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Why and How to Choose Microsoft Business Applications to Solve Your Business Challenges?

Identifying the right application for your business is an essential step in achieving your long-term strategic goals. Mainly, choosing the perfect CRM and ERP for your organization is vital to complement and meet these long-term goals. Organizations across industries face numerous industry-specific challenges; while all of those issues are not going away, many organizations adapt to a rich solution such as Microsoft Business Applications to turn every challenge into an opportunity. Microsoft Business Applications has supported organizations of all sizes, irrespective of their industries, to improve productivity through digital transformation drastically.

Microsoft Business Applications – Introduction

Microsoft Business Application includes a full range of back-office business applications instead of implementing and integrating separate ERP and CRM systems. It is one of the industry leaders in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a robust and comprehensive cloud solution that puts the levers needed to drive greater profitability at all levels of the organization, on any device, anywhere. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the best platform that gives you a 360-degree vision of the insights and processes. Microsoft Business Application is ideal for helping organizations gain end-to-end control and visibility with business intelligence (BI) capabilities. It can assist you to stand out amongst the competition by providing excellent functionality, performance, and security. MS Dynamics can also enable you to modify your solution as your organization adapts to your business environment.

Why to choose Microsoft Business Applications for Business Challenges?

Here are the top 10 reasons why many organizations choose Microsoft Dynamics 365 for their business challenges.

1. Simple and Familiar User Interface

Microsoft Business Applications work just like all the other Microsoft products that are familiar to us. Hence, it does not only help simplify user experience but also speeds up the training process with the system and leverages Office 365 tools in using Excel, Word, Office, Skype for Business, and Exchange.

2. Single Cloud Solution to Manage a Global Business

Almost all are doing business in multiple countries and regions across the world. Especially in a manufacturing business, the supply chain has become challenging to manage while maintaining customer service costs. One of the significant reasons many organizations prefer Microsoft Dynamics is because of the advantage that it offers for global business. Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports international business with multiple currencies, time zones, languages, and compliance with multiple banking and reporting standards. Also, all these can be managed from a single cloud solution to provide consistency and standardization across various business entities around the world.

3. Reduced Complexity and Unified Business across Channel

Every organization today uses multiple channels to sell their products; due to which there is an increased channel complexity that requires us to manage all these channels more effectively. Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrates multi-channel selling directly into the ERP solution and helps in eliminating the channel silos of the past. Wholesale, retail and e-commerce can live side-by-side within the application, intelligently sharing inventory, customer information, and supply chain visibility.

4. Supply Chain Visibility and Advanced Forecasting Capabilities

Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps manufacturers by handling complex supply chains out of the box. From a sophisticated multi-site model that addresses lead-time variation, different vendor sourcing models, and multiple raw material suppliers, Microsoft Dynamics 365 can keep up with the demanding needs of our customers. Also, with the Supply Chain 365 extension, organizations can get advanced forecasting, planning, execution, and analysis capabilities.

5. Enhanced Operations with Automated Business Processes

Microsoft Dynamics 365 dramatically enhances operational efficiency through standardization and streamlining of business processes. The solution offers a flexible workflow that allows businesses to automate tasks and procedures to be used every day. Microsoft Dynamics 365 can relieve your team of repetitive manual tasks and also will enable you to create processes using workflows to achieve the desired results.

6. Streamline Communications across Infrastructure

One of the biggest challenges many organizations face is streamlining communications across an increasing range of systems and devices in complex infrastructures. Having various applications to handle every individual routine task makes it much harder to keep track of everything, and departments within an organization end up with information silos that can hinder their collaboration efforts. In Dynamics 365, the common data model brings you immediate access to information since it is stored in one place. This also allows for seamless integration with other essential business applications, such as Office 365 and Power BI. With add-ons like free mobile applications with Dynamics 365 license and support for the cross-web browser on multiple devices, your workforce can be productive regardless of wherever they work.

7. Enabling business agility

Organizations miss out on many new opportunities just because their technology could not identify market trends as quickly as they need to keep up with the current market and demand. With cloud-hosted collaboration tools like Dynamics 365, you will be able to serve customers no matter where they are and quickly identify market trends and move parallel with the ever-growing demand.

8. Boosting employee productivity and efficiency

Most workers in the US are not engaged with their jobs as they could be, with the main reasons being unsuitable technology and mobility restriction. Employees expect flexibility regarding where and how they work rather than being at the same office desk around the clock. Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables complete workforce mobility and scalability as it lives in the cloud. This allows your employees to access the tools whenever they need to do their jobs from any device from anywhere. This will enable employees to make more intelligent and more informed decisions. Since your employees have all the tools and insights at their disposal, they can seamlessly find everything on one platform. All these ideally boost their productivity and efficiency.

9. Seamless Integration of solution with Other Microsoft products

One of the well-known and significant advantages of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is that it is easy to integrate it with other Microsoft products to allow businesses to switch from Dynamics 365 to Outlook for communication easily, Power BI for data analytics, and SharePoint for documentation.

10. Choices of Deployment and regular updates

Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers deployment options such as on-premise, cloud-based, partner-hosted. By choosing the deployment option that best suits your budget, resources, and business needs, you can effortlessly and quickly transition to Dynamics 365. Also, Microsoft is committed to enhancing businesses for its customers. Hence, they invest vast amounts of resources in Research and development for Dynamics 365 to develop continuous upgrades and advanced functionality that helps companies to stay on top of their game.

How Microsoft Business Application can help you solve your Business Challenges?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has been the most trusted solution for many organizations across industries to digitally transform, get equipped for the future, be more agile, and have a powerful sales team and more extraordinary customer service. Dynamics 365 solutions are enriched with advanced capabilities to ensure every requirement of any organization is met.

Here is a quick heads up on how Microsoft Business Applications is helping many organizations to solve their business challenges –

It is a cloud-first solution

Comes with an astounding pace of innovation

Highly reliable data security and privacy

Dynamics 365 solutions are highly customizable

Seamlessly connects with many applications

Requires very little time and effort in the integration

Offers full ownership of the technology

Simple, easy, and familiar user interface

And many more…

If you would like to know more about the rich and sophisticated features and capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions and how you can take advantage of the solution, reach out to our expert team!

Migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 – Reasons, advantages, and key considerations

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has seen incredible growth since 2017 till now as per Gartner. In 2017 and 2018, Gartner reports mentioned that CRM has become the largest software market; now, the Customer Relationship Management market is predicted to grow at a 13.7% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) through 2021. While implementing a CRM for an organization can have a profound positive impact, sometimes, despite your best efforts, a CRM may turn out to be a poor fit for your business. Then the companies have to acknowledge that it is not working efficiently and start looking for a new CRM solution that best fits. As a CRM and ERP, Microsoft Dynamics is the best solution for businesses that want to drive growth through a customer-centric approach. Microsoft Dynamics is one of the largest platforms implemented with a 67% growth rate and a 47% revenue. More organizations are switching from Salesforce to Dynamics to enjoy the flexibility and compatibility of working within the Microsoft suite products they use across their business. There are many strong reasons that more companies take this decision to shift from Salesforce to Dynamics.

Reasons for businesses to shift from Salesforce to Dynamics 365

Leveraging the larger Microsoft ecosystem of solutions and adopting more applications over time.

Strategic Microsoft partnership initiative.

Lesser costs compared to Salesforce.

Significant investments and ROI from Microsoft on these organizations.

The lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintenance.

Inability to meet growing business requirements with the current system.

Additional functionalities that Salesforce CRM does not offer.

Easy integration with Microsoft products like Word, Office 365, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, etc.

Quickly scale the usage of the products and apps they need to use.

Microsoft PowerApps and Power BI.

No extra cost on basic add-on functionalities

Advantages of Microsoft Dynamics 365

Get up-to-date analytics: Microsoft Dynamics enables you to gather data that keeps you informed and up to speed. This allows you to make better decisions by identifying and prioritizing key opportunities.

Cut down delays with centralized information: Centralized information in the system can ensure you can access information across the organization. It helps you cut down delays experienced by your customers by helping you save time by reducing search and follow-up time.

Multi-channel marketing capabilities: Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers marketing capabilities that enable you to determine the types of messages you should send your customers through their preferred channels and enhance your marketing ROI.

AI-informed processes: AI-fuelled CRMs provide real-time insights into customer behavior, identifying buying patterns that turn into conversion opportunities. Because of Microsoft’s investment in AI and machine learning, they continue to be a leader in this part. Dynamics 365 is such AI-powered platform that helps increase productivity and help you grow through advanced insights.

Exceptional customer experiences: Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help you improve your customer experience by using data and intelligence. This enables you to provide customer service that meets your customer’s expectations, builds trust, and keeps them loyal.

Scalable and adaptable to the legacy system: Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution suite flexible to your legacy system, but it also customizes your security levels to fit your needs. And this, of course, is scalable as your business grows.

Deployment options: With Dynamics 365, you can choose whether you want an on-premise solution or through the cloud. If you are coming from Salesforce, having more than one deployment option with CRM for Dynamics 365 is a luxury.

An important fact is that migration from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be complex and even disrupt your business. So if you’re planning to migrate from the Salesforce system to Dynamics 365, here’s everything you must know about migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 with better results.

Key things you need to consider before migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365

Planning: The first best practice you can put into action to ensure your switch from Salesforce to CRM for Dynamics 365 successfully gets the right parties and people involved early on in the planning process to have champions and advocates aligned when the switch is made.

Change management: When migrating to Dynamics 365, change management requires an abundance of upfront planning. This way, the actual switch from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 follows the detailed plan from data migration to user adoption.

Deployment options for Dynamics 365:

Dynamics 365 Online – It is the most similar to your Salesforce CRM deployment. The online deployment option provides you the flexibility to access your CRM data from anywhere and on any device connected to the internet.

Dynamics 365 On-Premises – An On-Premises deployment is for deploying your CRM system on your servers within your own data center. The most significant benefit to an On-Premises deployment is direct access.

Dynamics 365 in a Private Cloud – This deployment option for Dynamics 365 solution is similar to on-premise. But, instead of your server, it would be your Partner’s private data center. The most significant benefit to deploying in a Private Cloud is that you don’t have to manage the infrastructure of managing services.

Data migration: Businesses today have to deal with vast amounts of data, because of which big data and data migration have become topics of the utmost importance for business leaders. Any business must maintain top-level data quality. When shifting from Salesforce to Dynamics 365, you may want to execute the straight migration to be running on your new system as quickly as possible before adding new functionality. The data migration process can be challenging.

But, there is a way to plan your data migration to secure a smooth and seamless data migration process in a few steps.

Plan: Assess and find out the data sources and determine what needs to be migrated. This step is significant, and it helps determine the most suitable migration.

Map: Once done determining, map fields from the source system to the corresponding target fields/entities in CRM.

Extract: Post to past steps, extract the data from the source systems.

Transform: Transform the data (including changing data types, modifying formats, and at times, data cleansing and de-duplication) to be compliant with Dynamics CRM.

Load: Import the data into Dynamics 365 system through automated scripts, tools, or manually.

Verify: The last and essential part of the data migration process is to verify if the data is migrated successfully by comparing record counts, spot-checking records, or developing validation routines.

Migrate to Dynamics and accelerate your business now!

