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Microsoft Dynamics 365 is helping manufacturing organizations tackle the challenges they face today while also preparing them for tomorrow’s opportunities. Whether enabling workforce transformation and enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernization, helping navigate disruptions by increasing supply chain visibility and improving insights, or standing up reverse supply chains and circular economieswe are dedicated to helping manufacturers build the resiliency and agility they need to succeed. The following three success stories showcase how our modern, cloud-based, intelligent business applications are driving improvements in manufacturing supply chains.
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The manufacturing sector has faced labor shortages for some time now, but the pandemic has exacerbated this challenge. This has led many to double down on efforts to utilize technology as a means of offsetting the headwinds caused by ongoing labor shortages.
We see this in manufacturers accelerating workforce transformation of shop floor operations and increasing their utilization of industrial robotics, IoT sensors, AI, and intelligent automation. As these organizations create smarter and more connected factories, they are, in effect, increasing the workforce’s productivity, and this is one means of easing the constraint that labor shortages can have on output.
In addition to easing constraints on labor, manufacturers such as ChemTreat are also benefiting from ERP modernization initiatives. ChemTreat, a water treatment systems company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, and in business since 1968, was challenged to overcome the limitations of their in-house, custom-coded, desktop-bound ERP system. While the legacy system had served them well for many years, it now required laborious additional workflows, kept data trapped in spreadsheets, and needed nightly downtime. To keep pace with technology changes in the industry and support its growth, the company implemented Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
Today, ChemTreat benefits from real-time, end-to-end supply chain visibility that spans everything from its customers and suppliers to its inventory, expenses, and demand. Direct data visibility is also helping management proactively identify raw material shortages and improve their planning and execution processes. Plus, by modernizing their ERP, ChemTreat has the flexible and composable platform they need to support other digital transformation efforts in the future.
“Dynamics 365 helps us get ahead of challenges, identify potential customer impacts, and determine the best path to the best service.”Katie Journigan, Director of Business Systems, ChemTreat.
As businesses continue to forge a path out of the pandemic, many find that their current supply chain technologies are ill-equipped for an environment characterized by ongoing disruptions, constraints, and shortages. A recent survey by McKinsey & Company found that successfully implementing AI-enabled supply-chain management has enabled early adopters to improve logistics costs by 15 percent, inventory levels by 35 percent, and service levels by 65 percent, compared with slower-moving competitors.1 This has led to increased investment in advanced supply chain solutions that can connect disparate systems, unify data, increase supply chain visibility, and utilize artificial intelligence to push actionable insights to decision-makers. One company benefiting from investments like these is Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA).
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DTNA is the leading commercial vehicle manufacturer in the U.S., with a portfolio of distinctive brands like Freightliner and Western Star Trucks. The company has more than 20,000 employees in 91 locations and sources hundreds of thousands of parts from its global supply base. To add to this complexity, DTNA collects data from trucks on the road, its in-house ERP system and supply chain applications, and across its operations and production floor.
Breaking down the siloes of these disparate data sources became necessary for DTNA to meet customer and dealer demand and provide accurate delivery dates. To accomplish this, they needed early visibility into potential time constraints and the ability to collect and share real-time supply chain data with suppliers. With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, DTNA can make better supply chain decisions with proactive risk mitigation via prescriptive insights powered by AI.
“Sustainability has become an integral part of all world-class supply chains, and circularity is a leading supply chain sustainability strategy that enables recycling and reuse for the majority of a supply chain’s products.” Jodi Larson, General Manager of Strategy and Transformation at Microsoft.
More and more companies are working to make our world sustainable by embracing environmental, social, and governance goals. One way that manufacturing organizations are improving sustainability is by standing up circular economies. Circular economy, or circularity, is rooted in reverse supply chain management, which deals with what happens after a product’s useful life. According to a 2022 report from Gartner, 51 percent of supply chain professionals expect the emphasis on the circular economy to increase in the two years following the COVID-19 crisis.2
As focus ramps up on circular economy strategies, it’s important to understand that reverse supply chain management in manufacturing requires different operational processes. To state the obvious, manufacturers cannot simply accept end-of-life products at existing factories and warehouses. Depending on the complexity of the product and its recoverable raw materials, separate operations are needed to receive, inspect, sort, and refurbish raw materials before they can be reused.
Setting up these circular economy flows can be challenging without an agile and composable supply chain management application. Here at Microsoft, we have first-hand knowledge of the challenges involved as we have recently delivered our first Microsoft Circular Center. The Microsoft Circular Center program is designed to facilitate the reuse and recycling of servers and hardware within our datacenters, which is part of our commitment to achieving zero-waste and carbon-negative operations by 2030.
When planning the pilot of our Circular Center program, we needed a robust and flexible supply chain management platform to support an optimized warehouse routing and processing system to intercept decommissioned servers from Microsoft datacenters. To date, the Circular Centers model has achieved 83 percent reuse and 17 percent recycling of critical parts while contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions by 145,000 metric tons CO2 equivalent.
