This post was co-authored by Lax Gopisetty, Vice President, Global Practice Head, Microsoft Business Applications & Digital Workplace Services, Infosys Ltd.

In an age defined by single-click purchases, instant deliveries, and personalized experiences, customer expectations continue to rise, and frontline technicians are expected to meet these ever-changing demands. When customers face a problem, they want it fixed fast and right the first time. For many organizations, customer experience is both a challenge and an opportunity to differentiate from the competition.

It is no longer acceptable for technicians to operate on disparate technologies that individually are good enough to execute work orders, manage assets, and dispatch resources with real-time support. Timely resolution is key in field service, and arming frontline technicians with intuitive solutions that combine workflow automation, scheduling algorithms, and mobility can significantly enhance the customer experience. Tools that empower field technicians with timely inputs to focus on their core responsibilities and enable processes to track each work order closure, along with billing, are now becoming existential.

For example, solutions that unlock efficiencies for telecommunications providers with field service automation, empower medical device service technicians with improved downtime, maintain safe and highly automated facility management operations, and manage smart elevator service with Internet of Things (IoT)-driven field service are all recipes for greater customer satisfaction.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Transform your service operations and deliver exceptional service.

Learn about Field Service

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service integration supports positive customer experiences

Dynamics 365 Field Service integrates with Outlook, Microsoft 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 as Tasks 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 adds a great deal to creating a positive customer experience.

For example, a leading energy supplier based out of the UK partnered with Infosys to establish itself as a leader in the energy-as-a-service market by offering best-in-class customer experience. The connected field service-based solution unified the capabilities of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 to unlock a leaner and flexible business model that also enabled future scalability to ensure:

• Better workforce management through flexible scheduling, route optimization, and quota management.
• Field job execution via remote supervision, site awareness/recording, and offline mode.
• Customer intimacy powered by service history management, technician visibility, voice of customer, and closed loop tracking.
• Superior job outcomes powered by higher first-time resolution rates and reduced job aborts.

Connected field service helped redefine the leading energy supplier’s customer engagement model with a seamless work order management process. From streamlining work order creation, scheduling the best suited frontline technician, receiving remote expert assistance, and integrating asset management, Dynamics 365 enabled the customer to transform their field operations. Additional engagement highlights include:

• Seamless migration from more than 20 legacy disparate business apps onto Dynamics 365.
• Implemented core business functionalities with over 75 percent out-of-the-box feature fitment.
• Six phased incremental rollouts to enable more than 1,500 field technicians and more than 600 internal users.
• On track to reduce overall cost of IT operations by over 25 percent.

The leaner, AI-powered, and truly automated business, has unleashed novel revenue streams with infinite potential for the client:

This UK-based leading energy supplier is now well-positioned to drive its future growth. The organization is supported by a skilled and engaged workforce that works seamlessly with connected and leaner processes that together offer a sustainable competitive advantage.

Standardizing and automating processes through connected field service

Field Service continues to break ground into unexplored industries. Capabilities like GPS and routing, which enable timely visits and quicker resolution, are saving the day for thousands of field service professionals. They are now able to summarize completed tasks with inline Microsoft Power Apps component framework (PCF) capability.

Field service solutions must always be driven by an organization’s unique priorities, pain points, and process nuances. Partners like Infosys are co-innovating with clients to address these challenges with Microsoft Power Platform and its extensibility components. They are enabling nontechnical business users to build applications that cater to their unique requirements without the aid of IT experts.

The emergence of AI-embedded innovations like Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service will enhance service further. From creating work orders with the right information and assigning them to the right technicians, to equipping technicians with sufficient support to successfully complete jobs, Copilot will help streamline critical frontline tasks. These advanced functionalities will help companies genuinely standardize and automate field service processes.

Organizations competing in a market with high turnover are using mixed reality-based Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides for remote support and collaboration. This results in accelerated training with context and seamless transfer of information, insights, and skills, which help in lowering overall costs.

Technology is key to building a scalable and efficient field service operation. However, a significant portion of success still rides on the technician who is delivering the service. So, it is imperative for service organizations to unify field operations, frontline technicians, and customers with connected digital platforms, to unlock value—because service is no longer a cost center for organizations.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Field Service

Learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you transform your service operations and deliver exceptional service. And read how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service can accelerate service delivery, boost technician productivity, and streamline work order management with next-generation AI. Watch the video below to see it in action.

The post Unlocking customer value with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service through connected services appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Note: As announced at Microsoft Inspire 2023, as of September 1, 2023, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights have been brought together into one offering. We are retaining the existing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights name to encompass this new offer of both applications. Customers can start with one or both applications and then further invest in the application they want to scale by buying the capacity they need.

In today’s turbulent economic times, companies are facing critical business challenges such as customer acquisition, increasing customer loyalty, and maximizing lifetime value. Often, to save time, they follow a one-size-fits-all approach—resulting in impersonal marketing strategies with low customer engagement. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 89 percent of marketers say they struggle with having time to do their jobs.

To meet these complex challenges, it is crucial for companies to shift their approach from traditional mass communication to personalized engagement based on a deep understanding of each customer’s preferences and actions while ensuring their marketers have more time to leverage their creative and strategic skills to engage their customers. With this very goal in mind, Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 Marketing in 2018.

We are pleased and honored to share that in a short span of five years in market, Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms* for the second consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned highest in Ability to Execute.

For Microsoft, this placement recognizes our commitment to help companies better connect with their customers at scale, across all departments, to make this simple and easy for any company with a broad range of skillsets to employ.

Accelerating the journey to more personalized customer engagement

We started our Dynamics 365 Marketing journey in April 2018. Since then, we’ve gathered feedback and continued to learn at a rapid pace to help our customers on their journey to drive meaningful customer engagement, ensure long-term loyalty, and accelerate business success. To be competitive in today’s market, organizations must harness the power of data to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, anticipate behaviors, and craft one-on-one personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including sales, marketing, business operations, and service functions. Generative AI makes these capabilities within reach for every company. That’s why we’ve brought together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI-led solution to revolutionize customer experience. The new Customer Insights enables our customers to be more flexible by giving them access to both a modern, AI-driven customer data platform (Customer Insights data application) and real-time marketing with customer journey orchestration (Customer Insights journeys application). Customers can start with one or both applications and invest in the areas where they most want to scale.

To drive the necessary customer experience (CX) transformation, companies cannot rely on piecemeal integration of sales, service, and marketing products. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 50 percent of replacement customer relationship management (CRM) sales technology decisions will involve solutions including non-sales software comprising other modules from a CRM or a CX suite.^[1] However, the reality is that only a few companies are currently delivering on these expectations. Customer experiences often remain fragmented across channels and departments, leading to inconsistencies. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help customers overcome these challenges, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was built exactly for this purpose—to support customers throughout their end-to-end CX journeys.

Like all Dynamics 365 offerings, Customer Insights relies on Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM software data, which enables our customers to securely store and manage their data and harness the true power of that data by removing silos across sales, service, and marketing via a unified platform approach. Customer Insights helps marketers and customer engagement professionals gain a holistic view of their customers, anticipate their needs, and discover growth opportunities. Marketers can also deliver more relevant, contextual, customer-triggered engagements through the power of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Some of our most recent Copilot capabilities in Customer Insights enable marketers to:

• Deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience with emails, forms, and event registration pages that align to their organization’s branding guidelines.
• Easily orchestrate contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, to respond to customers quickly, generate sales leads, and increase customer satisfaction.
• Quickly build, summarize, and simplify targeted segments using conversational, everyday language, enabling more time for building customer relationships and reducing time to build complex segments from scratch.
• Discover new customer insights by using natural language to ask questions and gather information and suggestions for forming additional, deeper questions.
• Get help developing content for emails, social posts, and other text with a tone of voice that matches their brand and campaign.