From what we have seen in this article, migrating to Dynamics 365 exposes your business to a world of better possibilities. It comes with rich features and extensive capabilities to accommodate every company with their unique business need. Microsoft’s integrations with ERP, Office 365, Suite, Power BI, and Flow is an added advantage when we aim for business growth with Dynamics 365.

Significant things that every Manufacturing Chief Operative Officer (COO) must know – Dynamics 365 to change the future of Manufacturing

Digital disruption has transformed how many businesses do their business, and manufacturers are no exception to this. Manufacturers worldwide are driving change across the organizations to completely transform business, improve product quality, reduce time-to-market and customer service.

In the digital era, any manufacturer’s critical concerns are about improving visibility, increase efficiency, and lower costs. To thrive in this current environment, manufacturers are left with relying on technology to breakthrough innovations and drive more intelligent operations.

What is the future of Manufacturing?

The convergence of physical trends and digital trends is disrupting everything from the past. Manufacturers now want to connect equipment and factories and leverage the data to improve every aspect of operations, from the floor to customer service. Digitization in the manufacturing industry is enabling a customer-centric approach while optimizing entire processes. They sell value-add services to complement product sales, open new revenue streams, and strengthen customer relationships while revolutionizing the delivery of these differentiated services.

In recent times, using technology like augmented reality; the manufacturers combine a field expert’s insights back at headquarters in no time. Sophisticated technologies become more readily available, and everything is replaced by intelligent manufacturing facilities where tech-savvy workers, aided by intelligent robots, are creating future products. With these many growing technological advancements and the impact of artificial intelligence, today’s quality of investments will define the future of Manufacturing.

The Role of a COO in Manufacturing Industry in This Digital Era

When it is about digitally transforming the organization, a COO should take the lead on the digital transformation journey. Though the COO role has some primary responsibilities, there are a few aspects that a COO takes complete control of in the digital disruption to ensure business success.

Supporting the company throughout the digital journey

The COO should offer advice about how they can take advantage of new technologies to map out efficiency gains and cost savings. They also vouch for the operations, the expertise, and the quality to lend support throughout the digital journey.

Streamline investments in new technology

One of the critical objectives of a COO in the digital era should be reducing operational costs and streamlining investment in new technology. These are the core responsibilities for the COO, who adds their insight on the specific business operations and productivity challenges.

Finding and Retaining top talent

The responsibility to find the right people with the right skills at the right time ensures that everyone can perform well. Though there is an ever-growing need for new people who can think strategically in the business, understanding the requirement’s needs is very important. This also needs to be seriously considered and handled by the COO in a company.

Aligning operations in the company

It is a continuous effort of the COO to align operations with organizational goals, which entails alignment of resource planning, reconfigured service levels, process integrity, budgets, people KRAs, and many more parameters to ensure business continuity for the organization under most circumstances. Achieving alignment becomes a moving target and involves multiple balancing acts through various pulls and pressures.

Performance Monitoring

The core operations are monitored through indicators in operations dashboards, which cascade in the organization’s responsibility. The dashboards focus on priority performance measures for the operations leadership.

Addressing the pain areas

Transformation opportunities are highest in operations pain areas. Compared to other departments, operations pain areas are given higher priority. As a transformation leader, COO seeks to find visible pain areas in operations management. The credibility of the transformation process will go up significantly if we solve operations pain areas.

Why Microsoft Dynamics 365 is best for Manufacturers?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 ends the divide between CRM and ERP systems. Dynamics 365 supplements necessary capabilities with rich analytics, embedded intelligence, and the convenience people expect from apps on a mobile device. With Microsoft Dynamics 365, COOs can optimize all the processes while laying the foundation for connecting advanced technology for the future. It also offers deep insight into the supply chain and manufacturing lifecycles, warehousing specifics, and delivery schedules to meet all the modern manufacturing challenges. It helps manufacturers transform their business by bringing business processes together into one comprehensive service. Purpose-built apps enable seamless access across functions such as finance, sales, customer service, and supply chain operations.

An ERP like Microsoft Dynamics 365 can make all the difference to your operations. The Microsoft Dynamics suite has been a favorite of manufacturing businesses, with solutions offering various tools and processes for manufacturers; Microsoft is determined to aid manufacturers in streamlining and enhancing their processes for two decades.

Trends Every COO should be updated about – the Future of Manufacturing with Dynamics 365

Unified data and intelligent technology are driving connected Manufacturing.

Unified data removes silos and enables intelligent tools to be leveraged across all your business units, elevating every part of the business through applied intelligence. A fully connected company will provide AI tools with more complete data, which helps the system provide more accurate outputs and deliver intelligence to every corner of the business. COOs can gain visibility into performance and gain the ability to leverage unified data from across the organization. Unified data provides business leaders with better visibility into both performance and operations. With a complete picture, they can make faster, smarter decisions.

Focus is shifting toward improved customer experiences and personalization.

As customer expectations rise, manufacturing leaders turn to technology to deliver better and more consistent experiences. Most researches prove that more than 63% of customers switch to a competitor because they offered better service. As the customers’ expectation rises, Manufacturers are turning to Dynamics 365 to deliver a better customer experience.

Applied artificial intelligence and automation make manufacturing smarter and safer.

It was estimated that the spending for autonomous devices is predicted to approach 200 billion USD by 2022, and almost 60% of all manufacturing tasks could be completed with automation technology. As IoT connects data from across manufacturing organizations, intelligent systems leverage that data to make smarter and more efficient processes. AI-enhanced systems can detect and report physical processes in the real world and make automated decisions, predictions, and real-time optimizations across the end-to-end value chain.

Ethical business processes and solutions are moving up the priority list.

With mounting pressure from consumers, regulators, and shareholders, manufacturers invest in more ethical and sustainable practices. With intuitive, familiar tools that are easy to learn and cloud-based applications enable individuals to access information from anywhere. Microsoft Dynamics 365 makes technology more accessible to more people than ever before, opening up untapped markets for talent and innovation.

Manufacturers adapt to a changing workforce.

As the workforce becomes more diverse and inclusive, manufacturing COOs seek the knowledge and resources to help manage this transformation. They are also embracing this change to help drive innovation, onboard new technical digital skillsets, and develop new processes to capture institutional knowledge, ensuring that the next generation of workers is capable of taking the reins.

Technology is enabling more streamlined and precise R&D

New technologies and techniques, such as advanced prototyping and digital twins, enable advanced R&D and foster innovation. Many R&D departments have been tasked with developing products that utilize next-generation technologies such as cloud computing, IoT, AI, robotics, and big data. To meet time-to-market goals, R&D departments adopt some of the same technology they are tasked with incorporating into their products. Big data analytics, cloud computing, and intelligent sensors are some of the many technologies available to manufacturers today to truly listen to their customers and create innovative products.

Intelligent supply chains and planning capabilities are the key competitive differentiators.

As customer expectations have shifted drastically, manufacturers are developing more agile warehouses and leveraging intelligent order routing to help them stay ahead of the competition. Most customers shift to a competitor based on their experience around fulfillment, delivery, and service. By analyzing data for patterns, AI can predict customer purchases that allow businesses to stock items appropriately. The IoT will enable retailers to tap into reliable, real-time data, increasing the speed and accuracy of decisions and minimizing waste.

Businesses are adapting to global uncertainty.

Deloitte’s recent study showed that data management and data integrity topped executives’ lists of concerns and challenges in managing cybersecurity. With new cyber risks, geopolitical shifts, and new regulations, manufacturing COOs are looking for ways to navigate the uncertainty. Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers these operations leaders with greater visibility into their business operations and performance to help them identify emerging hazards and the flexibility to adapt quickly and scale with ease.

Explore more about Microsoft Dynamics 365

Digital transformation is not accomplished overnight. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 in place, you can optimize entire operations while laying the foundation for connecting advanced technology to prepare for the future. Dynamics 365 is a vast solution; whatever we see here would be just a grain of sand.

If you would like to explore more about Dynamics 365 solutions and how it can help your Manufacturing Industry, Talk to us.

How can a CFO leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central capabilities?

The role of Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is not just financial management; everything in an organization impacts the CFO’s commitment to an organization. There is no doubt that the primary job responsibility is to optimize a company’s financial performance and financial sustainability. While these continue to be the CFO’s mission-critical responsibility, the CFO needs to manage risks, build innovative strategies, and incorporate the right technology and automation to transform the business, aside from their financial responsibilities. CFOs face many evolving challenges that include increased regulatory scrutiny, adapting to constant technology transformation, meeting ever-evolving customer expectations, and identifying business issues.

Why CFOs need a Digital Technology Tool?

With more responsibilities and challenges, the need for investing in the right digital technology becomes vital in managing the complexity involved. Digital technology helps CFOs better manage, analyze, and present data that yields the most significant business value. The right technology presents the finance leaders with an opportunity to accelerate decision-making. Many companies have implemented ERP to put their struggles away. Here is a list of benefits that prove why having an ERP makes the CFO work easy.

Top 5 ERP Benefits that Makes CFO’s Life easy

Unified View of Enterprise Data: An ERP system helps you get a single, unified view of the financial data, a real-time view of the enterprise’s core business processes. It helps to collect, process, and analyze data. With this, the CFO can read multiple data variables to make quicker, data-driven decisions.

Visibility and Tracking: Having an ERP system enables you to get complete visibility throughout your organization. It helps a CFO view whether the organization is performing based on the KPIs, looking at the results, identifying the issues, and immediately taking corrective measures.

Predictive Analytics: The right ERP powered with a robust analytics tool can enable the CFO to leverage data and predictive analytics to better read the organizational trends and plan.

Compliance Ready: ERP systems come with a high-level toolset that helps companies manage compliance and finance-related reporting. The CFO can use the reporting interface available within an ERP to investigate and remediate regulatory compliance deficiencies across the business processes promptly.

Cost optimization: One of the major concerns for a CFO is cost optimization. A cloud-based ERP system enables the CFO to cut down excessive investments of the legacy IT infrastructure and any additional investment required for hardware and software installation in the future.

Dynamics 365 Business central – the best ERP solution

Business Central is an intuitive and scalable ERP solution by Microsoft that connects operations across your small or medium-sized business. It is a part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, and it shares the same codebase as NAV. With Business Central, an organization will make more informed decisions as it connects data across accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, and operations while streamlining your processes and improving your customer interactions. Business Central is packed with rich capabilities that make it the best ERP solution that is available in the market. Some of the significant advantages that Business Central brings are –

Cloud: Adopt new business models faster with flexible deployment, reliability, and security.

Integration: Connect people, processes, and insights to make better decisions faster with embedded guidance and dashboards.

Visibility: Accelerate financial close, improve forecasting, and get real-time performance metrics.

Connected service: Manage the entire sales process from within Microsoft Outlook to deliver better outcomes with connected service operations.

Planning: Ensure successful project execution with planning, resourcing, tracking, costing, billing, accounting, and real-time intelligence.

Inventory: Adapt to changing business models with visibility across purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, and warehouses.

How Can CFOs Leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Capabilities?

Business Central can enable a CFO to be equipped with connected data from reports, charts, and Microsoft Power BI dashboards across finance and accounting, sales, purchasing, and inventory to be proactive about the organization’s financial health. To put it clearly, we have come up with a list of ways Business Central can help CFOs.