“We were looking for a warehouse management system that would allow us to model all the product flows that we needed while also connecting to datacenters and other systems used to manage our cloud assets. Dynamics 365 had all of these functionalities to build exactly what we needed.”Anand Narasimhan, General Manager of Cloud Supply Chain Sustainability, Microsoft.
What’s next?
As we have seen through these customer stories, Dynamics 365 drives improvement in manufacturing supply chains by enabling companies to revamp their existing ERP platform, considerably increase supply chain visibility and insights, and stand-up circular economies through reverse supply chain management practices. It also empowers users to plan better, improves organizational agility, and maximizes asset uptime, allowing companies to operate smoothly and profitably.
If you are ready to see what our modern, cloud-based supply chain management solution can do for your organization, we invite you to start today with a free Dynamics 365 trial. You can watch the on-demand webinar on how to create a resilient and sustainable supply chain and the total economic impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Update: Wednesday, 16 February 2022 17:00 UTC
We have found that a backend service that Log Analytics is reliant, has become unhealthy causing ingestion latencies. We performed a repair of a backend node to mitigate the issue and we have started to see recovery. To expedite the recovery, we have also scaled out the number of instances of one of our backend services.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Our business landscape is evolving rapidly. Long-term COVID impacts to supply chains, worksite strategies, and consumer behavior have compelled most organizations to modernize to better serve customer needs. Though migrated Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers will tell you that cloud benefits far exceed the perceived risks of moving or “comfort” associated with remaining on-premises, making this transition is not always straightforward. Large, transformative projects take time, resourcing, skill, and often require buy-in from across an organization. You don’t have to do it alone.
Technology partners are an important extension of Microsoft, offering implementation and industry expertise to every deployment. How to choose the right partner for your organization? Let the Dynamics 365 migration program help you select the right partner for your Dynamics AX or Dynamics CRM migration with these three characteristics.
1. Do they possess the necessary skillset?
Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM customers face some important decisions on modernizing their current on-premises solutions. Selecting the right migration partner to help your organization transition to the cloud should be among these considerations. Like Dynamics 365it is an investment. Consider the partner’s skillset. Migration complexity varies greatly from solution to solution as do the reasons for moving. Migrating from Dynamics CRM 2016 or from Dynamics AX 2009 to Dynamics 365 can look very different across organizations and industries depending on an organization’s data and customizations. Whether you’re migrating to Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations or Dynamics 365 Customer Experience, ensure your partner has proven credentials that demonstrate they have the personnel, skills, and resources to implement that solution in your environment and work with your teams to do so.
2. Do they understand the technology?
Dynamics 365 is a fully managed software as a service (SaaS). Microsoft offers certifications that speak to a developer’s Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations and Dynamics 365 Customer Experience capabilities. The same is true at the organizational level. Consider the partner’s technology credentials within the Microsoft ecosystem. This translates to solution competency. Within Microsoft business applications the most important, functional competency is the Cloud Business Application (CBA) certification. The Dynamics 365 migration program requires participating partners must hold a gold or silver CBA certificate. This ensures that they have experience migrating Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM customers, executed these projects efficiently, and possess a solid relationship with Microsoft. Finally, this means customer service is a priority. The partner has a track record of migrating and deploying large, complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions successfully while driving adoption and active usage. This means their customers are realizing value with Dynamics 365 and across workloads.
3. Do they have industry expertise?
Context is important. Migrating to Dynamics 365 will ensure your organization is prepared to meet future needs and challenges, but these vary across organizations and industries. Consider the partner’s experience deploying Dynamics 365 within your industry. A chief technology officer (CTO) within manufacturing versus healthcare or finance has different solutions requirements. The selected partner should have implemented a successful Dynamics 365 with your peersand can prove it. References speak volumes:
Wahl Clipper Corporation migrated from Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365. By leveraging the cloud, Wahl Clipper Corporation can now respond to supply chain demands quickly and better anticipate customer needs. This allowed Wahl Clipper Corporation to continue to be the leader in providing products and services that meet market needs and take care of customers.
Travel Counsellors migrated from Dynamics CRM to Dynamics 365. The cloud opened new opportunities to standardize and integrate communication and data across business-critical areas, including recruitment, infrastructure, and sales. This allowed Travel Counsellors to leverage the entire Microsoft cloud to reduce IT costs, scale quickly, and drive faster decisions.
Answer your questions with the Dynamics 365 Migration Community
With so much to considerknowing where and how to begin is not always clear. Microsoft established the Dynamics 365 Migration Community to simplify things. Regardless of where you are in your migration journey, the Dynamics 365 Migration Community has the resources to help you make timely, informed business decisions. Visit the community today to access partner discovery resources.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
When sellers follow a predefined set of activities from day to day, they will usually be more productive. Sales managers and other experienced sellers define these best practices, or sequences, to guide sellers and ensure they follow business processes. However, these sequences must constantly evolve, and the best way to make improvements is to understand their effectiveness. Dynamics 365 Sales Premium recently announced a preview of the reporting capability for sequences.
