, 2024, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2024. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Check out the 2024 release wave 1 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page. 

For a complete list of new capabilities, please check out the Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1 plan and the Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 1 plan, and share your feedback in the community forums via Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform.

The post 2024 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>
http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2024/01/25/2024-release-wave-1-plans-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-and-power-platform-now-available/feed/ 1
Microsoft named as a worldwide Leader in four IDC MarketScapes for Field Service Management & Service Life-Cycle http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2024/01/18/microsoft-named-as-a-worldwide-leader-in-four-idc-marketscapes-for-field-service-management-service-life-cycle/ Thu, 18 Jan 2024 16:00:00 +0000 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/?p=188843 Across all industries and around the world, field service leaders face any number of challenges in areas including digitalization and modernization of traditionally paper-based processes, rising customer expectations, and employee training and retention. With these challenges top of mind, we have continually invested in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service as a solution to meet the growing requirements of field service management (FSM) operations.

The post Microsoft named as a worldwide Leader in four IDC MarketScapes for Field Service Management & Service Life-Cycle appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>

Across industries and around the world, field service leaders face any number of challenges in areas including digitalization and modernization of traditionally paper-based processes, rising customer expectations, and employee training and retention. With these challenges top of mind, we have continually invested in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service as a solution to meet the growing requirements of field service management (FSM) operations. That’s why we take great pride in sharing we’re the only vendor positioned as a Leader in the following four IDC MarketScapes:

Field service management applications

Illustration of a graph showing growth in the field service management vendor market.
Source:  IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Field Service Management Applications 2023 Vendor Assessment”, Aly Pinder, December 2023 IDC Doc# US49989523.

According to the 2023 report “Product Innovation and Aftermarket Service Survey,” IDC notes that “the top metric prioritized by service leaders as determining success in service was customer satisfaction (46.2%), followed by customer retention (39.0%).” This means frontline worker roles such as service agents and field technicians are absolutely critical to ensuring the best possible customer experience. That’s why we’re continuously developing Dynamics 365 Field Service so that organizations can equip those workers with modern digital tools to make them more responsive and efficient.

Microsoft was positioned as a Leader in the 2023-2024 IDC MarketScape for worldwide field service management applications based on two strengths: “innovation at scale and pace” and “infusion of AI into field service processes.” The IDC MarketScape notes that “Microsoft’s end-to-end service experience capabilities aid field service companies in a continuous transformation journey. As customer expectations evolve, frontline workforces shift, and business models get disrupted, Microsoft leverages its platform to incorporate technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), mixed reality, industrial metaverse, and digital twins.” In addition, the IDC MarketScape says that in the areas of AI and generative AI, which would include Copilot in Field Service, “Microsoft is enabling service organizations to realize near-term and long-term strategies around this innovative technology.”

The IDC MarketScape suggests that organizations consider Microsoft field service solutions “if they are looking for a vendor that can incorporate end-to-end capabilities with innovative technologies for transformation and growth.”

Service life-cycle management

Illustration of a graph showing growth in the service life-cycle management vendor market.
Source: IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Service Life-Cycle Management Platforms 2023–2024 Vendor Assessment, by Aly Pinder, October 2023, IDC Doc# US49989623

IDC has noted that service is no longer something that happens only after a sale is complete. More and more, organizations are aligning services and sales to help drive greater revenue through better alignment and new service offerings. This IDC MarketScape report highlights two key Microsoft strengths: an integrated platform supporting the front and back office, and innovation accelerators that enhance experiences.

From an integration standpoint, the IDC MarketScape notes that “the service team can no longer operate in a silo and requires tools that allow it to connect to other business functions, customers, and the wide network of partners. Microsoft’s integrated platform of back-office, midoffice, and front-office applications aids customers across their digital journey and not just within a single function.” The integration of Dynamics 365 Field Service with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams is key. Dynamics 365 Field Service integrates with Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft Viva Connections so that frontline workers and managers can create, view, and manage work orders within Outlook and Teams. This integration enhances collaboration between dispatchers, frontline technicians, and managers by enabling work order data to sync automatically between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365. Additionally, frontline technicians can quickly start their day with access to key workday information at a glance, with work orders visible from the Viva Connections homepage in Teams. Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 empower technicians with the right information to resolve issues the first time, which is key to creating a positive customer experience.