Control Your Financial Data: By having Business Central in your organization, as a CFO, you can manage your cash flow, bank reconciliations, fixed assets, budgeting, and project costing while shortening cycle times with the late payment–prediction extension.

Automate Your Business Processes: All theDynamics 365 solutions are connected with the Power Platform. With that, you will be able to create workflows that hook together systems in a way that creates a seamless experience.

Monitor Entire Financial Performance: Business Central uses built-in reports, Excel, or Microsoft Power BI and unlimited data dimensions to give you real-time cash flow, help you identify financial patterns, analyze trends, and improve business planning. You can connect reports, charts, and Power BI data across teams to get accurate insights and make financial decisions.

Collaborate With Your Team: A finance team has to be more collaborative than any other team in an organization as they deal with numerous documents and reports across the organization. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, with Microsoft 365 and Teams integrations, a CFO can seamlessly collaborate within their team/ other team/ vendors in no time.

Power up Your Reporting with AI: Power BIiss one of Microsoft’s reporting tools that can be used across all different systems. With Power BI in your Business Central system, you will be able to quickly get access to live reporting, real-time insights and act upon those promptly. Several powerful AI pieces built into Business Central can help you increase productivity by speeding up repetitive tasks and improving cash flow by helping with inventory.

Business Central Dimensions: ‘Dimensions’ is a powerful Business Central tool that enables CFO to get their hands on detailed reporting with great depth and speed. Unlike other methods, instead of having hundreds of G/L codes, you can use ”Cost Centre” and ”Department”/ any other as Dimensions in Business Central.

Quickly Expand into Global Markets: You will have the ability to support multiple currencies easily, exchange rates, consolidations, intercompany transactions, and localized tax regulations with Business central capabilities.

Accelerate Financial Closing: Financial close and reporting is quite a nightmare with the volume of data in an organization. Business Central helps you reduce month- and year-end closing times with connected general ledger, accounts receivable, payables, and fixed assets data. You can also streamline approval workflows using Power Automate in Business Central.

Find the Right Way to Leverage Business Central Capabilities for Your Organization

What we have seen in this blog is just a glimpse of what Business Central can benefit a CFO in an organization. But, there are a lot more features and capabilities of Business Central that can help transform your business.

How to Improve Customer Retention Using Microsoft Dynamics 365? Customer retention is essential for a company’s growth, and it is what makes a business stand out from the rest in this competitive business landscape. Many companies don’t realize how important customer retention is and continue to keep focusing on new customer acquisition. But, neglecting existing customers in search of new customers is a common mistake that many companies do. A proper customer retention strategy can help a company much better than acquisition. Forrester Research found that 88% of customers abandon their purchases because of a bad experience and a study by Bain and Company found that just a mere 5% increase in retention rates can increase your profits by up to 95%.

Customer retention helps to increase your business’s profitability in many ways that you might not even realize. Therefore, companies should build trust and loyalty towards their brand to see their profits increase over time.

Here is a quick run-down on some of the capabilities of customer retention.

Key Reasons Why Customer Retention Is Important

Customer retention is easier and more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.

Retaining customers bring more ROI – increases the revenue by 25-95%.

Acquiring new customers is 5-25X more expensive than retaining an existing customer.

Retained customers buy often since they’ve learned the value of a product/ service.

More than 60% of loyal customers talk about their favorite brands with people in their social circle.

How does Microsoft Dynamics 365 improve customer retention?

Here are some of the significant ways Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help you drastically improve your customer retention.

10 Ways to Improve Customer Retention with Dynamics 365

1. Provide Personalized Communication And Responses To Your Customers

Personalizing communication with your customers can help you build better customer satisfaction and increase their loyalty. Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions provide you the access to complete information in each customer’s record. With Dynamics 365, you will be able to pull information about past interactions, buying habits, preferences, marketing approaches, and other data that can help you personalize your messages and responses accordingly. Dynamics 365 comes with dynamic content through which users can use the advanced personalization of messages that reflect a customer’s order history, preferences, and other detail to increase engagement. Dynamics 365 also allows you to send personalized messages that communicate news, offers, events, and other relevant content.

2. Complete Visibility To Customer Information Across The Organization

When any of your customers place a query through phones, emails, websites, or social media, you should be able to answer that query promptly. Hence, your team should be equipped with the customer’s history. Dynamics 365 solution provides you a clear picture of your customer query and improve your relationship with them. It offers immediate access to information throughout the organization to all pertinent customer information. With this capability, your customers won’t have to repeat the same information to each new person who interacts with them and feel satisfied with the prompt service.

3. Proactively Connect With Customers and Offer Rapid Response

When your customers encounter any issue/ a problem, they want to contact you and get the issue resolved quickly. Dynamics 365 users can enable you to view and manage the request and respond to it promptly. It also allows the customer to submit a support ticket post. Posts which, you will be able set up the workflows and generate an acknowledgment via email to assure the particular customer that the request has been received and addressed. With Dynamics 365, you can also schedule reminder activities that prompt you to follow up with your customers proactively.

4. Enhanced Data Functionality with A Central View Of The Customer

An effective customer retention system should provide customer information to all employees to help the decision-making process. Dynamics 365 gives you a central view of your existing customers. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM creates a central view of your customers through role-based views that bring together different customer views specific to various roles across the business (sales, services, marketing), allowing for easy analysis and efficiency.

5. Advanced Integration of Customer Data

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has a suite of technical capabilities to consume and transfer data easily. Dynamics 365 comes with the ability to present information to users without duplicating it into the system, embedded data analytics, and KPIs from Power BI. It also allows the users to navigate directly to or from customer screens and information in other systems when needed. You can look into the end-to-end customer journey and examine everything from engagement to onboarding and purchasing, support, and retention.

6. AI Technology, Machine Learning, and Advanced Analytics

Microsoft Dynamics 365 combines advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence to detect patterns and suggest actions or automate workflows to help your team use the data. It enables you to make recommendations on how to deliver campaigns targeted at customer retention. You can connect Power Platform’s virtual agent tools or any other frameworks so that you can leverage the full power of machine learning and take deployment to any market.

7. Enhance Your Organizational Productivity

Dynamics 365 makes recommendations and identifies opportunities to cross-sell or upsell additional products or services to suitable customers based on the purchase history and other data. The solution acts as the best customer retention system by monitoring customer behavior and identifying selling opportunities to make recommendations related to ongoing customer needs. Through this, you will be able to deliver quality customer care and improve your customer retention.

8. Bring Your Marketing, Sales, and Service Teams Together for an End-To-End Customer Experience.

The key to a successful customer experience is offering impeccable customer service. However, when multiple teams are involved, the same could be misaligned, leading to communication breakdown resulting in unsatisfied customers. Microsoft Dynamics 365 lets your marketing, sales, and service teams become aligned through a complete integration to avoid this mishap. Dynamics 365 empowers servicing teams with the tools needed to deliver a tailored customer experience while keeping your sales and marketing teams in the loop with complete visibility. This helps your teams track any customer requests or complaints and work with the other teams coherently to promote and improve customer retention.

9. Easily Segment and Target Customers Based On Information.

With the current customer information available within Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can manage your marketing communications that all your customers receive. With the help of Dynamics 365, you can initiate sales follow-ups and workflows after marketing messaging and reduce or tailor further communication based on sales and customer service patterns or issues. You can apply customer insights and segmentation to boost effectiveness and enrich the experience with the data and processes in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

10. Assess Your Customer Service Performance using metrics

With many efforts to retain your customers, you need to know if your efforts are reaping any benefits to your process and the business. That is why it is essential to capture feedback, use metrics, and act upon the same. Dynamics 365 allows you to capture timely customer feedback scores by enabling you to send survey forms after an issue is resolved by your team in an automated email. You can use these feedback reports to assess performance and take corrective action if any issues are identified. With Power BI, you can also review service delivery performance, use metrics to identify recurring support or service problems, assess what issues are being resolved in a single call, and identify the areas for improvement.

Why Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an effective customer retention system?

Dynamics 365 is an effective solution that offers you everything from a central view, data visibility, AI capabilities, real-time insights, integration abilities to provide an extensive customer experience and increase customer loyalty to improve overall customer retention percentage.

Dynamics 365 is a great set of cloud solutions by Microsoft that can provide your business with various tools to improve customer retention and enhance business growth. Dynamics 365 can help you enrich your team’s productivity, promptly offer service to customers, and improve customer retention.

Building an In-house Team vs. Finding a Technology Partner for your Dynamics 365 needs

Having an effective CRM/ ERP system brings your business processes together to improve collaboration, help you make data-driven decisions, and advance your business productivity. But, the challenge isn’t over after evaluating, analyzing, and selecting the right solution. After choosing the right solution that perfectly fits your business needs and your current budget, it is essential to assign the implementation project to the right skill to ensure success. One of the biggest debates about handling implementation is either building an in-house team or finding the right technology partner. This post will let us gain insights into the pros and cons of both the options and understand why we need to find a technology partner over building your in-house team for our implementation needs.

Why Would You Need A Technology Partner?

Most companies prefer a technology partner to simplify and quickly deploy the software they need and free themselves from the struggle of recruiting, training, and managing the project’s workflow. If you decide to find a technology partner, you need not spend more time and effort in building, onboarding, and maintaining a new team.

Some of the other reasons to choose a technology partner are reducing the huge upfront infrastructure investment and development costs, speed up the implementation and time-to-market at a reasonable price while simultaneously helping your internal resources focus on mission-strategic tasks.

When speaking about Dynamics 365 implementation needs, even if you already have an internal development team, you might still need specific skills or expertise to make your Dynamics 365 implementation successful. However, in this case, hiring individual experts full-time is challenging and expensive. That is why finding the right technology partner makes more sense in Dynamics 365 implementation.

To give you a heads up on why businesses choose Microsoft Dynamics 365 over the other solutions –

Dynamics 365 ranks among the highest in user adoption.

The user interface is very familiar and intuitive.

The easy integrations with other Microsoft products offer a huge advantage.

Dynamics 365 comes with powerful built-in tools to improve productivity and efficiency.

It has a flexible architecture and deployment options.

Dynamics 365 can be easily customized to meet unique needs.

The downside of building an in-house team for your Dynamics 365 implementation

Talking about whether to build your in-house team or find a technology partner is debatable. While hiring a dedicated team or an employee who knows the details of your IT infrastructure has a few advantages, such as being a reliable source, cultural fit, and effective communication, there are many downsides in building an in-house team.

At first, you need to hire the right skills as full-time employees, which does not only involves lot of effort and time but also very expensive. Even if you are convinced with the right hire’s expense, another pitfall of building an in-house team is there aren’t enough individual Dynamics 365 experts out in the market. Their tech stack, domain knowledge, availability, and skills of the expert should match your Dynamics 365 needs and budget for you to start the recruitment process.

Besides monthly payments and other expenses such as medical insurance, tax, and social security coverage, buying hardware and software for your in-house team can be another added cost source. You will need to provide all of the equipment and licenses for your in-house team to skill-up and work properly.

Pros and Cons of the in-house team for your Dynamics 365 implementation needs

Pros of In-house team

Exact cultural fit: With an in-house team, you get the opportunity to pick team members that align with your business culture, and they work directly for you.

Complete dedication: Your in-house team, being a part of your company, would dedicate 100% of their time to your implementation tasks. They are always available within the physical space and are available to take up the tasks you assign to them.