Enabling our customers to increase their reach

Zurich Insurance Group, a global insurer serving people and businesses in more than 200 countries, wanted to optimize marketing processes to help create more personalized customer experiences. Its Switzerland business unit connects to its customers through hosting online and in-person events—but to drive the highest impact, it must be sure it invites the right customers to the right events. It wanted to improve its ability to track if customers opened event invitations—or even received them, as well as the connection to registration and attendance. It also wanted a formalized way to collect feedback or easily use engagement data to continue to optimize the sales process after the event. Zurich selected Dynamics 365 Marketing to give it the flexibility to reach customers in new ways and drive more effective follow-ups to help shape their journeys. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, Zurich increased its lead quality by over 40 percent.

Over the past decade, Natuzzi, a globally hailed creator of exceptional luxury furniture that delivers a harmonious combination of design, function, aesthetics, and ethics, has seen a rapid global expansion of its heralded luxury brand. Natuzzi lacked a customer engagement platform capable of unifying data from its retail point of sale (POS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and CRM systems. The company also wanted a way to bring together its business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) related data sets to drive greater insight between audiences. Adopting Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Natuzzi implemented an extensive customer experience platform to transform how its luxury brand discovers and sustains its customers. It uses customer data and insights to nurture customers and prospects through personalized campaigns, delivering emails, SMS texts, promotions, events, sales appointment reminders, and other relationship-building messages.

Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner

Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms.

Read the report

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to helping our customers unify and enrich their customer data to deliver personalized, connected, end-to-end customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service. We truly believe that bringing together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables us to continue investing in capabilities that will enable stronger, insights-based marketing that helps marketers and data analysts glean insights from customer data.

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offer.

1. Gartner Forecast Analysis: CRM Sales Software, Worldwide, Roland Johnson, Amarendra, Julian Poulter, 12 December 2022.

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Rick LaFond, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Matt Wakeman, Jeff Goldberg, Alan Antin, 20 September 2023.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft is named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers are fundamental to any organization’s success—and despite economic headwinds, business leaders are concerned about keeping the talent they have happy and productive at their jobs. Many sellers have long relied on highly manual and disjointed processes that involve a mix of email, spreadsheets, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. But following manual processes and switching between sales tools and spreadsheets can waste valuable time that sellers need to build relationships with customers and close deals. According to the latest Microsoft WorkLab research, 78 percent of sellers would be happy to have some help from AI to make their everyday tasks—like sending follow-up emails or tracking sales—easier. That is why we’ve been busy building a vision for sales-specific AI to help increase seller productivity and success.

Today, we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized again as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms* for the thirteenth consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.

Our strong vision and approach with Microsoft Sales Copilot by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities allows sellers to spend more time focused on engaging with their customers.

Empowering sellers through automation and intelligence

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables sellers to close more deals and meet customer needs with the help of next-generation AI and real-time insights. Sellers have everything they need in their app of choice to engage with customers, including historical data and access to subject matter experts. Using data, sellers can achieve more consistent sales interactions from creating a lead to closing a sale, predict how much revenue they will generate in a given timeframe, automate repeatable processes and define sales best practices, and promote products and services with targeted marketing campaigns. Additional sales enablement features include adaptive guidance for next best steps based on actionable insights, AI-guided selling features like the sales assistant and conversation intelligence to help build stronger customer relationships, and predictive scoring models to prioritize leads and opportunities for increased conversion and win rates. Sales managers can also get intelligent insights into how their sales team members are performing, so they can provide proactive coaching to improve their teams’ overall performance.

With Microsoft Sales Copilot, which is included with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses, we have established a vision of CRM platform by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities to help sellers reduce mundane tasks and personalize customer relationships even further. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Sales Copilot features built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security. Sellers can access Copilot in the tools where they’re working, whether that’s Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft Sales Copilot also connects to Salesforce for instant data syncing. Sellers can use Copilot to automate tasks or view email or meeting summaries, helping them save time on daily tasks and spend more time with customers. AI-powered, real-time insights including customer summaries, recent notes and customer news, and highlights of any issues or concerns help sellers enter customer meetings fully prepared to focus on key items. And to help sellers follow up after those meetings, Copilot can generate AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as customer-specific emails using data from their CRM platforms and Microsoft Graph.

Providing sellers with access to customer data in one place is key to helping ensure their success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilizes Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM platform data, which enables customers to securely store and manage data used by business applications. By using a platform solution to simplify and unify sales processes, sellers benefit from products built to talk to each other. Dynamics 365 Sales works seamlessly with technologies including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend capabilities for sellers. This means that sellers can continue to use familiar tools, which helps to simplify user adoption and lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs—a priority for many organizations in today’s economy.

Organizations can leverage the power of the full Microsoft Cloud to help sellers succeed. Dynamics 365 Sales natively integrates with Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. With automatic data syncing between Microsoft 365 apps and Dynamics 365 Sales or other CRM platforms, sellers can also surface customer and opportunity information directly in Teams and Outlook, which minimizes context switching and data loss. In addition, sales operation leads and managers can use Power BI to further analyze trends and build reports. And Microsoft Power Platform enables sellers to automate workflows, create apps, and analyze data to increase agility and innovation.

Helping to ensure our customers’ success

Investec, a global financial services company, set out to help its client-facing teams listen directly to customers and build more valuable relationships. This made conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales appealing because it automatically transcribes sales calls and analyzes the content, sentiment, and participants’ behavior. Conversation intelligence takes advantage of Microsoft advancements in AI and natural language processing to automatically extract meaningful insights from sales calls. With these insights, Investec can review salespeople’s conversation styles, help coach individuals on best practices, keep track of sales conversations, build stronger client relationships, and ultimately keep track of sales conversations, and build stronger client relationships. With Dynamics 365 Sales, Investec automatically incorporates conversation intelligence data across its customer engagement platform, saving time on manual entry, reducing overhead, and building a comprehensive customer view.

MAPEI, a global leader in adhesive, sealant, and chemical product manufacturing, was using 90 different customized CRM systems across 57 countries when it decided to consolidate into a single, centralized system. Migrating to Dynamics 365 Sales helped MAPEI simplify internal processes for its employees and provide more proactive service to customers. Today, MAPEI salespeople can build strong relationships with customers, make data-driven decisions, and close deals faster. The service also helps salespeople track customer accounts and contacts, track sales from prospect to purchase, and better qualify leads to assure they are spending time on the most impactful opportunities.

Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner

Microsoft is recognized again as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms for the thirteenth consecutive year.

Read the report

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Sales
• Microsoft Sales Copilot

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

__________________________________________________________________________

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, Steve Rietberg, Varun Agarwal, Guy Wood, 5 September 2023.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft is named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Force Automation Platforms appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Global retailers, manufacturers, and distributors continue to face the new normal of doing business today: economic volatility, unpredictable customer spending, and operational complexities. As we gear up for the holiday season, businesses that are agile and responsive will be poised to capture market demand and deliver an exceptional end-to-end customer experience. Adopting modern technology solutions can introduce agility to key processes overnight, and leaders should look across their supply chain functions to identify levers for maximum impact.

Supply chain technology leaders recognize that competitiveness—and in some cases, an organization’s survival—demands digital parity, if not leadership, so they now openly embrace exploratory IT investments.¹

One of those levers is warehouse management, a market that IDC reports grew at a compound annual rate of 14 percent in 2023.² By embracing modern, robotic, and AI-enhanced warehouse management solutions (WMS), organizations can drive meaningful results across the business in a relatively quick time-to-value.