When it comes to innovation, the IDC MarketScape explains, “Microsoft through its AI, GenAI, IoT, and mixed reality capabilities and tools allows service organizations to deliver enhanced experiences for the service team and the customer. Microsoft customers value this level of shared innovations, which has cemented partnerships for shared growth.” Dynamics 365 Field Service can be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on Microsoft HoloLens, Microsoft HoloLens 2, Android, or iOS devices to enable technicians to collaborate more efficiently by working together from different locations. This means service technicians can find and connect with technical experts working at other locations to share what they’re seeing, receive remote assistance, and quickly resolve customer issues. Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides to attach mixed reality guides to Field Service tasks. Overall, the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Guides, and tools like HoloLens helps to elevate field service operations by enabling them to optimize processes and deliver unparalleled customer experiences.

The IDC Life-Cycle Management report suggests organizations “consider Microsoft when searching for capabilities that will enable continuous exploration of innovation across the service life cycle and partner networks. Microsoft has enabled a broad set of innovation capabilities, which support collaboration, co-innovation, and prescriptive service at speed and a global scale.”

Field service management for utilities

Illustration of a graph showing growth in the utilities management vendor market.
Source:  IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Field Service Management Solutions for Utilities 2023-2024 Vendor Assessment, By: Jean-François Segalotto, John Villali and Daniele Arenga, November 2023, IDC Doc #US50036223

For customers in the utilities industry, the IDC MarketScape explains that a key strength for Microsoft is that “[customers] recognize Dynamics 365 Field Service as a well-engineered, flexible FSM solution, offering a solid user experience in terms of usability, configurability, ease of integration into complex landscapes, and extensibility thanks to the Microsoft portfolio.”

The IDC MarketScape also notes, “Microsoft is putting considerable resources behind the product, including significantly increasing the engineering budget this year.” It also states that “[the] ability to instantly access this innovation through a pure-play SaaS ultimately results in good value for money.” Many Field Service customers experienced this with the addition of the Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service Outlook add-in, which streamlines work order creation with relevant details pre-populated from emails and optimizes technician scheduling with data-driven recommendations based on factors such as travel time, availability, and skillset. Frontline managers can see relevant work orders and review them before creating new work orders, and they can easily reschedule or update those work orders as customers’ needs change.

Field service management for oil and gas

For customers in the oil and gas (O&G) industry, the IDC MarketScape stated, “Microsoft’s FSM solution comes in an integrated and comprehensive portfolio catering to core O&G field services and asset operations. By seamlessly integrating FSM with Mixed Reality, Microsoft 365, AI, IoT, and Azure, it provides customers the flexibility to tailor solutions, enhancing efficiency, driving innovation, and boosting productivity in a highly customizable manner.”

“Drawing on its long-established customer base, Microsoft works with major O&G players addressing a wide range of field service challenges. Typically, these collaborations focus on enabling frontline workers and optimizing planning and service workflow automation in vast scale operations spanning large assets such as refineries, petrochemical plants, LNG facilities, renewable gas plants, and the extensive network of gas stations.” For service technicians on the frontline, a primary benefit of Dynamics 365 Field Service is the Field Service mobile app which enables technicians to see their workdays at a glance so they can view and update work orders, customer assets, accounts, and more, no matter where they are working—even in areas with limited connectivity. Technicians can also easily access up-to-date inventory information, eliminating the need for cumbersome manual inventory checks and reducing delays caused by missing parts. The Field Service mobile app also incorporates safety checklists and real-time reporting, helping to ensure compliance with safety regulations and to improve the well-being of service technicians who often work under hazardous conditions.

We invite you to read the following IDC MarketScape report excerpts for full details:

Learn more about how Microsoft customers are optimizing service operations with Dynamics 365 Field Service:


Source: IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles.  

The post Microsoft named as a worldwide Leader in four IDC MarketScapes for Field Service Management & Service Life-Cycle appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

]]>