Direct communication: Since an in-house team works within a physical space, it would easy for you to set up meetings and have a face-to-face discussion that can speed up the communication. Also, there is no need for bouncing emails around to get the project information across to the team.

Cons of In-house development

Higher costs: An IT developer’s average salary in the US costs $71,508 as per Payscale. It is not just the salary; having an in-house team paves ways to added expense on medical insurance, tax, and social security coverage to your employees. Also, even when the employees are idling between projects, you have to cover their fixed salaries.

Time-consuming recruitment: Once you have finalized on which solution you need to implement, searching for the right skill, sending out numerous job postings, and waiting for the response to recruit the right talent, get them on board, train them sufficiently, and manage an in-house team is very complex, tiring, and time-consuming.

Hard to find the right talent: An expert in the field of Dynamics 365 with the skill and knowledge that matches your organization is not just expensive but hard to find. And, if you decide to create an in-house technical team, you have to spend lots of time and money on finding and hiring the right talent.

High staff turnover: The turnover rate can be high. The need for skilled people in the market is more increased, and hence, you would be having a tough time fending off poaching attempts by competitors and recruiters.

Upskill the team: In the digital era, with the introduction of new technologies, tools, and languages constantly, you need to ensure that your team keeps up with the changes. Hence, having an in-house team requires investment in training and tools as well.

Pros and Cons of Finding a technology partner for your Dynamics 365 implementation needs

Pros of technology partner

Extensive expertise: With a technology partner, you can access a pool of unique talent and expertise. You will be gaining a team of experts who have deeply experienced Dynamics 365 implementations across various industries. They can understand your business requirements and align them with their experience and expertise to provide you top service.

Eliminate/ reduce costs: There would be no expenses such as those inherent to in-house development – recruitment, salaries, retention, and more. Also, there is no requirement for an upfront IT investment. Especially, sourcing and recruiting talented Dynamics 365 experts is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. But, when you go for a partner for your Dynamics 365 needs, you evade paying all these costs.

Faster implementation: You get an already established team that consists of skilled experts who know how to work together and handle the implementation seamlessly from various projects they have handled earlier. So, you need not worry about internal teamwork issues, and you can complete the implementation quickly and accelerate the time-to-market.

Reduced management efforts: Unlike an in-house team, you get a self-managed team with the technology partner. You don’t need to worry about the management efforts taking up too much time as your technology partner will manage their deliverables with you still having control over what is happening. This allows you to free your internal resources and reduces the management efforts required from you.

Increased Flexibility: With a technology partner, it gets remarkably easier to scale up or down depending on your business needs at the moment. A technology partner would offer tremendous support in adding the right experts to the team when the project grows.

Efficient problem solving: A technology partner would have Dynamics experts who have rich experience in implementation and facing challenges due to various projects they got their hands on. They also have a vast accumulated knowledge that is an invaluable support in any problems or non-standard tasks arising for your organization.

Proven workflows/ methodology: The skilled partners would have conducted projects of a similar kind many times. They have a methodology that has been proven to work for your choice of solution. This can give you peace of mind that your complex Dynamics 365 implementation is in good hands and is ensured success.

24/7 support: When having an in-house team, you cannot ensure that your employees work round-the-clock for any Dynamics 365 requirements. But, a technology partner would support your Dynamics 365 needs – implementation and maintenance – 24/7.

Cons of Technology partner

Limited control: When you prefer a partner instead of an in-house team, you won’t be able to completely control your IT functions as you could with an in-house team. You will have limited control, but you will be able to monitor what is being done.

Potential Communication Gaps:  Since the technology partner is away from your organization, there is a possible chance of a communication gap. Also, it would be harder to arrange face-to-face conversations with your partner frequently.

What do you really need: An In-house Team or a Technology Partner?

Dynamics 365 implementation requires a lot of resources. If your business does have the resources to support such a large project internally or are tired of finding the right hire, you can opt for a technology partner for your Dynamics 365 needs. If you pair the right solution with the right people who can properly implement Dynamics 365 for your business, you have got yourself a winning formula!

Though there are a few cons regarding technology partners for Dynamics 365 implementation, the right partner can always eliminate these challenges. They would take time to understand your business beforehand and work closely with you and your team to have proper Dynamics 365 implementation.

Finding a technology partner for your Dynamics 365 implementation would be a smart move for the business in the long run.

Why DemandDynamics?

We, DemandDynamics, can help you capture new opportunities, improve overall productivity and reduce costs by leveraging the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365. Our certified experts will perform a thorough assessment of your business needs and suggest what works best for you and enable you to drive maximum ROI.

We have helped many of our clients across industries and around the globe with simplified Development, Integration, Maintenance, and Administration through our ODS model and provide Advisory support to guide them through all phases of their Dynamics roadmap.

Well, if you don’t, digital selling experience is already taking giant strides towards making an impeccable mark on the businesses to understand customers better and then to build meaningful relationships that lasts long using Microsoft Dynamics 365.

But, before we talk about the convergence of Sales and Marketing using Dynamics 365 in the context of digital selling, let’s take a quick look at how the sales organizations are poised in the market today.

If you look at the conventional sales-based-organizations, more often than not, organizations treat sales processes, sales applications, sales data and sales analytics as distinct practices from one another. With technology transforming at a rapid pace, there’s a major shift in how sales teams across organizations operate. It is believed that, in the next five years, sales organizations will witness all four teams merge into one single unit: AI for sales.

So, to stay relevant in the game, sales organizations need to build adaptive systems that integrates hyper-automation which records/handles all interactions and transactions between sellers and buyers.

Heard of multi-experience selling that has crept into the B2B landscape? It’s going to be the future – the digital phenomenon.

The Gartner Future of Sales report suggests that 60% of B2B organizations will transition from experience based selling to data driven selling by 2025.

The insurmountable amount of data that you have today is going to help you build a power-house tomorrow and Microsoft Dynamics 365 could potentially be the catalyst for your unprecedented growth.

Understand your customers and unleash your lead potential

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights allows you to create multi-dimensional customer profiles and segment them based on intent. It allows you to orchestrate seamless customer journeys using Dynamics 365 Marketing for creating personalized multichannel campaigns to nurture sales-ready leads. As you begin to understand your customers better and reach more customers with the right message at the right time using the right channel, you also have the provision to predict churn, next best action, and product recommendations with quick-start machine learning templates.

Stay connected with your customers

Digital experience is going to be disruptive than ever. According to Forrester, more than 80% of B2B engagement will be digital and remote. Using Dynamics 365 for Sales, experience a unified view of your buyer insights across customer relationship management.

One of the major advantage businesses experience on a Microsoft Platform is that, Dynamics 365 data is embedded within daily-use applications such as Microsoft Teams and Outlook. So, having the data at finger-tips makes it extremely a seamless experience between sellers and customers.

Also, in the quest of staying connected to customer at all times, sellers can now use Power Automate to trigger post-sales surveys to closed opportunities via Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. This enables organizations to record feedback on the sales cycle and the overall buyer experience. Using the survey data, managers or sales reps build a plan of action to identify cross-selling, upselling opportunities that enables them to build relationships with customers.

Build relationships that lasts long

LinkedIn is undoubtedly the largest social platform of decision makers. Tapping into its network to find the right customers and to understand their interests is going to be the first step for sales team to accomplish in their pursuit of building lasting relationships.

Leverage the functionalities of Smart Links on Sales Navigator to understand what type of content resonates well with your customers/audience. Post the activity, get a full picture with interactive org charts on your Dynamics 365 Sales Hub. One of the most critical activity to build relationships is to be on top of the changes your customers make from time to time. Like, change in jobs or moving to a different city. Monitor customer sentiment with relationship health to find out which customers need more attention.

Adapt to changes rapidly

No-code tools are handy tools for sales and marketing teams to quickly design and implement actions based on recommendations. It doesn’t require technical expertise to build an application. So, the sales team can leverage the prebuild AI and business processes to keep up with internal and external demands without relying on the tech teams.

Sales Forecasting, a key functionality in Dynamics 365 help sales team to easily analyze and take actions based on recommendations. It’s important for teams across organizations to understand the need to adapt to rapidly growing tech landscape and be up-to-date with new entrants and upgradations in the arena of making customer interactions a seamless experience.

Summary

Nurture more sales-ready leads, align your sales and marketing teams, and grow your business with a robust and adaptable solution – Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing. Being on a flexible platform, you can facilitate collaboration and optimize the sales process from start to finish.

Why choose DemandDynamics?

Whether you intend to integrate new apps with Microsoft Dynamics 365 or an existing stack, DemandDynamics is here to help. To begin with, our team of experts evaluate your current and future needs to strategically align the Dynamics 365 implementation with your specific business goals and objectives to make sure we leave no coin unturned.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we provide the best Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consulting and Implementation services in the industry to meet your business needs with insights and expertise that increase productivity and drive digital transformation.

Our clients love our unique and scalable Pay-As-You-Use model that offers exclusive benefits when compared to traditional Microsoft engagement models.

Over the years, we have set ourselves ahead of the competition, only because, we are:

Affordable | Flexible | Scalable | Available | Agile

Top platforms to integrate with your Dynamics 365 system – Extend the capabilities of Dynamics 365 solution with simple integration options

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Solution is a leading solution in the market as recognized by top industry experts such as Forrester and Gartner with over 500,000+ customers. The solution includes products ranging from sales, marketing, customer management, and finance. One of the key features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is that it can easily be integrated with Microsoft’s other solutions and a myriad of third-party applications without any extensive configuration. Microsoft offers a host of APIs that make these integrations easy and straightforward. However, choosing the most useful and right platform to integrate is highly challenging, which is why it is essential to understand how you can leverage Dynamics 365 capabilities with any tool.

Here is the list of top 10 best platforms to integrate with Dynamics 365. These have proven benefits of lower costs, scalability, and faster implementations while making Dynamics 365 a valuable business tool.

Top Platforms to Integrate With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Systems

Dynamics 365 + Power BI

Power BI is a primary business tool by Microsoft that delivers real-time insights. With Power BI and Dynamics 365 integration, spotting trends, identifying problems, making informed decisions become more convenient and accurate because of data from your CRM, ERP, financial software, and other systems. In the age of data overload, integration with Power BI would allow companies to make the best business decisions. Integrating Power BI with Dynamics 365 will enable you to access dashboards, explore the data, create rich reports and dashboards quickly, and use them interactively on multiple devices.

2. Dynamics 365 + Marketing Automation

Dynamics 365 not only allows integration with Microsoft products but also with other third-party tools. Marketing is a vital part of any organization. With this integration option, you can enhance Dynamics 365’s marketing functionality with an email marketing and marketing automation tool. Without being particular, you can choose any of the best marketing automation tools that fit your needs and your budget for integrating to Dynamics 365.

3. Dynamics 365 + SharePoint

SharePoint is the ultimate content management collaboration tool. This integration allows users to store, search, share information, and create a productive atmosphere with secure access to documentation and data needed to make business decisions with Dynamics 365. Integrating SharePoint with Dynamics 365 also expands the storage of Dynamics 365. Any company that needs to store many documents related to their sales, procurement, and other business opportunities would benefit greatly from integration with SharePoint.