In this post, we’ll explore why warehouse management solutions are needed and how Microsoft and Dynamics 365 enable customers to navigate ongoing disruptions, optimize inventory levels, and deliver on time with ease.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Build a resilient supply chain

Take a guided tour

Navigate supply chain uncertainties with technology

While the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic are behind us, retailers and operators are still navigating the new normal, which includes:

• Growing labor constraints.
• Demand volatility.
• Multichannel distribution.
• Storage capacity challenges.
• Permeation of AI into core processes.

In the face of these challenges, there is an opportunity for businesses to embrace uncertainties with technology and maximize levers like distribution capacity, improved employee and warehouse productivity, and consistent operations during volatile times. Legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are often disjointed and lead to a delay in real-time insights and optimization.

What is a modern WMS?

A modern warehouse management system helps businesses manage and optimize key warehouse operations like inventory tracking and shipping coordination through an open and composable framework. It can integrate with multiple systems and platforms and helps support end-to-end business processes, from ERP to customer relationship management. For businesses that want to stay competitive in an ever-expanding fulfillment economy, a modern WMS meets those challenges with an agile, digitally connected solution that reduces costs through maximizing resources like employees, machinery and storage.²

Modern warehouse management solutions can help improve real-time visibility into inventory levels, provide the ability to automate and streamline operations, and drive greater efficiency across the organization.

Adopting a modern WMS can contribute to these outputs:

• Reduced costs through improved inventory turns and optimized storage space.
• Improved customer satisfaction via on-time and in-full delivery and improved fill rates.
• Business growth and agility to meet unexpected customer demand and product development.
• Automation and enhanced productivity to free up your employees’ time to focus on what’s next.

The benefits of a modern WMS

1. Reduced costs

Golden State Foods (GSF) is an industry leader that produces liquid products like sauces, dressings, and condiments for customers like McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A. With a 25 year-old legacy ERP system, GSF chose Dynamics 365 ERP solution’s Supply Chain Management and Finance to help create a modern, common platform with centralized reporting and more standardized processes to facilitate opening a new plant.

“We chose Dynamics 365 because we need modern technology that will evolve with us.”

–Carol Fawcett: Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Officer, GSF

With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, GSF’s warehouse management processes were completely modernized. Dynamics 365 is being used to receive, put away, and consume inventory for production; report inventory as finished; store it in finished goods warehouses; and select it for shipment for customer orders. It prints standard barcode labels that are used at customers’ distribution centers for fast and accurate traceability—a considerable improvement from previous processes. This end-to-end visibility helps GSF operations managers improve inventory turns and make better decisions about production restraints and forecasting. With improved forecasting, GSF can reduce waste, optimize inventory, and increase its efficiency across its plants.

2. Improved customer satisfaction

Bedrosians Tile & Stone is one of the largest porcelain tile and stone importers and distributors in the United States, with 40 retail locations worldwide. It’s 30 year-old legacy ERP system impacted demand planning and forecasting, which was critical for Bedrosians’ massive 10,000-item inventory. Without accurate demand planning and forecasting, Bedrosians was reactive and vulnerable to market whims.

Like many retailers, Bedrosians saw customer demand skyrocket during the COVID-19 pandemic. Annual spending on home improvements grew, but without accurate demand forecasting, Bedrosians struggled to find that “just right” inventory on hand formula, often finding itself understocked or overstocked. With lead times as long as six months or more, the need to have accurate inventory levels—and visibility into them—couldn’t be more important.

Bedrosians’ legacy ERP impacted its ability to optimize inventory placement and as such, the company was at risk of promising products they couldn’t deliver or losing sales opportunities while inventory was in transit. Bedrosians chose Dynamics 365 ERP solutions to help optimize financial, inventory, purchasing, and planning capabilities to better streamline the movement of their globally sourced inventory. What used to be a manual guessing game has turned into an automated, scientific forecast based on historical data and industry trends. This ensures Bedrosians can capitalize on sales opportunities, despite months-long lead times, and deliver an on-time and in-full customer experience.

“Implementing Dynamics 365 has been a game-changer for our business. It has improved our operation and financial management. Real-time visibility, optimized procurement, and streamlined order processing has resulted in increased sales, improved margins, and a more efficient supply chain and positioned us for sustained growth in a competitive market.”

–Nirbhay Gupta: CIO, Bedrosians Tile & Stone

3. Business growth and agility

Barnas Hus is Norway’s leading children and baby products retailer, with both e-commerce and 28 physical stores. Working with a Microsoft partner, KPMG, Barnas Hus set out to face its supply chain challenges that were hindering its business growth, such as lack of visibility and inconsistent accuracy in its legacy ERP system. Barnas Hus embraced a modern, cloud-powered platform enabled by Dynamics 365. This technology-focused improvement helped the company transform its warehouse management, inventory control, production planning, and more—setting Barnas Hus up to meet growing customer demand.

Once they had made the shift, Barnas Hus opened a new state-of-the-art warehouse that utilizes autonomous robotics to accurately pick, sustainably pack, and trace every product. The modern warehouse management system improved inventory visibility and freed up employees to spend time with customers. The best part? The ease of implementation led to a quick time to demonstrate value and Barnas Hus saw its biggest month ever in revenue.

See how Barnas Hus embraced robotics with KPMG and Dynamics 365.

4. Automation and enhanced productivity

Michael Hill is a leading jeweler based in Australia with operations in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. When the pandemic hit, its 300 stores were facing temporary closures and the company confronted logistic complications that forced expensive, indirect, and inefficient shipments to its customers worldwide. Michael Hill’s legacy ERP system was inflexible and lacked visibility and accuracy.

The international jeweler moved quickly to avoid harm to its business and its brand. It rapidly deployed Dynamics 365 and almost immediately began providing increased visibility into inventory availability across its supply chain. This gave Michael Hill the ability to treat each of its stores as a warehouse location, which seamlessly allowed customers to order items online with the option to pick up at the site of their choice or ship direct from that location. It also vastly reduced the manual labor previously required from Michael Hill employees to ensure fulfillment.

“We use the ship-from-store capability in Dynamics 365 to fulfill demand from many locations, rather than requiring human intervention whenever stock is transferred. That helps us reduce how many hops it takes to put a piece into the hands of the customers, and that’s our end game—a better experience.”

–Matt Keays: Chief Information Officer, Michael Hill

By implementing Dynamics 365 as its warehouse management system, Michael Hill was able to deliver agile flow solutions that freed up its employees to focus on more strategic initiatives such as loyalty programs and trialing new fulfillment models.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 solutions

To compete and thrive in market conditions today, organizations should look to adopt modern warehouse management solutions to better prepare for uncertainty, increased demand, and disruptive conditions. While legacy ERP systems are complex, Microsoft partners and Dynamics 365 solutions provide quick time-to-value and provide the agility and automation required for growth.

Explore a free guided tour of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Footnotes

¹Gartner SC 2023 Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Execution Technologies, 2023.

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

²Source: IDC TechBrief, Warehouse Execution Systems, Document number:# US51050623, August 2023.

The post 4 benefits of modern warehouse management solutions appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Finance teams’ roles have evolved—and expanded—into new realms. As economic pressures demand that everyone deliver more with fewer resources, finance professionals’ plates are increasingly crowded with analysis, strategy, even supplier relationships—plus all the traditional finance processes they’ve long been responsible for.  

It’s not just moving invoices along—finance teams are being asked by upper management to bring cost-saving, time-optimizing, and value-adding insights to the table when business model evolution and digital transformation are discussed. And they’re looking for any solution that will give their overstretched employees time back in their day to think bigger, by tightening up tedious processes that drain human energy and douse the spark of innovation. 

