Scammers are posing as your TV and internet company
This article was originally posted by the FTC. See the original article here.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
Automate your Accounts Payable process with invoice capture
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Accounts Payable teams around the globe spend hours processing invoices that come from different channelsfax, mail, email, handwritten, and electronic data interchange (EDI). The sheer volume of invoices is a difficult burden to overcomeand the number grows exponentially with the number of office locations. Resource-strained finance teams must manually transfer invoice details to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This error-prone process increases finance cycle times, delays closing the books, and prevents timely financial statements. Misplaced invoices and delayed payments cost organizations thousands in lost vendor discounts. Wouldn’t it be great if all that manual work could be automated? With the new invoice capture feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, it can.
Invoice capture automates the entire AP invoice-to-pay process using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With invoice capture, employees scan invoices as they arrive, OCR extracts critical data, and the system matches invoices with purchase orders, identifies exceptions and data errors, and updates financial records. Employees can quickly route coded invoices for approval through workflows that follow rules based on the invoice data and amount.
Invoice capture helps control spending and reduce paperwork
Invoice capture delivers the following benefits:
- Spend control: Automated processing and better audit trails deliver more real-time visibility into spend and better reporting, which results in faster responses to time-sensitive vendor inquiries. This can help your business avoid late bill payments, take advantage of time-based discounts, and accelerate approvals.
- Faster cycle times: Freeing your AP teams from manual data entry reduces errors, trims weeks from the payment cycle, and allows the team to focus on more strategic tasks like improving vendor relationships, optimizing sourcing contracts, and negotiating deeper discounts.
- Paperless AP: Say goodbye to filing cabinets, lost invoices, and printer jams. With a fully digitized process, not only do you reduce your carbon footprint and printing costs, but documents are more secure.
Key capabilities of invoice capture
- Invoice data extraction from multiple channels: Invoice capture offers flexible configuration settings that allow you to automate invoice processingregardless of how invoices come across your desk, whether they’re faxed, EDI, or even handwrittenand consolidate them centrally for approvals.
- Empowered by AI Builder and Azure Form Recognizer: Invoice capture contains a prebuilt AI model powered by Microsoft AI Builder and Azure Form Recognizer, which can process most invoice formats from all over the world without extra model training effort. The Microsoft AI Builder continuously improves the model.
- Custom AI model for invoice processing: When business complexity prevents the prebuilt model from recognizing an invoice format, invoice capture provides a way to build custom models to supplement the prebuilt model.
- Intelligent and flexible business rule engine: Sometimes the AP team needs more information to make the right decision than the basic details on the invoice. It’s often helpful to have information from the supply chain or bank account details, for instance. Using an intelligent business rule engine, you can define derivations and validation rules to accommodate the complexity of your vendor invoice processing. This helps to streamline the accounts payable automation and relieves the AP team from repetitive work, allowing them to focus on more value-added tasks.
Next steps
Take the first step by downloading our public preview of invoice capture from Microsoft AppSource. Check out the documentation to get started. Then tell us what you think!
The post Automate your Accounts Payable process with invoice capture appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
New localized product information improves productivity and order accuracy
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are excited to announce that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can now display product names and descriptions in your users’ preferred languages. Supply Chain Management already offered a localized user interface (UI) but showed product information in the system language. We have now made it possible to show localized product information throughout the UI. This has long been one of the most requested capabilities from customers using our Dynamics 365 Application Ideas portal.
You might already have your product information available in multiple languages for use in printed documents. If you do, you’re ready to take advantage of this new feature. All you have to do is turn it on.
Localized product information avoids frustration and lost time
There are many scenarios where local users find it difficult to understand product names and descriptions in the system language. This affects many roles, from sales and purchasing agents to machine operators on the shop floor. Misunderstandings can lead to frustration, lost time, and, in the worst case, can even lead users to create transactions using the wrong products.
Imagine an international organization that uses English as its system language. At the plant in Stockholm, where workers use Swedish as their preferred language, all UI elements are shown in Swedishbut product names and descriptions have always been shown in English. Now they can be shown in Swedish, too.
Before: The following screenshot shows how the production floor execution interface used to appear at the Stockholm factory. As you can see, the UI is in Swedish, but the product name in English.
After: The user interface is still in Swedish, and the product name is now in Swedish, too!
