Businesses are moving away from rigid and monolithic solutions towards agile business applications that can be deployed quickly, integrated seamlessly with other existing systems, and can collect and unify extensive amounts of data from various touchpoints unlocking siloed data. According to Forrester, siloed data inhibits organizations from creating a comprehensive profile of customer needs, a challenge for 44 percent¹ of retail decision-makers.

To drive better personalization, organizations also need to create a single view of their orders across all engagement channels. Propelling this shift is the realization by business leaders that they can leverage best-of-breed applications to avoid costly and time-consuming rip and replace business processes while still achieving the same objectives.

Last month we announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, a solution that enables businesses to accelerate agility by leveraging easy-to-deploy out-of-the-box connectors within a low-code or no-code environment. This month, we are pleased to share several integrations and enhancements that further expand the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management.

Learn more: Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is now generally available

Rapidly scale with partner connectors

McKinsey² recently interviewed 60 senior supply-chain executives from across industries and geographies. 85 percent of respondents reported that they struggled with inefficient digital technologies to address logistic disruptions, shortages of parts and materials, and sudden swings in demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. designed to allow businesses to rapidly scale with out-of-box, pre-built partner connectors to e-commerce platforms, fulfillment services, delivery partners, and other back-office systems. Through our growing ecosystem of partners, we provide companies with new levels of agility by seamlessly integrating with other best-of-breed solutions.

Some of the order intake systems that Intelligent Order Management offers pre-built connectors are Orderful and BigCommerce. BigCommerce is a cloud-based e-commerce SaaS platform, and Orderful is a cloud-based electronic data interchange (EDI) platform that allows enterprises to integrate EDI transactions from Orderful’s network. These new order intake sources enable more nimble operations, allowing businesses to capitalize on new opportunities faster by accepting orders from anywhere.

Another integration that we are proud to announce is with ShipStation. ShipStation is a web-based e-commerce shipping platform that helps merchants quickly generate shipping labels for their online orders. By integrating ShipStation with the Intelligent Order Management platform, users can bring all their carriers and order sources together within one unified solution.

Finally, Intelligent Order Management users can now connect to Avalara, an automated tax compliance solution that determines order tax rates based on geolocation and product classification, and also Flexe, a cloud-based platform that unifies warehouse sourcing and streamlines material handling operations.

By adding these pre-built partner connectors to Intelligent Order Management, our solution provides a foundation for businesses to build agility and resiliency into their order management processes and free themselves from legacy and inefficient digital technologies.

Learn more: Intelligent Order Management partners with leading service providers to optimize order management

Accelerate time to market

Organizations can no longer afford to be rigid and reactive, and the push is for flexible, adaptable, and agile architecture. A survey conducted by McKinsey showed that highly successful agile transformations typically delivered around 30 percent gains in efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance, making the organization 5 to 10 times faster and turbocharging innovation.

Thanks to our partnership with ShipStation, Intelligent Order Management now saves users time with the capability to print shipping labels directly from its own application.

We are also making updates to system functionality such as adding internal to external ID transformation. With internal to external ID transformation, users can establish different mappings with different providers. For example, a user can map different names for the same product or SKU from an e-commerce system, such as BigCommerce, to Intelligent Order Management. This type of internal to external ID mapping is critical because Intelligent Order Management is used in complex order environments where data is communicated between many internal and external systems.

We have also added localized Business Event definitions and Provider definition metadata to localizations. The updates to localization also extended localization beyond English to the following languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

Additionally, users will now enjoy an enriched Power BI architecture including a set of dashboards embedded into the user interface that is based on Microsoft Power BI technology. The Power BI dashboards provide longer-range insights into the order and fulfillment data that is moving through the app.

Improve order accuracy with fulfillment insights

According to a recent “final mile” survey by Gartner, just 18 percent of organizations report fulfillment accuracy rates of 95 percent or better⁴. At Microsoft, we believe that digital solutions are a promising path to improving this key performance indicator, and our new Order insights dashboard can help companies do exactly that.

The order insights dashboard (shown above) provides in-depth visibility into aggregated order fulfillment activities flowing through Intelligent Order Management. From a single screen, users can quickly review key performance indicators such as Lines per order on average, Order count, Number of order lines, and Orders past due. Users can also see performance metrics of individual providers, and if there is an issue, they can drill down into the provider’s details to learn more.