The Future of Finance

Streamline your accounts payable process and free up resources to fund your business transformation

Watch the webinar

For finance teams, incorporating automation into accounts payable (AP) is a great place to start. After all, the work of capturing invoices, processing and verifying them, then paying vendors can be complex—with plenty of sub-processes to support the end goal of on-time payments and stronger customer relationships. Automating parts of the accounts payable process lets finance teams spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on higher-value work that builds agility in finance operations and across your business.  

5 ways accounts payable automation elevates finance operations

To get started on your AP automation journey, check out this webinar, The Future of Finance: Unlocking the Benefits of Accounts Payable Automation, and learn how automating accounts payable data can help you:

1. Focus on strategy—not tedious data tasks

Allow your finance teams to put more energy where it matters—fulfilling, strategic work that keeps them engaged—not cumbersome accounts payable processes that waste time and drag down productivity.  

2. Reign in costs and unnecessary fees

Understand payment trends, analyze vendor performance, and improve processing time to drive significant savings. Cut paper costs by automating manual processes, while helping avoid handwritten errors that lead to mistakes and late payment fees downstream.

3. Stop small errors from becoming big problems

Improve accuracy with automated accounts payable software that limits the unavoidable errors inherent with manual data entry—so you sidestep risk now while dialing in what you need for compliance later.

4. Get to know your vendors

Strengthen vendor relationships by automating AP processes to pay them on time, every time. And over time, analyze accounts payable data to reveal valuable cost-saving insights that put you on more solid footing for future negotiations.

5. Gain more visibility

Put more eyes on your cashflow to help people across your business focus more on cost savings. Empower everyone—not just data specialists or finance operations teams—to support larger initiatives with more readily available data.

When should you automate accounts payable?

To keep pace with competitors, you’re probably looking at ways your finance team can integrate new technology into traditional processes like accounts payable that have long kept business’ bottom lines in order. Because the pace of business isn’t slowing, nor are potential disruptions retreating. To respond to changing business conditions and guard against long-term risk, finance leaders are starting to recognize how the latest AI-powered automation can help them take on what’s currently taking up too much of their employees’ time: 

• Complex processes: The more complex the process, the more challenging it can be to manage effectively. Inefficient processes with too many steps are not only a drag on people’s time and energy, they’re often a barrier to digital transformation. When that leads to a delayed payment, it can damage customer relationships that have taken years to build—putting the wrong kind of spotlight on finance teams. 
• Strained IT: When organizations are facing flat (or shrinking) IT budgets and people don’t have the tools they need, it’s hard to build consistent processes. A lack of IT budget is more than annoying; unreliable systems can overwhelm employees, get in the way of strategic work they’d rather be doing, and make it tougher to follow processes that finance regulations demand. 
• Data overload: Invoices, payment records, information on multiple vendors—all that data is difficult to manage on its own. When people naturally turn to manual processes to make sense of it all, it’s often time intensive and susceptible to errors, fraud, and missed opportunities for insights. 
• People power: Freeing up resources to hire new talent is tough enough, and retaining that talent is even tougher when mundane tasks fill up their plate. Engaging them in their current role with opportunities to be creative and offer strategic insights is often a better investment than trying to find, onboard, and retain a new hire. 

If these obstacles sound familiar, automating accounts payable processes is a cost-efficient way to start moving your organization past them. When your company is ready to shift from managing cumbersome accounts payable operations to supporting strategic initiatives, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance can help. 

How Dynamics 365 Finance modernizes accounts payable operations

Dynamics 365 Finance modernizes accounts payable operations by capturing invoices in multiple formats (digital and manual), processing them while coding and resolving errors with full automation, then automatically paying vendors on time—with analytics around payment scenarios and compliance gathered in real time. Be sure to watch the webinar to learn more, including how one Microsoft customer cut invoice costs in half and reduced overall costs by 25 percent by streamlining procedures across their business, including invoice processing, with accounts payable automation. It also features a demo of how to use AI-powered automation to accelerate digital transformation with Dynamics 365 Finance.  

The post 5 ways accounts payable automation drives digital transformation appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

For more than two decades, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software have been defined by manual entry and high-touch data processes. Since then, businesses have made strides in automating many manual transactions through various means but have largely reached a plateau. Our 2023 survey on business trends found that 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce these kinds of repetitive tasks from their jobs.¹

Supply chains have been a prime area for the application of AI, due to the vast amounts of critical business data and processes involved. Supply chains have evolved over the years, with emerging technologies and innovations that enable businesses to optimize their operations, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. Yet, while statistical models have been used in processes such as inventory management, forecasting, production planning, and scheduling, there hasn’t been a significant shift in the industry beyond improving algorithms. Learning hasn’t been applied to make supply chain processes intelligent and self-regulating. The next generation of AI will transform the industry by making it more agile, efficient, and responsive to changes.

In March, Microsoft announced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, introducing the world’s first AI copilot for ERP and CRM applications. With the next generation of AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 Copilot, those high-touch, laborious processes can be transformed with interactive AI-powered assistance.

With Copilot, you can further unlock the potential of ERP by bringing together data and AI to reduce time spent on unfulfilling tasks and accelerate the speed of execution and business outcomes.

We are excited about bringing next-generation AI to virtually every business function, and especially so about the opportunities AI has within the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform. In this post, we look at AI in supply chain management (SCM), both its development and current state, and we share our view of next-generation AI in SCM.

Learn more: Introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, bringing next-generation AI to every line of business

Microsoft Supply Chain Center

Redefine what's possible with the power of AI.

Sign up for a free trial

Industry 4.0 is AI

The Fourth Industrial Revolution opens doors that further transform how we work and what we focus on during the workday. We have come a long way from the industrial plant floor automation of the 1960s to the intelligent era of supply chain digital twins of the 2020s. We now have significant technological advances that can transform traditional supply chains into next-generation cognitive supply chains. These cognitive supply chains can proactively predict and self-correct disruptions, trigger replanning, and provide intelligent recommendations. Thus, enabling humans and AI to work together to quickly respond, in real time, to changing environments.

In the age of AI, tools like artificial neural networks and machine learning provide the means to automate personal workflows and processes. Still, low-code applications, natural language processing, and generative AI will not replace human innovation. It will, on the other hand, increase and expand our expertise and ability. This is why at Microsoft, we believe that AI is going to define new ways for humans to amplify their impact, their capability, and their unique potential.

The brief history of AI in supply chain management processes

The first application of AI in SCM is a so-called expert system known as the inventory management assistant (IMA). IMA was designed in 1986 to improve the replenishment of spare parts and reduce safety stock for the US Air Force.² From there, the 1990s saw a broad resurgence of interest in the decades-old concept of AI. As a result, AI became commercially available in SCM applications on a limited basis during this time.

In the 2000s, computing power continued to increase as hardware costs declined rapidly, making the investment in AI affordable. However, AI’s widespread adoption in SCM really took off in the 2010s with the rise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the associated acceleration in digital transformation. Together, these factors led to an explosion in the amount of data generated by supply chain processes, marking the beginning of big data in the supply chain.

Outside the supply chain, machine learning algorithms matured and refined into efficient and almost standard-like features, such as the Netflix recommendation engine. At the same time, SCM use cases were taking shape and beginning to deliver value. The first applications of machine learning came in the areas of demand forecasting using regression models to achieve high forecast accuracy, short-term demand sensing using pattern recognitions, anomaly detections in assets, and inventory optimization, to name a few.

Today, AI is used in a wide range of applications, including image and speech recognition, natural language processing, and autonomous vehicles. More recent breakthroughs, such as Dall-E2 and ChatGPT from OpenAI, are rapidly opening new doors, as evidenced by our recent launch of Dynamics 365 Copilot. However, most companies are still focused on analytics and promotion use cases, such as forecasting demand or planning production.