Learn more
Localized product information is a public preview feature.
For more information, check out the video introduction, Dynamics 365 release plan article, and technical documentation for this feature.
The post New localized product information improves productivity and order accuracy appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
Evolve your CRM at Customer Experience Reimagined
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Expectations for executives leading their companies’ customer experience (CX) efforts seem to grow every day. From driving sustainable growth, to aligning your teams and integrating your technology, to empowering employees to do their best work, there’s more on your plate than ever. Meanwhile, customer expectations can feel like a moving target that only goes up. Buyers today are digital first, becoming more informed, more comfortable switching between channels, more likely to ignore anything that doesn’t feel authentic, and they expect businesses to follow their lead.
To stay relevant to customers, many leaders are rethinking their approach to CX at every touchpoint. Relying on customer relationship management (CRM) to drive sales simply won’t cut it anymore. You need to connect customer insights and data across your organizationsales, marketing, and serviceto meet customers where they are and capitalize on every opportunity.
That’s why I’m excited to invite you to Customer Experience Reimagined, a digital event on October 26. Learn about the latest trends shaping CX todayand tomorrowwith Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft. He’ll share his perspective about what CX leaders are facing, how they energize employees by simplifying fragmented and complicated systems, and what it means to be a digitally connected enterprise with unified, enriched data.
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Hear insights straight from the experts
Customer Experience Reimagined will give you a window into what other CX leaders are thinking, with strategies to help your business adapt to a changing landscape. Learn about the evolution of CRM, along with critical technologies and skills from leaders who are shaping their customer experience strategy:
- Constellation Research Founder and CEO Ray Wangauthor of Everybody Wants To Rule The World: Surviving and Thriving in a World of Digital Giantswill join Constellation Research Vice President and Principal AnalystLiz Miller to discuss the importance of AI, analytics, and automation for shifting from real time to “right time” personalized experiences.
- Accenture Senior Managing Director John Bolze will share insights from a new report by Accenture, The Human Paradox, including how 95 percent of C-suite executives say customers are changing faster than businesses are able to adapt. John will talk about why overcoming this crisis of relevancy requires shifting from a customer-centric strategy to a life-centric strategy.
- Valencia Club de Ftbol (CF) Director of Innovation in charge of Digital, Business Intelligence/Analytics, and Fan Experience Franco Segarra will discuss how to create more meaningful fan experiences, increase attendance, and improve game day experiences with a data-centric approach.
- Eika Director of Business Applications Atle Riksfjord, Northrop & Johnson Director of Technology and Intelligence Keith Perfect, and AccentureSong Global Lead Social & Emerging Channels and author of Human-Driven Experience: The Battle for Trust in the Digital AgeRobert Harles will lead a roundtable discussion on how to kick-start your CX transformation and guide your company to deliver more personalized, intentional, and relevant experiences.
Learn key lessons from Microsoft’s modern marketing transformation
Get the inside story of our own CX transformation from Stephanie Ferguson, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Global Demand Center, as she shares the vision for our Commercial Customer Platform to meet the changing expectations of customers in the business-to-business (B2B) space. Stephanie will show how we help our marketers and sellers around the globe engage our customers with greater relevancy, clarity, and purpose.
You’ll also hear our technology vision from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platform, along with Lori Lamkin, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing. They’ll talk about how we’re helping companies connect data from hundreds of business applications and deliver AI-enabled insights to sellers and service agents with automated tools that give them more time to spend with customers. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform combined with the new seller experience application Microsoft Viva Sales helps companies unify and automate, so they can scale their customer experience investments to get customers to “yes” faster.
See what’s shaping CX todayand tomorrow
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear strategies for elevating your customer experience and uncover new ways to sustain business growth, no matter what the future brings. Register for Customer Experience Reimagined today to join us on Wednesday, October 26, 2022, 9:00-10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7).
Customer Experience Reimagined
Evolve your CRM to personalize and connect customer journeys
The post Evolve your CRM at Customer Experience Reimagined appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
Making Search Better Within Microsoft
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The Challenge
Five years ago employee satisfaction with finding information within the company was very low. it was the lowest rated it service among all those we surveyed about. Related surveys done by other teams supported this, for instance that our software engineers “finding information” as one of the most wasteful frustrating activities in their job, costing the company thousands of man years of productivity.