Within the Insights menu, we have also introduced different dashboard views to provide users with the whole picture of what is happening with an order. For example, the Daily Events dashboard gives users an overview of any failed order orchestration steps, flagging them to help in the decision-making process.

Learn more in our recent webinar: Turn Order Fulfillment into a Competitive Advantage

What’s next?

As businesses continue to improve their ability to quickly adapt to changing demands, they must rely on flexible solutions like Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management that seamlessly integrate with other best-of-breed applications. By providing organizations with the ability to scale rapidly, go to market faster, and improve order accuracy with fulfillment insights, we are enabling businesses to increase organizational agility.

If you are interested in seeing how these features can work for your organization, you can get started today with a free Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management trial.

¹A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned by Microsoft. The Digital Commerce Imperative. January 2021.

² McKinsey, Resetting supply chains for the next normal. July 2020 | Article. By Knut Alicke, Richa Gupta, and Vera Trautwein.

³McKinsey, The impact of agility: How to shape your organization to compete. May 25, 2021 | Survey. By By Wouter Aghina, Christopher Handscomb, Olli Salo, and Shail Thaker.

⁴Gartner, Top Trends in Retail Digital Transformation and Innovation for 2021. 5 February 2021. By Kelsie Marian, Miriam Burt, Max Hammond, Hanna Karki, Robert Hetu, Sandeep Unni.

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

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For organizations to thrive in the modern environment, they need to innovate, and innovation takes time. Leaders that expect teams to be innovative without creating time for the innovation process will likely be disappointed by the results. But how can teams deliver more with less? One possible opportunity for finance leaders is to leverage intelligent automation and other emerging technologies.

It’s widely accepted that intelligent automation can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and improve productivity. It can also increase team member engagement and satisfaction. However, what’s often overlooked is the broader impact on innovation. With less time spent on manual tasks, employees can reinvest their energy into work that requires more creativity and critical thinking. Adopting intelligent automation and emerging technology now allows forward-thinking finance leaders to remain competitive amidst today’s complex challenges.

Meet rising expectations

As business complexity rises, organizations increasingly turn to their senior finance leaders for strategic direction and to drive business transformation. Chief financial officers (CFOs) play significant roles in companies’ transformation efforts, and the transformations demand expanded support from finance.

As these expectations continue to rise for finance leaders, they must look for opportunities to leverage technology, such as AI-driven insights, to enhance financial decision-making within their organizations. Moreover, by projecting future outcomes, organizations can make more informed decisions today. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance is helping leading organizations in these efforts and paving the way for innovation in the process.

Take advantage of emerging technologies

To meet the demands of modern business, many finance teams are turning to emerging technologies, such as intelligent automation, AI, and machine learning, to help streamline processes, improve accuracy, and maximize compliance. Much of finance operations can be fully or partially automated using currently available technologies. It follows that leaders’ who embrace emerging technologies to automate finance operations can free up significant resources in their organizations to focus on strategic leadership and innovation.

Indeed, financial institutions surveyed by Statista who are already using AI reported reduced operational costs, increased data-driven decision making, and even improved customer satisfaction. Internally, these institutions also saw benefits like reducing team member workload.¹

Despite the benefits, the adoption of AI technologies remains low. A potential reason for the low adoption rate is that AI is seen as more complicated and has a less proven use case, unlike other emerging technologies such as the cloud. In financial firms, significantly fewer used AI-driven technologies than cloud-based platforms.

Considering AI’s reported and potential benefits alongside its lower adoption rate, the case can be made that finance leaders who leverage this technology now can do more than free up time for team members to focus on innovation. They can also create a strategic advantage for their organization in the short term.

With so much to gain, let’s look at a few specific examples of where organizations can leverage AI to increase efficiency and improve competitive advantage.

Accounts receivable

Organizations often find it difficult to predict when a customer will pay their invoices. This situation can lead to less accurate cash flow forecasts, collections processes that are started too late, and orders released to customers who may default on their payment.