As such, organizations have yet to fully explore the potential of AI, which involves self-learning supply chains, more sophisticated supply chain algorithms, and recognizing patterns in big data that are beyond human perception. AI can automate many of the recurring decisions in SCM and interact with supply chain systems in human context, but this requires a platform to connect legacy and modern solutions to unify the vast, growing amounts of supply chain data.³

Microsoft Supply Chain Platform and next-generation AI

As supply chain complexity grows, companies are using next-generation AI to gain a competitive edge and remain profitable. AI is proving to be a game-changer for businesses, whether they’ve already embarked on a digital transformation journey or are considering doing so. Let’s explore some of the cutting-edge AI use cases in supply chain management that can deliver immediate value without undertaking costly transformation initiatives.

AI-powered risk mitigation

By unifying data sources and business applications and combining them with next-generation AI, companies can better predict and act on disruptions across channels, suppliers, and geographies. For example, the AI-powered Microsoft Supply Chain Center news module proactively flags external issues such as weather, financial, and geopolitical news that may impact key supply chain processes. Plus, predictive insights surface affected orders across materials, inventory, carriers, distribution networks, and more.

With Dynamics 365 Copilot capabilities, users can quickly turn these insights into action with contextual email outreach. With a custom and contextual reply, supply chain users can save time and collaborate with impacted suppliers to quickly identify new ETAs and reroute a purchase order (PO) based on a weather disruption or fulfill a high-priority customer order via an alternate distribution center due to geopolitical tension.

Sign up for a free trial of Microsoft Supply Chain Center today.

Optimize order fulfillment processes

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management (IOM) enables organizations to intelligently orchestrate fulfillment and automate it with a rule-based system using real-time omnichannel inventory data, AI, and machine learning. IOM can improve order fulfillment models by using AI to automate the identification and selection of optimized fulfillment decisions. Including the ability to enhance AI models when recommendations are not ideal, using the train, feedback, and improve methodology.

Elevate forecast accuracy with AI-driven collaborative demand planning 

Demand forecasting is an area that has already seen pervasive use of AI. Organizations already use machine learning-powered forecasting algorithms to improve their forecast accuracy. However, trust in the system-generated forecast is still not as high as was hoped. Recent supply chain disruptions have only exacerbated the role of the importance of manual oversight during creation and careful review. As a result, demand planners and other stakeholders continue to spend a significant portion of their time manually analyzing trends and anomalies, and fine-tuning demand plans. The next-generation of foundation models have the potential to disrupt these very use cases. Ability to get answers through AI forecast explainability and natural language querying will help demand planners breeze through their demand plan analysis, reducing the time needed for fine-tuning and adjusting demand plan from days to minutes. Furthermore, AI can help in demand review meetings by using natural language for data-driven decision making, surfacing risks and opportunities, summarizing assumptions behind a plan, providing real-time what-if analysis, and generating transcripts and summaries of the meeting along with action items. The next generation of AI in demand planning promises to make the entire process more efficient, accurate, and collaborative.

Mitigate order delivery risks with data Q&A

Procurement teams often conduct monthly supplier reviews for top vendors by volume and vendors struggling to meet delivery requirements, but which have been painful to stop trading with for some reason. A significant amount of time for two to three team members is usually dedicated to gathering and analyzing monthly performance data in preparation for these reviews. Conversational AI can unlock productivity.

With conversational AI, we can imagine a future scenario where any analyst is prompting Dynamics 365 Copilot to: “Show me all orders which were not delivered on-time and in-full (OTIF) in the last 30 days. Estimate how much of our order backlog is impacted by these late deliveries. Suggest three questions that will help the supplier dig into the root cause of the issue. Write a short recommendation requesting the supplier participate in our monthly supplier review until OTIF is above 97 percent.” This example is only the tip of the iceberg for scenarios where generative AI can be used to democratize access and retrieval of a company’s data through conversation-styled interaction with AI chatbots.

Additionally, AI could significantly accelerate the onboarding of new suppliers by bypassing or speeding up internal legal review. We can envision purchasing managers, supply chain directors, and more benefitting from AI contract review by assisting in tasks like reviewing master supplier agreements.

Autonomous self-regulated supply chains

One of the biggest challenges in managing a complex supply chain is that it is “high touch” with disparate data sources, different cross-functional units, and processes ranging from strategy to execution. Companies struggle to harmonize these disparate data and processes, leaving planners to make intuition-based decisions rather than data-driven ones. AI can address the complexities of mapping a multi-tier network model from several disconnected systems across the value chain, including external business partners. Further, with advances in AI such as reinforcement learning, the networks can be adaptive, and self-regulated with different sub-network agents operating toward a common goal of increasing resilience, profitability, and customer service. Such an adaptive network considers the historical trends, and supply chain internal and external events, along with signals. The system evaluates multiple scenarios and performs business impact analysis to determine the best course of action using techniques such as simulation, optimization, and machine learning. For example, the system may recommend a make-and-buy option, versus solely buying, and provide a balanced scorecard of supply chain metrics and costs, along with a ranking for the recommendation. This type of supply chain offers automation to eliminate manual processes, and intervenes based on exceptions, generating alerts, and providing suggested actions. It also has the ability to self-learn from user actions and automatically execute corrective measures.

Intelligent process automation

As next-generation AI innovation emerges, it will increasingly deliver on the promise of automating many of the recurring decision touchpoints in supply chain management, freeing up valuable human resources to focus on higher-level productive tasks that require creativity, judgment, and complex problem-solving skills. AI bots can carry out tasks like reading email for new procurement requests, logging into multiple systems for data entry, solving supply chain alerts, and triggering workflows. Another example is increasing planners’ productivity by using generative AI to create the artifacts (plans, performance, assumptions, risks, and mitigations) required to run key business processes such as sales and operations planning (S&OP).

Intelligent inventory visibility and optimization

Another example of AI in supply chain management is inventory intelligence where AI can balance inventory more accurately to reduce stockouts, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Consider a scenario where the global inventory position analysis shows a projected inventory depletion in the upcoming quarter, with levels falling below safety stock requirements. With AI, the supply chain analyst can gain insights into the root cause—low supply relative to demand for a particular region and time. The scheduled maintenance of a factory in that quarter would lead to no additional production, exacerbating the situation. As a result, the demand must be met from existing inventory. With the help of AI-powered insights, the analyst can now delve deeper into the impacted products and locations and take corrective measures, using AI-powered recommendations to rebalance inventory from other locations or employing a cost-effective contract manufacturer.

Intelligent inventory visibility is also revolutionizing the way businesses search and view their stocks and products, empowering users with unparalleled accessibility and efficiency. The power of AI enables users to swiftly ascertain stock levels and product availability by merely typing their inquiries in natural language, similar to chatting with a friend. Whether it’s a query about products nearing expiration or the availability of limited-edition items across various regions, the AI assistant promptly delivers the desired results. Gone are the days of navigating through cumbersome menus, remembering product IDs or location details; simply use natural language to acquire essential information within seconds. In addition, AI can streamline today’s labor-intensive data-mining and table-joining. AI technology can now streamline the entire process, and even summarize inventory status in dashboard and text reports. Consequently, businesses can liberate their analysts from mundane tasks such as data cleansing and report writing, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive success.

Shorten warehouse inventory cycle times

Another area of supply chain management to which AI can be applied is to shorten cycle times in warehouse fulfillment. Today, as demand for different items ebbs and flows, it’s difficult to predict which items should consume forward picking locations in the warehouse. Warehouses typically deal with the situation in two ways: they can pay for more space than they need at the current volume (unlikely) or have workers re-slot bins to bring items from a bulk area to a pick location. The latter is an ongoing, labor-intensive, and time-consuming process that is reactive by default.