4. Dynamics 365 + Office 365/ Outlook

With the Office 365 integration to Dynamics 365, you can improve managing your customer interaction. With this Office 365 integration, users can better ensure their employees’ productivity by making their day-to-day tasks more straightforward. You can collaborate more efficiently with your team across multiple devices. The integration of Outlook with Dynamics 365 allows users to connect Outlook emails to contacts and opportunities associated with their Dynamics 365 records, create activity lists for email responses and schedule them as tasks, and monitor email activity on any device.

5. Dynamics 365 + Exchange

You can sync all your contacts, appointments, tasks, deadlines, and customer communications in one place with Dynamics 365 integration with Exchange. This helps to generate automated emails from within Dynamics 365, drive efficient collaboration, view all emails, add Dynamics 365 contacts directly from an email message, enable Exchange folder tracking by simply dragging an email to an Exchange folder and tracking it automatically in Dynamics 365.

6. Dynamics 365 + One Note

When working with multiple leads or teams, there is a high need to take notes to work together on opportunities, orders, contracts, or other projects. Integrating One Note into Dynamics 365 allows you to collect your thoughts, ideas, plans, and research in one single area. This can help you to recover previous interactions, opportunity details, quotes, and orders. Also, manage pending leads in an organized manner. This integration allows you to create a OneNote tab for each new record and attach unstructured notes easily.

7. Dynamics 365 + LinkedIn Sales Navigator

With the purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft, the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool is directly accessible within Dynamics 365 CRM. With the Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration, you can search LinkedIn profiles, save leads, set up alerts, get notifications about changes on your lead’s profile.

8. Dynamics 365 + Document Creation Tools

Be it proposals, quotes, other sales documents, or contracts, all these can be built directly in Dynamics 365 CRM. Integrating a document creation tool can significantly enhance the efficiency of your sales process. By using this data in CRM to pre-populate fields in your documents, you can send those documents directly from CRM, create documents automatically logged to a CRM opportunity, and track current status at any time.

9. Dynamics 365 + Finance and Operations

Integrating CRM with your ERP solution is crucial for keeping your entire organization on the same page. Dynamics 365 CRM already connects to Microsoft’s existing ERP solutions—Dynamics 365 Business Central for small and mid-market businesses and Dynamics 365 F&O for enterprise businesses. But, you can also integrate it into the existing ERP or financial solution of your choice. This eliminates the need for manual data entry, ensures accuracy when sharing information across systems, and enables an effective supply chain and inventory management.

10. Dynamics 365 + Custom Integrations

Dynamics 365 solutions offer a lot of flexibility and have web APIs that make integration to other solutions very easy. In case of no pre-built integration that suits you is available through Microsoft’s AppSource, a Dynamics 365 partner can help you build a custom integration for any solution you need for your business.

How to integrate the right solution with Dynamics 365?

There are umpteen integration options and ways to leverage the capabilities of the Dynamics 365 solution. But, if you need to take maximum advantage of your Dynamics 365 system with integration, there is something you need to know. Dynamics 365 integration is simple. There are no large-scale configurations required. But, if you want to make your integration work the way you expected, you need a strategy. It would be best if you analyzed how it will influence your current and future business needs and find the right approach to gain your Dynamics 365 integrations’ best possible outcome.

When it comes to SMB’s, their importance is realized upon their wise marketing efforts, financial operations, and other functions.

Though marketing is getting better and more prominent, marketers worldwide face many unique and common challenges. Some of the significant challenges include accessing data across platforms, identifying customers across channels, maintaining a consistent customer experience, tracking metrics, lead nurturing, providing and measuring the ROI, etc.

But when you have the right solution in place, you can eliminate all the challenges your marketing team faces and enhance the marketing efficiency. Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions are among the most prominent CRM vendors with the highest growth and acceptance rates among consumers. It is cloud-based and comes with a host of ERP and CRM solutions.

What is Microsoft Dynamics 365?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is not just a simple CRM and ERP solution; it combines robust sales, marketing, and servicing tools to give a clear view of customers from the initial contact to support. The Dynamics 365 solutions have revolutionized CRM by applying intelligence to all forms of data. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is powered to provide all the tools SMBs need to execute successful marketing campaigns across several channels. It can help the marketing teams to evolve from reactive business decisions to proactive insights and ideally empower and accelerate performance. You can achieve targets, generate leads, increase account value, and many more.

Let us explore how, with this simple guide on how you can leverage the capabilities of Dynamics 365 to enhance your marketing teams.

How Dynamics 365 can transform your marketing process?

Many companies across the business industry have already employed marketing automation extensively and gained more than 27% increase in their lead volume, 30% increase in the lead conversion, and more than 25% increase in the marketing ROI. Microsoft Dynamics 365 unifies your customer information, provides marketing automation features – lead scoring, customizable email templates – and allows you to create personalized customer journeys.

Here are some of the business challenges Microsoft Dynamics 365 solves and the benefits it provides.

10 Benefits Dynamics 365 can bring to your marketing team.

Centralized information access: Information is a crucial asset for anyone in this digital world. As the marketing team becomes less dependent on each other for exchanging and updating information, marketing teams work more effectively, withholding all the details of marketing activities at hand.

Personalized communication: Dynamics 365 solution delivers customer segmentation to personalize customer communication to their needs and interests. You can gain trust and loyalty by communicating with customers at a distinct quality level.

On-brand email templates: Dynamics 365 allows to optimize launching marketing campaigns and customizing the templates from the start. You can diversify email campaigns and tailor communication to different customer situations.

Automated lead scoring: The process of generating and nurturing leads can get more effective with the Dynamics 365 solution in place. With a chance to set lead-scoring models, you can generate leads from marketing activities and scoring them automatically depending on their activities and interactions over time.

Customer journey mapping: This capability of the Dynamics 365 solution can help you achieve automation of daily processes that can be triggered without your marketing team’s direct participation. You can easily decide how the journey unfolds depending on a customer’s reaction to a marketing action.

Informed marketing decisions: Analytics is the key and critical for every company to understand how their marketing activities are resonating with their audience, what works best for you and them, and what can be excluded from the existing strategy. Dynamics 365 solutions can help you track KPIs, including email management and customer journeys, to provide you with insights into customer behavior and direct you to data-driven marketing solutions.

Analyze Competitors’ Performance: A significant part of being successful lies in tracking your conversion rate and understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Dynamics 365 comes with an in-built feature that allows businesses to accurately create their competitors’ profiles, including the accounts and the sales opportunities they are trying to attain.

Event Management: Dynamics 365 allows you to promote and organize webinars or in-person events and includes online portals for attendees to review the speakers, schedule, or register for events. This feature is currently unique to Dynamics 365 for Marketing.

Core Marketing: Dynamics 365 solutions provide behavior tracking, customer journeys, email marketing, marketing pages, lead scoring, and much more.

Online Surveys: The feature, Voice of the Customer, is part of the marketing solution and add-on with other Dynamic 365 products to develop online surveys to determine consumer trends.

Leverage the Dynamics 365 capabilities for your marketing team

Overall, Dynamics 365 solutions allow enterprises to establish strong relationships with customers, make informed decisions, arrive at data-driven marketing solutions, keep track of contacts/ accounts, nurture leads, automate lead scoring, and a lot more benefits to mention.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 and its exceptional range of solutions owed to its intuitive use and customizability makes it a best fit for business of any type.

If you are someone on the look-out to gain the fullest benefit from your Dynamics 365 investment or someone willing to enhance your marketing processes, Talk to our expert team!

Then you must surely have gone on a whirlwind search to finding the best Customer Relationship Management software for your business. I understand choosing the right CRM can get tricky. Because there are hundreds of CRM software solutions available in the market and you need only one that deem fit for your business. And that’s why I am here to help you with that today.

If you are someone who is trying to understand what Dynamics 365 is all about, this blog is for you.

If you are someone who is evaluating Dynamics 365 for your business, this blog is for you.

If you are someone who wants a comparison of Dynamics 365 with Salesforce and other companies who are leading in the CRM segment, this blog is for you.

When I say this blog is for you, it is because, we have got everything you need right from building the awareness around the need for having a CRM to considering what license works best for your business.

So, let’s get started from the ground rules of Dynamics 365.

What is Dynamics 365?

Launched in 2016, Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers an integrated solution for business of all kinds. Perhaps, Microsoft is one the first Tech companies to offer an integrated solution that combines CRM and ERP.

What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 used for?

Dynamics 365 is used to bring business units together by connecting people and data across applications. It is widely popular for its user-friendly interface as most of the businesses are familiar with Office 365 which makes navigation easy for the first time users.

In addition to making smarter decisions with built-in AI, Dynamics 365 can easily help you integrate with plethora of applications without having to change the course of your business direction.

How does Microsoft Dynamics 365 work?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings all the customer data and sales information together into a single system making it a single source of truth. By doing that, it gives users a complete picture of their customer journey lifecycle that can help them reach out on mediums that works best for their customers and close deals faster.

Dynamics 365 automates the most critical and time-consuming activities across business functions allowing businesses to operate effectively and more efficiently.

Related Blog: How Microsoft Dynamics 365 can improve your business Growth in 2021?

Dynamics 365 versions

From the humble beginnings of offering a basic contact management solution to keeping a track of prospects and existing customers with a functionality to run email campaigns way back in 2003. Microsoft has launched its first ever CRM called Microsoft CRM 1.0.

Ever since the launch, for the past 17 years, Microsoft has been relentlessly working towards providing a more personalized and targeted experience to small, medium and enterprise businesses. In October, 2016 Microsoft rebranded its CRM software as Dynamics 365. Combining both the Microsoft business products (CRM & ERP)

Within Dynamics 365, Microsoft has allowed customers to choose which module they’d prefer based on their business requirements. The two of the modules cover – CRM and ERP services.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 versions

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Dynamics 365 for Sales

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service

Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Dynamics 365 for Field Service

Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation

While Dynamics 365 CE covers the CRM applications,

Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, Dynamics 365 Business Central are fulfilling the ERP needs of the customer.

Dynamics 365 Pricing:

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide (June 2021) – PDF Download

Dynamics 365 Licensing (Team Users & Full Users)

In almost every organization, we have two types of users who are on the tool working most of their time in generating reports, data sheets and other insight driven information. While some of the users don’t necessarily have a need to work on the tool as much as the former user does. It can be a simple task such as entering time sheets or updating records.

For users, who will have limited exposure to the full functionality of the Dynamics 365, a team user license is ideal instead of having a full user license which is comparatively expensive.

Know more about Dynamics 365 Pricing updates here

What are Dynamics 365 capabilities?

To make better and informed decisions, Microsoft has bundled CRM and ERP capabilities into one power packed solution in the name of Dynamics 365. It has all the features and capabilities in seamless functioning of a business unit.

Here are some of the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Dynamics 365 for Marketing allows you to quickly automate and run campaigns at lightning speed. It helps you build stronger relationships and also improve the overall productivity and performance of the business.

Some of the capabilities of D365 Marketing that keeps competitors at the edge of their seats are,

Multi-Channel Campaigns

Lead Management

Event Management

Templates

Marketing Insights

Dynamics 365 for Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales brings digital intelligence into every business. From tracking sales opportunities to providing insights, Dynamics 365 sales plays a pivotal role in building exceptional experiences by driving more qualified leads.