Compounding the problem is the fact that cash collection is generally a reactive process. All too often, managers are stuck with rising receivables and manual data entry. It’s why many people are still pulling data from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) into Excel spreadsheets a process that quickly eats through valuable time. Therefore, the ability to shift towards a proactive, intelligent approach to cash collection is invaluable.

For example, in Dynamics 365 Finance, it’s now possible to develop a prediction model to manage accounts receivable with AI-driven technologies. In this scenario, an AI model predicts which customers are likely to pay on time, which are not, and even provides a margin of error to consider. Organizations can use predictions in this way to create collection strategies to enable intelligent automations. This enables finance leaders to proactively encourage customers to pay ahead of time or develop new strategies and systems to make payments more manageable. Leveraging an automated, AI-based prediction model also means more time for employees to focus on higher-level problem solving, planning, or customer service.

Ultimately, a proactive, automated collections process enables teams to improve margins and efficiency while reducing risk and late payments.

Cash flow forecasting

Traditional cash flow forecasting can be tedious and problematic. For example, data often gets stuck in siloes, leaving people with complex Excel spreadsheets that are disconnected, time-consuming, and error-prone. It can also be hard to develop and deploy models when cash flow forecasting is based on institutional knowledge. And when it comes to measuring performance and accuracy, excel spreadsheets often fall short.

At Microsoft, we have built an intelligent cash flow solution that uses AI and machine learning. This new solution allows users to first integrate data from external systems to Dynamics 365 Finance using the data import and export framework. Then, users can create a forecast of cash flow and cash positions based on customer payment predictions as well as bank balance and time series forecasting. The system also allows users to save cash flow forecasts and then measure forecast performance when the financials have been realized.

Learn more in our recent webinar: Optimize financial operations with AI-infused processes.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Dynamics 365 Finance is a financial management suite that enables enterprise organizations to monitor the performance of their global financial operations in real-time, predict future outcomes, and make data-driven decisions to drive growth. If your organization is looking for ways to leverage automation and AI, Dynamics 365 Finance can help to unify your data and automate your business processes.

You can learn more about how Dynamics 365 Finance can enable your organization to improve efficiency and quality with AI-infused finance processes in our recent “Improve efficiency and quality with AI-infused finance processes” blog or get started today with a Dynamics 365 demo or free trial.

1- “Benefits from adoption of AI in financial services sector worldwide 2020, by region”, F. Norrestad, Statista, Jun. 28, 2021.

The post How finance leaders can leverage intelligent automation to unleash innovation appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app helps frontline workers stay connected to essential information while out in the field. Frontline workers use the mobile app to view schedules, record notes, and examine customer, work order, and asset information.

Download the training module, Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app in a day, to learn how to set up, use, and configure the Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app. This self-paced, on-demand training is a step-by-step guide through exercises based on business scenarios from real customers.

What you’ll learn

After completing the online training module, which can be completed in about four hours, you will be able to:

• Download and sign in to the mobile app and interact with Dynamics 365 Field Service information like bookings and work orders.
• Perform common configurations like editing the tables, forms, views, and columns displayed in the mobile app. Set up “offline first” synchronization so the mobile app works without internet access.
• Perform more advanced configurations and customizations like location tracking, push notifications, barcode scanning, and mobile workflows to accommodate more business requirements and processes.
• Learn best practices to implement the Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app, including migrating from the previous mobile app.

What you’ll need

To complete the “Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app in a day” training, you will need:

• Internet connection
• PC computer or laptop
• Android or iOS mobile phone or tablet

No prior experience is needed. The module starts with setting up a new Dynamics 365 Field Service environment from scratch and builds from there. If you are already using Dynamics 365 Field Service, you can use your existing environment.

More about the Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app

The Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app is a model-driven app built on Microsoft Power Platformthat is optimized for mobile interfaces. This means the process to manage, configure, customize, and upgrade the mobile app is the same process as it is for other web-based Dynamics 365 apps. It also means the mobile app uses Microsoft Power Platform functions and leverages new platform capabilities.

Next steps

To begin your self-paced tutorial, download the training module Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app in a day.

• Blog: 5 tips for implementing the Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app
• Playbook: Download the Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile adoption playbook
• Documentation: Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app product documentation
• Watch: Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app videos
• Microsoft Certification: Dynamics 365 Field Service Functional Consultant Associate

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