In the future, AI could be applied to analyze incoming orders (or look further upstream in the supply chain) to forecast demand better. Based on this analysis, combined with data like physical product dimensions and the storage capacity of bin locations, recommendations for re-slotting can be offered to warehouse managers––allowing plans to be proactively set in motion to ensure that on-hand inventory is available at the time of picking.

Revolutionizing the supply chain industry

The above are just a few examples of how we imagine this next wave of AI innovation can improve supply chain processes and the overall employee experience. And it’s certainly just the starting point. AI has the potential to revolutionize supply chains, offering new possibilities for improved efficiency, cost savings, and customer satisfaction. To fully harness the benefits of AI, businesses must invest in the right technology and infrastructure to unify their supply chain processes and data—while considering critical aspects like security, accessibility, and company values. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to deliver AI in supply chain, by integrating built-in capabilities across our solutions and delivering a secure, composable, extendable, and interoperable platform. With low-code/no-code automation, collaborative actions, process orchestration, and rich supply chain functional capabilities in a single experience, customers can compose a tailored ecosystem and confidently apply AI to deliver new value.

Next steps for AI in supply chain management

Dynamics 365 Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center is already unlocking a new world of opportunity and redefining what’s possible when teams harness the power of AI. By embracing AI, organizations can gain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the curve in an ever-changing business landscape. And as we explored through the possible supply chain scenarios covered in the last section, we are just getting started. Sign up for a free trial to get started.

End notes

¹ Four Ways Leaders Can Empower People for How Work Gets Done

² International Journal of Logistic Research and Applications, 2009. Artificial intelligence in supply chain management: theory and applications.

³ Boston Consulting Group , 2022. Why AI-Managed Supply Chains Have Fallen Short and How to Fix Them.

The post Applying next-generation AI to the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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

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

Supply Chain Reimagined at Hannover Messe

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

Register for the session

AI-powered risk mitigation

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

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

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

Optimize fulfillment with warehouse automation

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

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

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

Rapid enterprise standardization

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

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

Keep customer promises with improved asset availability

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

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

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

Next steps

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

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

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

Attend to:

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

End notes

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

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

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

We surveyed more than 500 CFOs and senior business leaders for our 2023 Future of Finance Trends Report and found that many organizations continue to struggle with lack of IT resources, overwhelmed employees, and disconnected systems. In fact, while 79 percent outlined that they were shifting to owning business model innovation and empowering transformation across the organization, 88 percent said they don’t have the IT resources or tools needed to drive operational efficiency and minimize busy work for their teams. Finance, human resources (HR), and project operations leaders need to reimagine processes to help their teams achieve more, faster. 

With the 2023 release wave 1, we are delivering enhancements across Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Dynamics 365 Human Resources that focus on helping our customers adapt faster, work smarter, perform better, and operate more sustainably.

Adapt faster with simplified financial consolidations and close

Financial reporting and close—whether year-end, quarterly, or monthly—can be challenging for finance teams as they must quickly aggregate data from across the organization and handle the close and consolidation process on time without compromising accuracy. With these latest updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365, we are further streamlining the close process while improving speed and accuracy, enabling organizations to adapt faster to changes.

Improved speed and accuracy

With these latest updates, we’re providing new features that take the hassle out of recording certain types of transactions, improving speed and accuracy. 

Changes in exchange rates cause the book value of open transactions in foreign currencies to vary over time. Recording these fluctuations accurately at a granular level is incredibly important, yet it’s difficult in practice. Our updated currency revaluation posting profile enables finance teams to post currency revaluation adjustments per currency and module. Accounts payable and accounts receivable subledgers are updated automatically to reflect the unrealized gain or loss, helping to ensure these adjustments are accurately recorded.

Similarly, determining how certain transactions, such as the disposal of a fixed asset as a scrap, should be recorded can be complicated. Elimination of these transactions affects balance sheet accounts, such as acquisition adjustment, depreciation adjustment, revaluation, and write-up and write-down accounts, so recording these adjustments accurately is incredibly important. These latest updates provide options that allow you to determine the posting details of fixed asset disposal scrap/sale based on your business needs.

More granular tracking and reporting

While businesses need to quickly consolidate financial data to close their books, it is also essential that they have sufficient granularity in their reporting to provide finance leaders with the visibility they need to drive strategic decisions. 

After transactions are posted, it’s common for organizations to require visibility into subledger data so that certain transactions can be analyzed. With this update, we are including new ways to define financial tags. Financial tags let organizations track user-defined fields on accounting entries posted to the general ledger. Financial tags can also be used to track the subledger data and are now available for matching within ledger settlement, reducing the number of transactions to be manually matched.

In addition to supporting new financial tags, we’re also improving how vendor and customer payments are recorded to the bank subledger. This feature allows an organization to post vendor and customer payments in separate vouchers but update the bank account in summary to match the bank statement, making reconciliation easier and ensuring smoother bank reconciliation.

Accelerate global expansion and operations

As companies look to better manage the complexities of international operations, globalization studio enhances the globalization capabilities for numerous countries’ new laws around reporting. With this latest update, we are bringing new capabilities to help make it easier for companies working in certain parts of the European Union (EU), Latin America (LATAM), and Asia Pacific area (APAC). 

These updates include the extension of multiple tax ID reporting to more EU countries, which helps ensure accurate tax numbers for transactions, streamline compliance, and raise operational efficiency for global companies. We’re also expanding out-of-the-box regulatory compliance coverage to additional LATAM countries, including Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Colombia, and Uruguay. By providing localized solutions, Dynamics 365 Finance users can confidently navigate the regulatory landscape, reduce compliance risks, and fortify their operational efficiency across multiple LATAM countries.

Work smarter with automation that minimizes repetitive tasks and data entry

For many companies, financial processes still involve many manual and repetitive tasks, which require a large number of resources and take finance leaders away from more strategic work. According to our 2023 Future of Finance Trends Report, 88 percent of financial leaders feel they are primarily responsible for transactional functions, such as creating financial reports, as opposed to the more strategic functions of running a business, like advising on innovations. Similarly, 88 percent of finance leaders reported not having the automation tools they need to automate repetitive tasks (for example, digital invoicing software and online payroll) and free up their time for more innovative work. With this latest release, we’ve added new capabilities to help finance teams work smarter by using automation to minimize manual and repetitive tasks. 

Streamline invoicing to reduce the time from procure to pay

Processing vendor invoices is a manual and repetitive task in every organization. Not only is this process resource intensive—requiring a high volume of document processing—it is also ripe for human error.

By digitizing and automating invoicing, businesses can save time and reduce errors. Dynamics 365 Finance includes accounts payable automation with invoice capture to provide continuous AI-driven automation with reading and recognition of vendor invoices. With this release, we added additional capabilities for non-purchase order (PO) invoices and the vendor invoice journal. We’ve also enhanced the invoice process with the ability to process free text invoices faster and invoice automation that enables the processing of vendor invoices during import, all of which save time and effort while helping to improve accuracy. This eliminates the need for additional background processing and frees accounts payable staff to focus their efforts on exceptions.

Improve processes

Working smarter as a company requires integrating systems of record to provide greater visibility and continuity across the organization. With this update, we have added some key integrations that will make it easier for companies to operate strategically.

In this update, we’ve enabled resource management integration. By significantly streamlining the project resourcing process for organizations by consolidating employee data, resource managers can swiftly identify and allocate suitable resources based on skills, certificates, and availability. We’ve also enabled learning management integration, which offers users a centralized view of training data and other employee information, streamlining workforce development, boosting productivity, and fostering a more informed decision-making process.

Simplify manual processes

Organizations are often burdened by manual tasks, which draw valuable resources and are prone to error. For those tasks that require manual inputs, making those experiences as simple and intuitive as possible is critical. 