Pro Tip: Here’s what VP of Dynamics 365 in his own words about the power of D365 Sales when integrated with LinkedIn Sales.

“When you integrate LinkedIn Sales Insights with Dynamics 365 Sales you can automatically import the latest company profile data, such as size and growth of specific departments and job titles, from LinkedIn Sales Insights into a matched account in Dynamics 365, to help keep your data up to date,” said Alam, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Dynamics 365 during the April Wave 1 release updates.

Actionable Insights

Relationship Management

Sales Productivity

Sales Performance

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers your customer service teams to respond quickly to customer requests and guide agents using agent-facing bots to surface relevant information and provide recommendations.

Omni-channel engagement

Unified Knowledge

Dynamics 365 for Field Service

Dynamics 365 Field Service time and again exceeds the customer satisfaction levels with intelligent scheduling, native mobile support and remote asset monitoring to help you accomplish tasks faster than estimated time.

From accurate billing to SLA management, you can build service agreements and manage them all from within the application.

Service Agreements

Inventory Management

Dynamics 365 for Retail (Commerce)

From giving customers the convenience and flexibility through its Omni-channel experience, Dynamics 365 for Retail (Commerce) is helping businesses understand the growing customer needs to engage.

Unified Commerce

Intelligent operations

Customer Engagement

Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation

Get the most out of billable resources using a unified scheduling engine with real-time resource visibility using Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation (Project Operations).

Some of the capabilities of Dynamics 365 PSA include,

Project Planning Team Collaboration Opportunity Management

Dynamics 365 for Human Resources

Dynamics 365 for Human Resources is a comprehensive set of HR applications with Office and LinkedIn integration. It helps you hire the right talent by streamlining process using automated interview scheduling.

Hiring the right talent

HR Administration

Dynamics 365 CRM vs Salesforce Comparison

In a highly competitive market, holding a major chunk of the user base consistently for years is no mean thing and Salesforce was able to do that effortlessly for quite some time now. While they continue to dominate the CRM segment, there’s also a lot of discussions around what the future has in store for the CRM giant? Because, Dynamics 365 is pacing up with functionalities that businesses of today are in need of. It’s deep integration capabilities and familiar interface is becoming the guiding light for businesses of all sizes. Not just that, Dynamics 365 offers advanced BI capabilities that can propel any business forward clearly becoming a direct choice for businesses to choose Dynamics 365 over Salesforce for their CRM needs.

While Salesforce is fully cloud-based, Dynamics 365 still having its traces on premise. Having a clear advantage of being able to support businesses that are on premise.

As we drill down into more advantages, the simple interface, seamless integration with other Microsoft suite of products is a clear competitive advantage for Dynamics 365 while Salesforce’s wide range of applications and plugins makes a better cut.

Dynamics 365 CRM for Small Business

There’s a common misconception to many of the early stage and small businesses is that, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is too big for business of their size and it is cost intensive. But if you look at the close proximity businesses today have with the technology, it is all because of cloud-technology. It has made life easy for businesses of all sizes.

Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can now have the privilege to choose applications on a subscription model. Which means, it requires no server setups, no dedicated systems or no infrastructure required to get your operations on the flow. Because, the cloud subscription comes all included. So, less hassle to your business which can translate to more productivity.

Dynamics 365 CRM for Small Business Forum

Dynamics CRM for Mid-level companies

Is Microsoft best fit for SMBs?

Well, to answer that, Microsoft caters to businesses of all sizes. As you know organization size often has a heavy influence on the technology requirements and the financial decisions in a company. While small businesses find a challenge in going with the right CRM for their business, mid-level companies or SMBs are relatively in a better position to afford Dynamics 365 for increased ROI.

Here are some of the reasons why businesses of all sizes should consider choosing Dynamics 365 for their CRM or ERP needs.

Flexible Licensing Options

Easy Integrations

24*7 Data Access (Anywhere & Anytime)

So, if you are looking at what Microsoft has for SMBs, it has designed a Business Edition for SMBs to address their key challenges.

What does it have?

Inventory Management

Financial Management

Project Management

Customer Service

Sales & Support

Being a cloud-solution, any small and medium businesses (SMBs) can easily benefit and grow in size and number.

Dynamics 365 for Enterprises

Enterprise companies with over 250+ employee count are more likely to invest on technology to position themselves ahead of their competition. Because, the management clearly understands the need to have a robust security along with a process that can help them do their job better. With rising employee count, an enterprise resource planning software is essential for a seamless operational experience.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM services are meant to solve the challenges businesses of all kinds experience. It enables business productivity and help in accelerating digital transformation to meet customer growing needs.

Dynamics 365 for Healthcare

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare offers a comprehensive suite of solutions for the healthcare industry. Previously, healthcare consultations are more of in-person but with the on-going pandemic, the need for having a virtual consultation has become a major differentiator which has forced the industry to go digital. And that’s exactly where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare is making a significant difference is meeting the healthcare requirements on-the-go.

From virtual consultations to keeping track of patient information and data, healthcare industry is experiencing a super surge in admissions and discharge due to the on-going pandemic. So, with handling so much of volume at hand, health care professionals and organizations can leverage the full functionalities of Dynamics 365.

A recent survey has revealed that 93% of patients need timely access to their medical history. 71 % of patients have indicated that they expect healthcare specialists to provide care through a mutually-agreed digital channel of communication about all the information on decisions about the treatment.

Here’s what Dynamics 365 Healthcare is packed with

Care Management

Home Health

Patient Access

Patient Outreach

Patient Service Centre

Health Assistant

Related Blog: Top 5 Reasons to Use Microsoft Dynamics for Healthcare

Dynamics 365 for Manufacturing

Being a process-heavy industry, manufacturing industry is bound to experience huge volumes of data that can add significant value to business if only the information was put to good use. Thanks to the rising customer expectations and the need for digital transformation, the industry has seen a massive improvement in terms of their technological investments.

A report by IDC predicts that by 2020, 60% of all manufacturing supply chains will have benefited from digital transformation.

For over 2 decades, Microsoft has been at the forefront of operational management across the manufacturing companies. In fact, Manufacturing industry contributes to one of the highest share in the business verticals among the Dynamics users.

Let us know take a look at how Dynamics 365 for Manufacturing is helping businesses at large.

Streamline Asset Management

Digitalize Operations

Improve Customer Experiences

Increase On-Field Productivity

Related Blog: How to transform your Manufacturing Business with Microsoft Dynamics 365?

Dynamics 365 for Retail

Deliver safe and personalize shopping experiences across physical and digital channels using Dynamics 365 Retail – An Omni-channel solution with Point of Sale, Store and merchandise management capabilities that bring more dimensions to any retail business.

With Dynamics 365 Retail, you can leverage both CRM and ERP solutions as it allows retailers to have a complete view of business that includes, order history, customer data, pricing and a lot more all from a centralized system.

Here’s what retailers experience while using Dynamics 365 Retail

Unified E-commerce

Inventory Management (More feasible)

Business Optimization based on Insights

Create exceptional shopping experiences

Related Blog: Why Choose Dynamics 365 for Retail Business? – Reasons and Benefits

Dynamics 365 for Nonprofit

Microsoft is providing an out-of-the-box solution for Non-profit called Dynamics 365 Non-profit Accelerator. It is at the forefront of retail innovation by easily connecting and unifying customer-centric retail experiences with intelligent, adaptive business solutions.

Some of the pre-built features that Microsoft offers to the Non-profit users are.

Pre-built dashboards

Workflows

Sample apps

Templates

Customer engagement

Content management

Data connectors

Donor Profile

Dynamics 365 for Education

Schools can gain insights into student data with the help of Dynamics 365 integrated solutions, that allows them to help improve the learning standards of their students.

Here are some of the solutions Dynamics 365 has for education.

Personalized student profiles

Student Portal

Cases, requests and ticketing

Knowledge base for efficient service

Learn more about Dynamics 365 for Education

What’s new in Dynamics 365?

Last year has been quite a challenging year for all of us with the sudden emergence of the pandemic which affected businesses across all the industries. But, on the brighter side of it, it has forced businesses to go digital and there’s no better time than now to build digital capabilities to stay afloat.

Microsoft, in its pursuit of becoming an undisputed leader in the CRM segment, has come up with wave 1 release updates for the year, 2021. So, let’s quickly check out what’s new in Dynamics 365.

Connected Customer Experiences

Dynamics 365 is committed to deliver personalization at scale. From data insights to understanding customer preferences better, Dynamics 365 helps you find new ways to engage and delight customers with more of a human and empathetic approach.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing

Improved changes in customer journey orchestration brings customer experience and marketing automation together to engage customers in real-time across all the functions such as sales, commerce and service.

Enhanced Integration with Teams bring new webinar capabilities within Microsoft Teams.

Redesigned Email Editor helps business create impactful and personalized content powdered by AI.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

In order to guide sellers to close deals faster, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales has seen some major improvements to bring in productivity within the sales team in an organization during the Dynamics 365 Sales wave 1 release updates of 2021.

Sellers can now automate time-consuming sales tasks

Optimized seller workspace

Embedded Teams chat within Dynamics 365

Conversational Intelligence to auto extract actionable insights from sales calls.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service

Dynamics 365 Field Service + Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist + Microsoft Teams = Enabling on-field technicians to stay connected for work orders, information in real-time.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce brings Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) onto a single unified retail commerce platform to better understand, engage and serve customers.

Here are some of the new updates from wave 1 release update.

New AI-powered intelligent shopping features for more personal and relevant shopping experiences.

Synergize task management between D365 and Microsoft Teams to improve productivity.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance

Dynamics 365 Finance has been consistently driving business growth by providing real-time insights, visibility into operations, predictive outcomes and data driven decisions for financial organizations.

Some of the most anticipated features from the recent wave 1 release are.

Intelligent cash flow forecasting

Power of AI into finance process (To help you predict company’s cash flow)

New electronic invoicing service

Public preview of tax calculation service.

Why choose DemandDynamics?

Whether you intend to integrate new apps with Microsoft Dynamics 365 or an existing stack, DemandDynamics is here to help.

To begin with, our team of experts evaluate your current and future needs to strategically align the Dynamics 365 implementation with your specific business goals and objectives to make sure we leave no coin unturned.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we provide the best Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consulting and Implementation services in the industry to meet your business needs with insights and expertise that increase productivity and drive digital transformation.

Our clients love our unique and scalable Pay-As-You-Use model that offers exclusive benefits when compared to traditional Microsoft engagement models.

Over the years, we have set ourselves ahead of the competition, only because, we are:

Affordable | Flexible | Scalable | Available | Agile

There’s no one-size-fits-for-all in the CRM industry. You can be a business of any size, small, medium or enterprise, we understand the hassle you have been through. Every business that is in dire need of a customized solution is no longer in the offing. It’s here.

Microsoft Dynamics GP vs. Dynamics 365 Business Central – Key differentiators

To help businesses keep pace with the ever-evolving business landscape, Microsoft has continuously enhanced the features of its solutions. When it comes to business management solutions, majority of the focus is on its’ cloud-first business line, Dynamics 365, while continuing support for Dynamics GP. With the varied range of solutions, Microsoft has prioritized its efforts on encouraging customers to migrate to Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Dynamics GP and Business Central – An Introduction

Microsoft Dynamics GP is an ERP program that helps companies manage back-end operations to keep the day-to-day business running. It offers you the flexibility that you need for your business needs. Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud-based, single comprehensive solution to manage finance, operations, projects, sales, supply chain, and service. It is designed to integrate customer engagement and business processes to allow quick decision-making in real-time.