A project team was formed to improve this. In the years since we have pursued:
- Improving search result relevance
- Improving search content completeness
- Address content quality issues
The Microsoft Search Environment
Microsoft has >300,000 employees working around the globe, and collectively, our employees use or access many petabytes of content as they move through their workday. within our employee base, there are many different personas who have widely varying search interests and use hundreds of content sources. Those content sources can be file shares, Microsoft sharepoint sites, documents and other files, and internal websites. our employees also frequently access external websites, such as hr partners’ websites.
We began with user satisfaction survey net score at 87 (scale of 1-200, with 200 being perfect). We have reached satisfaction of 117. Our goal is 130+.
What We’ve Done
Core to our progress has been:
- Understanding the needs of the different personas around the company. At Microsoft, personas are commonly clustered based on three factors: their organization within the company, their profession, and their geographic location. For example, a Microsoft seller working in Latin America has different search interests than an engineer working in China.
- Has resulted in targeting bookmarks to certain security groups.
- Has led to outreach to certain groups and connecting with efforts they had underway to build a custom search portal or improve content discoverability.
- Understanding typical search behavior. For instance, the diagram below shows that a relatively small number of search terms account for a large portion of the search activity.
- We ensure bookmarks exist for most of the high frequency searches.
- We look for commonalities in low frequency searches for potential content to connect in.
- Improving content quality. This has ranged from deleting old content to educating content owners on most effective ways to adding metadata to their content so it ranks better in search results. As part of our partnership with this community, we provide reporting on measurable aspects of content quality. We are in early stages of pursuing quality improvement, with much to do in building a community across the company, measuring, and enabling metadata.
- For those site owners actively using this reporting, we have seen a decrease of up to 70% in content with no recent updates.
- Utilizing improvements delivered in product, from improved relevance ranking to UX options like custom filters.
- We have seen steady improvement in result ranking.
- We also take advantage of custom filters and custom result KQL.
- We use Viva Topics. Topics now receive the most clicks after Bookmarks.
- Making our search coverage more complete. Whether it’s via bookmarks or connectors, there are many ways of making the search experience feel like it covers the entire company.
- We currently have 7 connections, one of which is custom built and brings in 10 different content sources. This content is clicked on in 5% of searches on our corporate SharePoint portal.
- About half of our bookmarks (~600) point to URLs outside of the corporate boundary, such as third-party hosted services.
- Analytics. Using SharePoint extensions, we capture all search terms and click actions on our corporate portal’s search page. We’ve used these extensively in deciding what actions to take. The sample below is a report on bookmarks and their usage. This chart alone enabled us to remove 30% of our bookmarks due to lack of use.
In analyzing the click activity on our corporate portal, the most impactful elements are:
Bookmarks | Are clicked on in 45% of all searches and significantly shortens the duration of a search session. We currently have ~1200 bookmarks making for quick discovery of the most commonly searched for content and tools around the company. |
Topics | Are clicked on in 5-7% of all searches. |
Connectors | Are clicked on in 4-5% of all searches. |
Metadata | Good metadata typically moves an item from the bottom of the first page to the top half and from page 2 or later onto the bottom of page 1. |
Additional details will be published in later blog posts. If of interest, details as to exactly what Microsoft search admin does in its regular administrative activities are described here.
Business Impact of Search
As shown in the preceding table, roughly half of all enterprise-level searches benefit from one of the search admin capabilities. Employees who receive such benefits average a one-minute faster search completion time than those whose searches don’t use those capabilities. Across 1.2 million monthly enterprise-level searches at Microsoft, that time savings amounts to more than 8,000 hours a month of direct employee-productivity benefit.
We achieve these results with an admin team of part-time individuals, investing a total of <300 hours per month doing direct search administration, responding to user requests to help find individual items, and maintaining a self-help site which advises employees on where and how to search best. We also have a larger improvement program striving to improve information discoverability across the company.
So 5 years into our improvement efforts, we have significantly improved user satisfaction, can now measure the productivity impact search is having, and built numerous partnerships across the company that are expected to continue yielding improvements in the years to come.
Lessons from this work is actively improving search has significant payback. The first step is to actively administer search, doing whatever helps the most popular searches to deliver the right results.
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