One such experience is time entry. We’ve taken steps to modernize the user experience for time entry in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, making it more efficient and user-friendly. The modernized interface optimizes usability, accessibility, and extensibility, allowing consultants to enter time more effectively and accurately.

Perform better with enhanced business performance analytics

As finance leaders continue to take on more strategic responsibilities with organizations, the need for high-quality data and insights is increasingly important. Yet getting this visibility across the organization remains a challenge for many businesses. The new Dynamics 365 features significantly improve business performance analytics. 

Turn data into insights

To be successful, business leaders don’t just need data; they need actionable insights that help drive corporate strategy. New record to report and procure to pay data models will provide financial and non-financial data and metadata into Microsoft Dataverse and transform it into analytical tables. Structuring this complex data provides a single data source for reporting, allowing users to build well-defined and readily available relationships between ledger, subledger, and source documents from multiple systems.

The new reporting hub and base reports on data governance, as well as row-level and role-level security. These features help finance teams quickly locate, edit, and share relevant reports by business process easily and quickly—helping to put insights into action.

Advanced data gets enhanced security

Security is paramount for financial data. We’re furthering our investment in security by providing additional security controls in Dynamics 365 Finance. Business performance analytics provides row-level and role-level security capabilities to multiple users in your organization’s finance and accounting teams, as well as to the staff in other departments. This helps ensure that reports are only seen by those with appropriate permission.

When paired with the extensibility of the data model, users can be set up to view reports by dimension and legal entity. This lets teams create refreshable, prewritten reports that can be distributed beyond the finance organization, making it easier and safer to circulate data.

Making it easier to navigate taxes

Streamline tax calculation and reporting processes for import/export businesses through direct currency conversions and localized support for Indian taxation. Additionally, you can simplify interoperation with tax solution ISVs, enabling efficient management of complex tax rates across multiple jurisdictions. The withhold tax calculation during invoicing also helps customers meet their compliance obligations, reducing manual effort for businesses operating in countries with specific tax requirements.

By integrating these features into a single comprehensive solution, businesses can achieve greater accuracy in tax declarations, seamless integration between project management and accounting modules, and improved tax management across various jurisdictions. These capabilities ultimately help organizations drive efficiency, fulfill legal compliance, and make better decisions, allowing businesses to thrive in an increasingly globalized market.

Operate more sustainably

We are introducing new features aimed at helping businesses improve traceability tied to sustainability by utilizing the power of automation, digitization, and compliance with evolving global regulations. These features include archiving data and electronic invoicing services for various countries. Implementing these solutions can help organizations reduce power usage, improve efficiency, and comply with local and international regulations.

Reduce data storage energy expenditures

The archive data feature allows companies to save storage space and improve performance by reducing the data set they work against. This enables organizations to archive data consistently and securely while still allowing for reporting and analysis of historical data through standard reporting.

Eliminate paper waste

Electronic invoicing services support the move towards a paperless environment by helping companies automate the entire invoicing process. By eliminating the need for physical paperwork, electronic invoicing reduces paper waste. This newest release offers electronic invoicing services for France, Poland, and Japan.

Additionally, the global e-invoicing feature addresses the growing market driven by tax digitization and invoice automation. By interoperating with government services and intermediate-certified operators, the global e-invoicing feature helps businesses efficiently exchange electronic invoice documents with tax authorities and other businesses.

Try out the capabilities

Many users started testing the new features in an early access period starting January 30, 2023. This allowed users and partners to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. For those already in an early access non-production environment, these new features will be automatically enabled with the April 2023 upgrades.

Watch this YouTube video to learn more about these updates or get started with a free trial.

Dynamics 365 release planner

See the new features for Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations

Explore release planner

The post 2023 wave 1 releases AI, automation, and analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we launched 2023 release wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a rollout of new features and enhanced capabilities slated for release between April and September 2023.

The updates include Copilot for Dynamics 365 and Copilot for Microsoft Power Platform, bringing the power of next-generation AI capabilities and natural language processing to business processes. Release wave 1 also introduces hundreds of new and updated user experiences to collaboratively solve challenges, streamline workflows, and help individuals and teams focus on what matters most.

The 2023 Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, available to view on demand, is a great way to get up to speed on the release wave and learn how organizations are already using these capabilities to transform end-to-end business processes today.

Some of the major themes that we’re excited to highlight include:

• Enhancing end-to-end customer experiences with AI and Dynamics 365 Copilot. 
• Modernizing every link across supply chain and operations.
• New ways to accelerate development with Microsoft Power Platform.

Enhancing end-to-end customer experiences with AI

Release wave 1 supercharges end-to-end customer experiences while improving collaboration and information sharing across the organization. New capabilities provide more insight into audiences’ needs, and more ways to engage customers with personalized content and conversations at scale. AI takes center stage in this release wave, with new Dynamics 365 Copilot capabilities that help to streamline processes—from audience research to content development.

For example, automaker Lynk & Co. is attracting new customers to its innovative, membership-based approach to car ownership by using new AI capabilities in Dynamics 365, as well as enhancements to build relationships with the right audience. Learn more in this fireside chat with Lynk & Co by visiting the bonus content during the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will enable marketers at organizations like Lynk & Co. to use natural language capabilities in Copilot to query, group, and measure their customer data, allowing them to discover hidden patterns. Marketers can quickly identify the best audience for upcoming events and create a segment directly from the results.

In addition, users can see all Customer Insights activities in the unified activity timeline in Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing. Valuable data from Customer Insights can be embedded directly within the Contact, Account, and Lead forms within Dynamics 365 Sales, giving sellers a more complete picture of their customer in the flow of work.

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Dynamics 365 Marketing delivers Copilot capabilities to help marketers learn more about their customers, create targeted customer segments, and generate personalized content. We’ve enhanced the query assist feature with generative AI capabilities, enabling marketers to accurately target customers using conversational, everyday language to quickly build targeted segments. Content ideas helps to find inspiration and provide a starting point for copy when composing emails for audiences.

We’ve also made it easier to add lead capture forms to a website. With the new intuitive forms experience in real-time marketing, you can easily create modern forms with advanced capabilities without depending on developers. Also, marketers can use out-of-the-box dashboards to track pipeline development and analyze the impact and contribution of journeys, marketing messages, and content at different stages of the business process.

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Dynamics 365 Sales delivers enhancements to streamline seller tasks and improve effectiveness. Rather than manually tracking next steps, Dynamics 365 Sales helps sellers to automate the creation of follow-up tasks. This saves valuable time to focus on higher-priority items and avoid tasks from falling through the cracks. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales creates email content for faster customer replies and AI-generated meeting follow-ups that compile discussed topics.  

In addition, updates include a new manager insights dashboard for conversation intelligence, as well as extended support for conversation intelligence with calls made through third-party telephony providers. This gives sellers a seamless experience irrespective of the call provider they are using.

See the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Viva Sales.

Release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 Customer Service include enhanced case creation, channel-based swarming with Microsoft Teams, and robust real-time analytics with customization, in addition to availability of the voice channel in more regions.

Organizations like MVP Health Care—a nationally-recognized regional not-for-profit health plan provider—will soon use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to provide agents with real-time AI-powered assistance, helping them to resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks so they can focus on delivering high-quality service to their customers.

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Modernize every link across supply chain and operations

Updates to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management deliver increased agility and resilience across the supply chain. By applying appropriate valuation methods and selected currencies, you can now account inventories—inventory and work in progress (WIP)—in multiple representations, to help comply with local generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), internal management accounting, and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) principles.