Both Dynamics GP and Business Central are built for growing small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Though both the solutions share the same code base and offer almost the core set of functionalities, there are significant differences between the two ERP solutions.

What is the difference between the ERP solutions – Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365 Business Central?

Many Dynamics GP customers have already moved for several reasons – hardware and server maintenance or resource requirements of their Dynamics GP system were growing too expensive, or they decided to opt for more modern, productivity-enhancing features, like mobile access and data analysis.

The three major differences between Dynamics GP and Business Central are –

Licensing and Hosting

The Dynamics GP provides a variety of licensing plans, including subscription licensing (pay the full licensing costs up-front), perpetual licensing (flexibility of paying monthly), and cloud hosting (own servers), and hosting on-premise (hosted through Infrastructure as a Service). You can also extend the functionality of Dynamics GP through ISV add-ons.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Business Central is a true cloud ERP solution licensed as SaaS and hosted on Microsoft Azure. It lets you choose whether to license your users with a team member license, essential license, or premium license.

Add-Ons

Dynamics GP includes the core financial and distribution functionality. You need to purchase three additional packages to extend functionality for manufacturing, services, customizations, and advanced payroll/HR through a network of partners and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Dynamics GP add-ons require different back-end development and must be managed separately.

For Business Central, Microsoft has made building add-ons with Extensions. These extensions or business apps are available for purchase through Microsoft AppSource. You can install apps for Business Central, Power BI, or separate Azure web apps within a few minutes.

Functionality and Integrations

Dynamics GP comes with functionalities that include core financials, Payroll, eBanking, Fixed Assets, Inventory Tracking, Purchase Orders, Manufacturing, and Services. In GP, financial reporting can be handled through Management Reporter or Jet Reports (ISV add-on). Integrating GP with Power BI or CRM requires specialized resources, customized implementation, and additional costs. However, the Dynamics GP does not include budgeting and warehousing functionalities.

Business Central delivers more flexibility with its core financials than Dynamics GP and Fixed Assets, Inventory Tracking, Multi-Currency, Multiple Entities, Purchase Orders, Warehouse Management. With the Premium licensing, you can also gain functionalities including manufacturing, service, payroll through apps, and built-in budget functionality. Since Business Central is fully hosted on the cloud, there is unparalleled security, performance, and reliability to enhance efficiency and improve your organization’s overall productivity.

Quick Comparison between Dynamics GP and Business Central

Benefits you get through Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

New user interface: Unified view for Dynamics 365 products and customized with intelligent notifications, personalized feeds, and role-specific views.

Mobile application: Business Central allows you to access rich functionality across various platforms.

Seamless Integration: It is a system that integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft services.

Native intelligence: Dynamics 365 Business Central helps generates more accurate forecasts and more in-depth and valuable analytical insights.

Simple customization: The extension options allow you to better customize your unique business needs.

Should You Migrate from Dynamics GP to Business Central?

Understanding Business Central and its features, functionalities, and capabilities could be complex. If you are still confused if you should migrate to Business Central, let us help you.

From strengthening Azure AI, making it a power platform to all the way down to investments in security skilling that includes compliance and identity, Microsoft is back again with its Ignite 2021 conference with a barrage of new product features and announcements that always keep end-customers on the edge of their seats. And this time, it’s all about the power of cloud computing. As we get along from what we have witnessed from the virtual conference, we’ll begin by taking a look at the 5 trends that CEO – Satya Nadella believes will drive the next wave of innovation.

Unprecedented times always gives the courage to overcome the most unimaginable constraints. And, 2020 has proved that for every industry across every business function as we all have witnessed a second wave of digital transformation, starting from healthcare to manufacturing, accelerating digital initiatives to build resilience and transform like we have never seen before.

This year’s ignite 2021 started off with the chief outlining the five key attributes that will drive the next generation of innovation in the cloud. And they are,

Ubiquitous and decentralized computing

Sovereign data and ambient intelligence

Empowered creators and communities everywhere

Expanded economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce

Trust by design

A detailed study/run-down on the aforementioned five trends that were highlighted during the conference will be covered in another blog. For now, let’s take a look at some of the key announcements on the business applications front. Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

What’s new in Dynamics 365?

While Microsoft Teams saw several updates at Ignite 2021, we couldn’t be happier for its integration with Dynamics 365. As remote work becoming the new norm, the synergy between Dynamics 365 and teams makes way for enabling enterprises to connect with customers in a better way.

Teams and Dynamics 365 (New Integrations)

Ignite 2021 has got our team of certified experts at DemandDynamics perplexed with the latest integration between Teams and Dynamics 365. A collaboration that all of our users love to use without having to switch between the applications.

That means, users can now leverage Teams from their Dynamics 365 workspace to make calls, start or continue chats, schedule meetings and collaborate, and more without having to juggle back to Teams. On the flip side, users can also access and share their Dynamics 365 content from within Teams, without having to go back to Dynamics 365.

Here’s how Teams integration with Dynamics 365 is going to help business functions.

Dynamics 365 Sales: With the new integration, sellers can connect sales records to Microsoft Teams without having to leave Dynamics 365 Sales. Also, you can use teams to manage calls and access other functionality from within the seamless interface of Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 Marketing: From the comfort of a single window, marketers can set up, promote and report on events hosted on Microsoft Teams directly from Dynamics 365 Marketing. Allowing you to nurture attendee relationships during and after the event across multiple channels.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service/Field Service: From Dynamics 365 Customer Service, you can now easily find the right subject-matter-expert directly to resolve your customer issues on the fly. (All thanks to Teams Integration)

Dynamics 365 Human Resources: Later this year, you can access Dynamics 365 Human Resources directly within Microsoft Teams. This helps managers review and approve requests in just a couple of clicks.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, is a new application in disguise for legacy ERP customers to scale their order management process from intake to delivery. This “purpose-driven supply chain solution,” as Microsoft refers to it, is a quick-access tool for companies to handle the overwhelming commerce requirements with ease. It can perform numerous actions for businesses based on need. It can utilize AI to decide the best way to fulfilling an order, based on current inventory, and game out potential implications of the options available.

Did we mention real-time personalized customer experience capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing? I don’t think we did. The all-new capability is slated to public preview in April.

Power Platform updates in Ignite 2021:

As part of Microsoft’s on-going mission to democratize app development and filling the gaps for developer resource shortage, it has released a handful of updates to make Power Platform much more user-friendly.

Power Automate Desktop to Power BI Premium, this year’s release has its focus on the stability and security across the functions. Some of the Premium Gen 2 enhancements include,

Flexibility to license per user or per capacity;

Faster processing – up to 16x performance boost with Microsoft managed architecture.

Auto-scale to automatically add capacity when needed; and

Consistent and reliable cost management with utilization metrics.

Industry Cloud updates in Ignite 2021:

One of the most exciting announcement from the conference come from the industry cloud. Microsoft has announced three new industry clouds will be out to power the financial services, manufacturing and non-profit sectors. These three inclusions will join the list of already available

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services (New)

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing (New)

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare (Launched Oct, 2020)

Microsoft Cloud for Retail (Announced early January 2021)

From what we know from the event, the first update to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is slated for a release in April 2021. This update includes four new features and adds support for eight additional languages. Feature updates focus on further streamlining virtual health, care collaboration and patient self-service.

As we think of the growth potential, businesses across the world are amplifying their efforts to adapt, digitize and transform at a rapid pace and Microsoft Ignite just tells us that it’s just the beginning of the innovation.

Spark the ignition of your digital transformation journey with us:

Whether you intend to integrate new apps with Microsoft Dynamics 365 or an existing stack, DemandDynamics is here to help. To begin with, our team of experts evaluate your current and future needs to strategically align the Dynamics 365 implementation with your specific business goals and objectives to make sure we leave no coin unturned.

Getting started with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management – Everything you need to know.

To help organizations enhance manufacturing operations, maximize the asset life-time, improve warehouse management, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is sending a strong message to its counterparts with its new features and updates. Inclusion of these new technology and tools are helping companies gain greater visibility into their supply chains, facilitating proactive business decisions with data and forecasting.

With 59.6% of companies using Big Data analytics, 47.7% use the Internet of Things (IoT), 31.2% use artificial intelligence (AI), and 27.5% use geospatial and location intelligence, the implementation rate of supply chain technology and analytics are astonishing.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (SCM) is one of the best tools in the supply chain management technology market. But before that, let’s understand what is supply chain management and how Dynamics 365 is helping companies drive into higher efficiency and profitability.

What is Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management?

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (SCM), formerly known as Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, is Microsoft’s enterprise-scale supply chain solution for operations leaders to transform their manufacturing and supply chain processes.

Dynamics 365 Supply chain management is not just about planning and logistics. It provides a single source of business intelligence that uses predictive insights, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT) across planning, production, warehouse, and transportation management to maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enables you to run smarter with –

Unified solution to support processes across the supply chain

Optimize manufacturing parameters

Financial management module in supply chain management

Advanced warehouse and logistics management

Real-time insights and predictive intelligence

Features of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

The Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management features that help you manage your organization are –

Warehouse management system – Get critical insights driven by Artificial Intelligence to help you manage stocks efficiently and optimize inbound and outbound delivery processes using Microsoft Power BI.

Supply Chain Optimization – With Dynamics 365 SCM, you can gain full visibility of your whole supply chain, including stock details of partner organizations, and also streamline deliveries to reduce cost and improve accuracy by using analytics.

Automation – Reduce downtime and improve margins with automation along with real-time insights by leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT). This also helps you improve operational performance.

Ensure Product quality –  Anticipate issues with equipment/ machines with predictive insights and maintain product quality consistency by using IoT data.

Asset maintenance –Systematically plan asset maintenance routines to increase machine/ equipment life with the Asset Management add-in and identify repairs promptly to plan for replacements by using telemetry data.

Centralized dashboard – Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management allows you to manage all information such as product images and attachments related to products and product families in a central dashboard with easy access.

Strategic planning – The planning and Inventory management modules available in Dynamics 365 SCM helps companies improve strategic planning by providing a unified view of inventory, warehouse, manufacturing, service, and logistics. Along with predictive analytics, it converts data into insights to support companies take better strategic decisions.

Benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Intelligent manufacturing operations– Create an ideal manufacturing mix from discrete, lean, and process in a single, unified solution to support processes across the supply chain. Reduce downtime using IoT intelligence and perform production planning in real-time with Planning Optimization Preview.

Modernize warehouse management– Utilize machine learning enhanced guidance to resolve out-of-stock or overstock situations for more effective stock management.

Optimize production performance– Identify potential machine issues, prevent downtime, increase product quality and yield before issues occur. Effortlessly optimize manufacturing parameters for each product family, including make to stock, make to order, pull to order, configure to order, and engineer to order.

Maximize the life of your assets– Using the IoT and mixed reality to plan, predict and perform asset maintenance with Asset Management Preview, and extend the life and performance of your equipment.

Automate your supply chain– Improve your supply chain’s fulfillment, material sourcing, and logistics with predictive analytics and improve product delivery.

Get real-time information –Simplify and accelerate business process changes, seamlessly integrate with legacy systems, and scale elastically using almost any device.

Explore more about Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Here is a complete recap of all the features, benefits, and capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Dynamics 365 SCM has proven that it is the best supply chain management tool by –

Ensuring consistency in your product quality

Quickly identifying and resolving problems

Speeding-up innovation

Responding to client needs faster

Predicting demand using AI

Planning production and supply in real-time

Optimizing supply chain logistics, warehousing, and material sourcing

Automation, predictive analytics, IoT, AI, and mixed reality

Reducing cost and achieving operational excellence

What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales in 2021? – New and planned Dynamics 365 Sales Features

Microsoft has recently announced many upgrades for its cloud apps suite as part of the 2021 Release Wave 1. For Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft is focusing on adding productivity enhancements for sellers, access to data-driven insights to help with decision making, and updates to the mobile app, enhancing the mobile experience for sellers on the go.

Being an undisputed leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Dynamics 365 Sales continues to be the leading sales tool that empowers every organization with data and intelligence by consistently helping organizations understand customer needs, drive more relevant engagements, and make sales more efficient.

In today’s blog, let’s look at some of the most exciting upgrades planned for Dynamics 365 Sales features 2021 Release Wave 1.

Feature enhancements planned for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales in 2021

Automation and adaptive sequences to sell smarter

This upgrade includes automation such as sequence automation, sequence forks, and sequence listener that can enable you to execute activities automatically without requiring any intervention, smartly pick the next step based on external or internal triggers, and adding a listener for email engagement/ phone or meeting conversation.

Smooth integration of varied communication providers

Now, easily integrate your telephony provider with out-of-the-box functionalities. Organizations interact with their customers in various ways and to maintain them, organizations tend to have an on-premises telephony system where sales teams (digital agents and managers) conduct an audio conversation. With this feature update, these conversations are captured in various formats and quality, aligning with cultural or regulatory reasons. It can provide insights on top of video calls, analyze and extract business insights for multiple-participant calls, support online meetings, and support answering calls within Dynamics 365.

Improvements to forecasting and predictive scoring

Organizations run their business operations in adherence to specific calendar periods to optimize their success in the market. With the custom fiscal calendar support feature, forecast managers now have an extended capability to select a custom fiscal period to match their business. They can add an extra week at the end of any period to account for leap years.

Intuitive mobile experience

Mobile has become an essential part of providing salespeople access to information they need at any time. Microsoft has introduced an intuitive mobile experience through which sellers can get up-to-date information, insights about a deal, account, and contacts integrated with AI, and easy access to files, notes, emails, and more. The new mobile experience features the following functions:

The new mobile experience makes it easy for salespeople to log in and share information in real-time.

Microsoft Teams customer calls or online meetings can be transcribed and assigned to a Dynamics 365 record.

Easily manage activities and take follow-up actions promptly.

Get up-to-date LinkedIn information on meeting participants, insights about a deal, account, and contacts integrated with AI.

New pipeline manager workspace

The new pipeline manager workspace provides an optimized and user-centric experience to empower sellers to keep their pipeline healthy effectively. The pipeline manager workspace includes feature enhancements such as,

Ability to customize and configure the record side panel form: A record side panel is a streamlined representation of a form delivered through a side panel as part of the pipeline management workspace. Organizations will be able to customize the record side panel form to fit their unique business requirements.

Advanced editable grid to update deals with the ability to personalize columns: This feature offers the ability to edit fields inline, filter, sort, search, and reorder data in the grid, show or hide columns in the grid or add columns in the grid, see aggregations for numeric columns, and run business logic on-grid actions.

Enhanced productivity with new record side panel form: The record side panel form provides quick and easy access to the opportunity record that can be updated without navigating away or losing context.

Enhanced workspace experience with Sales Insights:  This feature provides enhanced experience and insights with relationship score, predictive opportunity score, and other insights for quick actions. It includes sales insights score, relationship score opportunity score, and predictive opportunity score

Interactive visual charts that sellers can personalize: This gives you the ability to view opportunities in a visual representation quickly is one of the top requests by sellers. It allows sellers to get the insights they need to identify the deals they need to work on next with the out-of-the-box charts that provide sellers a visualization of their opportunities and filter through these opportunities.

Increase your Sales with the improved Dynamics 365 for Sales

What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales in 2021? – New and planned Dynamics 365 Sales Features

Microsoft has recently announced many upgrades for its cloud apps suite as part of the 2021 Release Wave 1. For Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft is focusing on adding productivity enhancements for sellers, access to data-driven insights to help with decision making, and updates to the mobile app, enhancing the mobile experience for sellers on the go.

Being an undisputed leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Dynamics 365 Sales continues to be the leading sales tool that empowers every organization with data and intelligence by consistently helping organizations understand customer needs, drive more relevant engagements, and make sales more efficient.

In today’s blog, let’s look at some of the most exciting upgrades planned for Dynamics 365 Sales features 2021 Release Wave 1.

Feature enhancements planned for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales in 2021

Automation and adaptive sequences to sell smarter

This upgrade includes automation such as sequence automation, sequence forks, and sequence listener that can enable you to execute activities automatically without requiring any intervention, smartly pick the next step based on external or internal triggers, and adding a listener for email engagement/ phone or meeting conversation.

Smooth integration of varied communication providers

Now, easily integrate your telephony provider with out-of-the-box functionalities. Organizations interact with their customers in various ways and to maintain them, organizations tend to have an on-premises telephony system where sales teams (digital agents and managers) conduct an audio conversation. With this feature update, these conversations are captured in various formats and quality, aligning with cultural or regulatory reasons. It can provide insights on top of video calls, analyze and extract business insights for multiple-participant calls, support online meetings, and support answering calls within Dynamics 365.

Improvements to forecasting and predictive scoring

Organizations run their business operations in adherence to specific calendar periods to optimize their success in the market. With the custom fiscal calendar support feature, forecast managers now have an extended capability to select a custom fiscal period to match their business. They can add an extra week at the end of any period to account for leap years.

Intuitive mobile experience

Mobile has become an essential part of providing salespeople access to information they need at any time. Microsoft has introduced an intuitive mobile experience through which sellers can get up-to-date information, insights about a deal, account, and contacts integrated with AI, and easy access to files, notes, emails, and more. The new mobile experience features the following functions:

The new mobile experience makes it easy for salespeople to log in and share information in real-time.

Microsoft Teams customer calls or online meetings can be transcribed and assigned to a Dynamics 365 record.

Easily manage activities and take follow-up actions promptly.

Get up-to-date LinkedIn information on meeting participants, insights about a deal, account, and contacts integrated with AI.

New pipeline manager workspace

The new pipeline manager workspace provides an optimized and user-centric experience to empower sellers to keep their pipeline healthy effectively. The pipeline manager workspace includes feature enhancements such as,

Ability to customize and configure the record side panel form: A record side panel is a streamlined representation of a form delivered through a side panel as part of the pipeline management workspace. Organizations will be able to customize the record side panel form to fit their unique business requirements.

Advanced editable grid to update deals with the ability to personalize columns: This feature offers the ability to edit fields inline, filter, sort, search, and reorder data in the grid, show or hide columns in the grid or add columns in the grid, see aggregations for numeric columns, and run business logic on-grid actions.

Enhanced productivity with new record side panel form: The record side panel form provides quick and easy access to the opportunity record that can be updated without navigating away or losing context.

Enhanced workspace experience with Sales Insights:  This feature provides enhanced experience and insights with relationship score, predictive opportunity score, and other insights for quick actions. It includes sales insights score, relationship score opportunity score, and predictive opportunity score

Interactive visual charts that sellers can personalize: This gives you the ability to view opportunities in a visual representation quickly is one of the top requests by sellers. It allows sellers to get the insights they need to identify the deals they need to work on next with the out-of-the-box charts that provide sellers a visualization of their opportunities and filter through these opportunities.

Increase your Sales with the improved Dynamics 365 for Sales

How to transform your Manufacturing Business with Microsoft Dynamics 365?

Enterprise leaders across industries are looking to implement customer-centered strategies focused on revamping their ideas to remain significant in the market. It is believed that digitally empowered manufacturers can predict and understand future trends that may impact production. But manufacturers today care about improved visibility, increased efficiency and flexibility relatively at lower costs.  Marking as the beginning, digitization is fundamentally changing the way manufacturers approach business. But, with the unified and flexible solutions from Microsoft, the opportunity to digitize manufacturing business has become easier.

Here’s how Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help manufacturers in reshaping their businesses.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is reshaping the Manufacturing Industry – How and Why?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 unites every aspect of a manufacturing company with a unified, flexible, end-to-end system that boosts its efficiency at the speed and scale that suits the company. It enhances the businesses by offering all the necessary capabilities, including rich analytics and embedded intelligence. With Microsoft Dynamics 365, manufacturers can optimize across all processes while connecting advanced technology in the future.

Benefits Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings to Manufacturing.

Improved Visibility

With Dynamics 365, a manufacturing company can improve visibility by collecting, integrating, and visualizing supply chain data. Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution can integrate your sales and purchasing processes with logistics, production, and warehouse management to provide a simplified supply chain management and also helps drive streamlined vendor collaboration.

Increased efficiency

Dynamics 365, through its latest collaboration, productivity, and intelligence features, allow the manufacturing industry to streamline all operations while simultaneously improving employee productivity, to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Gain Real-Time Insights

Get advanced real-time insights for manufacturing, sales, service, and marketing teams using the Dynamics 365 in-app experience with the latest Power Platform update. Dynamics 365 offers real-time insights through built-in analytics capabilities on any device, solves issues quickly, and provides value-added services. With the insights and consolidated view, you can regulate efficiency gains and use connected devices to monitor and resolve issues remotely.

Increase productivity

Collect data and analyze connected products and equipment to provide your employees with everything they require to complete their tasks efficiently and more quickly. With Dynamics 365, you can automate processes across the manufacturing lifecycle, accelerate production, improve the cycle of innovation, and deliver personalized service.

Increase customer loyalty

Through predictive analytics, you can deliver value-added services, quickly provide timely responses to your customers and build trust among them. With the help of a connected platform, you can solve potential problems remotely before your customers feel the impact, proving your value and building loyalty. The predictive analytics capability can also allow you to personalize service based on each customer’s usage and purchasing history.

Future-proof your business

With Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, IoT, and several other technologies, manufacturing is disrupting the industry’s landscape. However, the AI and IoT capabilities in Dynamics 365 help you become future-proof while non-dynamics users may experience an end point for not capitalizing on the technology.

Faster time-to-market

By using a data-driven approach, you can accelerate the cycle of innovation and decrease time to production. It becomes easy to keep pace with today’s growing market trends, with a system that can connect devices, internal departments, suppliers, partners, and customers in a single database.

Are you ready to reshape your Manufacturing Business?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has been helping manufacturers streamline and optimize their processes for over two decades. With digital transformation taking place at a massive scale across the industry, Dynamics 365 has upgraded its suite of solutions with new tools that can keep up the pace with the growing technologies. Dynamics 365 solutions, each alone or together, can do absolute wonders to your business.

Fun Facts about Manufacturing Industry:

Did you know?

80% of manufacturers expect that improved factory connectivity will help them to increase output levels.

83% of manufacturers said that selling services as products would increase profits.