A new Asset Management mobile app helps ensure smooth operation of production equipment. From one app, your team can create new maintenance requests, track and update work orders, and access key information. Updates to the Warehouse Management mobile app include a new version for iOS devices and features to speed the packing process, such as optimized screen layouts with more prominent product images to help workers more quickly identify items.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is officially included in Microsoft Supply Chain Center, helping to provide faster, more reliable delivery times. Updates include the ability to create a purchase order from a sales order and check order status updates without switching to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, as well as new purchase orders for business-to-business (B2B) capabilities. At the launch event, we demonstrate new capabilities that help organizations like Northern Tool + Equipment—a manufacturing and omnichannel retail business with 130 stores across the United States—to experience faster, more reliable delivery times, so their customers get the tools and supplies they need exactly when they expect.

See the release plans for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Intelligent Order Management, and the Microsoft Supply Chain Center.  

Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations

In this wave of updates, we’re helping finance organizations adapt faster, work smarter, and drive business performance with features and enhancements focused on the three As of rapid finance-first innovation.

Organizations like The Robert Walters Group, a specialist recruitment agency operating in 31 countries, can now use our newly generally available Expense mobile app. The release wave 1 updates also include expense itemization and the ability to capture receipts using optical character recognition (OCR), enter per diems, and log mileage.

Enhancements for Dynamics 365 Finance include further automation of complex tax scenarios and full end-to-end automation of accounts payable and ledger settlements, helping finance professionals to expedite the close and spend more time focusing on value-added activities.

See the release plans for Dynamics 365 Finance, Project Operations, and Human Resources.

Accelerate development with Power Platform

Microsoft Power Platform—our comprehensive and intelligent low-code platform—enables users and organizations to create innovative apps, bots, and automations seamlessly. In our launch event, we explore how customers like Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) use Microsoft Power Platform to automate and eliminate redundant and manual processes throughout their organization.

This release wave builds on our commitment to create tools and experiences that add value to every role by breaking down silos between data, insights, and people. The union of AI and low-code will revolutionize the way solutions are built and fundamentally transform the way people work, collaborate, and create.

With Power Apps, we continue to support the scaling of organizations by empowering makers and developers of all skill levels to be more productive and to build apps, and manage data and logic. We are helping organizations reduce risk with advanced governance capabilities, such as automated tests for custom pages and model-driven apps, enabling customers to further benefit from modernization of web and mobile experiences ensuring modern and fast experiences across apps.

See the release plans for Power Apps.

Power Pages supports low-code and no-code makers, as well as professional developers, with more out-of-the-box capabilities, like new solution-based application life cycle management and migration of website configurations from one environment to another. With virtual tables and cloud flow integration, Power Pages can now connect seamlessly to your external data and service and enable both low-code makers and pro developers to build amazing user experiences.

Explore what’s new for Power Pages.

Power Automate is reimagining the process of creating flows with natural language authoring capabilities that allow you to simply describe the flow you want to create. It has never been easier for new users to start creating and authoring flows. Other improvements include introducing work queues where automatable tasks can be viewed and managed together, as well as providing streamlined connectivity to a machine for desktop flows, which eliminates the need for additional installs and password management. Lastly, we’re making it easier for organizations to contextualize the impact of their technical investments with ROI performance tracking capabilities in Power Automate desktop flows, which helps organizations invest in the most valuable automation efforts.

Explore what’s new for Power Automate.

Power Virtual Agents is the Microsoft single conversational AI studio and unified authoring canvas for all bot-building needs. We’re making it easier for developers and makers to build bots with Copilot in Power Virtual Agents, greatly accelerating bot development via natural language authoring. Developers can then extend their bots to handle more complex workloads with Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services capabilities in Power Virtual Agents.

Explore what’s new for Power Virtual Agents.

Power BI infuses AI-driven insights into everywhere that people get work done. For Teams, we’re bringing enhancements to meetings and multitasking to help users work with their data wherever they may be. And, for individuals, we’re enhancing the creation experience, bringing more parity on the web, and adding the Power Query diagram view into Power BI.

Explore the release plans for Power BI.

Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

We encourage you to watch the launch event on demand for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Physical Operations, and our AI transformation journey in business applications.

Be sure to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan, in the release planner.

Release planner

Explore Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform features coming soon or available to try now.

View the release planner

The post Release wave 1 expands agility, automation, and innovation across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This is an exciting time in the evolution of AI, and you don’t have to look far to see the headlines on ways it is changing the world. From advanced machine learning models to breakthrough natural language technology, new opportunities to use AI to improve the way we work are surfacing daily. AI innovation can free employees from mundane, repetitive tasks and allow them to focus on the work that matters most, increasing job satisfaction and pushing productivity to new heights. According to our recent survey on business trends, 89 percent of those with access to automation and AI-powered tools feel more fulfilled because they can spend time on work that truly matters.¹

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central brings the power of AI to small and medium-sized businesses with features that help companies work smarter, adapt faster, and perform better. Let’s explore some of the ways that AI in Business Central is improving how work gets done, including:

• Automating repetitive tasks
• Improving customer service
• Anticipating business challenges
• Enhancing decision making

Automate repetitive tasks with Copilot in Business Central

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot introduces the next generation of AI-powered experiences to Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications. Dynamics 365 Copilot provides AI assistance directly in the flow of work using natural language technology, automating repetitive tasks, and unlocking creativity. Dynamics 365 Copilot is the world’s first copilot in both customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), ushering in the new age of productivity for businesses of all sizes.

With Copilot in Business Central, product managers can save time and drive sales with engaging AI-generated product descriptions. Banish writer’s block with unique, compelling marketing text created in seconds using product attributes such as color, material, and size. Tailor the descriptions to your brand by choosing a tone of voice, as well as format and length. Complete the process by publishing to Shopify or other ecommerce stores with just a few clicks. Copilot in Business Central makes launching new products fast and easy so you can focus on growing your business. Try Copilot in Business Central today.

Improve customer service with Sales and Inventory Forecasting  

In a highly competitive business landscape, effective inventory management can be the key differentiator between a successful business and one that struggles to retain customers and remain profitable. Inventory management is a trade-off between customer service and managing your costs. While low inventory requires less working capital, inventory shortages can lead to missed sales. Using AI, the Sales and Inventory Forecast extension predicts future sales using historical data to help you avoid stockouts. Based on the forecast and inventory levels, the extension helps create replenishment requests to your vendors, helping you save time and improve inventory availability to keep your customers happy.

Anticipate business challenges with Late Payment Predictions

Effectively managing receivables is critical to the overall financial health of a business. The Late Payment Prediction extension can help you reduce outstanding receivables and fine-tune your collections strategy by predicting whether sales invoices will be paid on time. For example, if a payment is predicted to be late, you might decide to adjust the terms of payment or the payment method for the customer. By anticipating late payments and making adjustments, you can better manage and ultimately reduce overdue receivables.

Enhance decision-making with Cash Flow Analysis

Azure AI in Business Central helps you create a comprehensive cash flow forecast with Cash Flow Analysis, enhancing decision-making so you can stay in control of your cash flow. A company’s cash flow indicates its financial solvency and reveals whether the company can meet its financial obligations in a timely manner. To make sure that your company is solvent, a future-oriented planning instrument is necessary. With insights from AI, you can make proactive adjustments to ensure your company’s fiscal health, such as reducing credit when you have a cash surplus or borrowing to mitigate a cash deficit.

Innovate with Business Central

In today’s fast-paced market, AI has become essential for companies looking to stay ahead of the competition. The AI tools built into Business Central can help you improve the end-to-end customer experience, reduce costs, and boost financial success. With the ability to automate repetitive tasks, analyze data, and offer personalized recommendations, Business Central can help you operate more efficiently and grow your business.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Adapt faster, work smarter, and perform better with Business Central.

Download the guide

Sources

¹ Four Ways Leaders Can Empower People for How Work Gets Done

The post Introducing a new era of AI-powered experiences in Dynamics 365 Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.