Sales acceleration reporting (preview) offers a performance dashboard for sequences that provides sales managers with the right information to measure the efficacy of the defined sequences. The dashboard helps them compare the success rate of each sequence and analyze the effectiveness of the related activities. Key data points embedded within the metric charts help managers manage seller activities.
The administrator can enable these embedded Microsoft Power BI reports and they are available at no additional cost for customers with Dynamics 365 Sales Premium licenses.
Improve the sales process
Sequences help sales managers implement a standardized sales process. Even though each sequence reflects years of experience and input, it is necessary to constantly revise and optimize the sales processes by monitoring performance. The dashboard provides the success rates of the sequences, aligned to the business KPIs. The dashboard also helps the manager compare sequences. They can also identify poorly performing sequences through the reports. Standard filters let the manager drill into specific data.
The dashboard reports offer the following key features:
Check the conversion success rates of the leads and opportunities associated with sequences
Compare sequences and check the number of associated leads and opportunities
Monitor the time taken to complete the guided sales activities
A sales manager can view the leads related to a particular sequence to monitor a seller’s activities and ensure adherence to the standardized sales processes.
The sequence stats page offers a grid view for sequences that helps managers compare different sequences and brainstorm ways that a sales process can be more productive.
Ensure high completion rates of seller activities
Sales managers can monitor seller activities with charts in the dashboard. They can filter activities using the following parameters:
Date range
Entity type, such as lead or opportunity
Sequence name and owner
Seller
Territory
By using these metric charts, the manager can identify the channels that are working well and see where improvements can be made. With the help of the activity status charts, the manager can easily recognize the completion rate of activities and decide where to focus to meet expectations. The chart for email engagement tracks the effectiveness of that activity.
Sales managers can find the following key insights with the reporting page:
Identify the channels that are most used in the sales process
Track the completion of sales process activities
Measure the effectiveness of email engagement
Next steps
To enable sequences in your environment, you need Dynamics 365 Sales Premium or the Sales Insights Add-in for Dynamics 365 Sales.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Now that our new Microsoft Information Governance feature, adaptive policy scopes, has reached general availability (GA), we thought it would be helpful to dive a little deeper into SharePoint site scopes. One of the most common questions we receive regarding site scopes is how administrators can use custom properties to include or exclude SharePoint sites with them. With this post, let’s take a deeper look at what custom properties are, why you may want to use them, and how to configure them.
If you are unfamiliar with adaptive policy scopes, it is an exciting new feature for Information Governance and Records Management which provides the ultimate level of flexibility when applying retention to Microsoft 365 locations. It allows organizations to meet regulatory, legal, or business requirements that demand different retention rules to apply to various departments, locations, and roles.
For more information about adaptive policy scopes, check out the following resources:
Additionally, much of the information we’ll discuss was also presented and demonstrated in our January 2022 webinar “Building Advanced Queries for SharePoint Sites with Adaptive Policy Scopes“: https://aka.ms/AdaptivePolicyScopes-AdvancedSharePoint
Introduction to SharePoint Site Scopes
Out of the box, adaptive policy scopes allow you to include or exclude SharePoint sites based on indexed properties such as the site’s URL or name. One common problem admins face, however, is that those properties don’t always work well for their retention requirements. Furthermore, SharePoint sites, by default, don’t have many other queryable properties that they find useful when scoping retention policies. Many times, they require more user-centric attributes, such as region or location, to align with regulatory requirements.
For that reason, we designed adaptive policy scopes to take advantage of refinable managed properties which allow administrators to inject and query whatever custom site-level information they want, enabling powerful complex scoping scenarios. For example, an administrator can create a queryable property that references the location in which the site is used, with a value such as “France”.
The most popular of these refinable managed properties – and ideal for our location example above – is the refinable string. Because it is the most commonly used refinable managed property, we added it as a selectable option in the simple query builder of the adaptive policy scope wizard when creating a site scope:
The simple query builder can be used to quickly create queries using the most common indexed site properties.
However, there are more refinable managed properties that may also be useful to administrators such as date and integer. These aren’t available in the simple query builder, but for maximum flexibility, can be queried using Keyword Query Language (KQL) within the advanced query builder:
The advanced query builder can be used to create more complex queries using Keyword Query Language (KQL)
As you can probably guess, deciding whether to use the simple or advanced query builder will depend on the complexity of the scope, the properties which must be queried, and the operators that are required to achieve the intended result. To help understand the differences, refer to the following chart:
The advanced query builder supports more properties, but requires knowledge and experience of KQL.
How custom properties work in SharePoint Online
Before using a custom property with an adaptive policy scope, it’s important to understand how they work. There are several components that are involved and at play when creating and querying custom properties with SharePoint sites:
The site property bag: a per-site dictionary of key/value pairs. This is where an admin could add any custom properties to hold custom data that they’d want to query.
Crawled property: when a new custom property is added to a site, a tenant-level crawled property is automatically generated during the SharePoint search and crawl process. This crawled property is not directly queryable and thus cannot be referenced in KQL queries. I like to think of it as unformatted data that has no data type.
Refinable managed property: a queryable property that can be mapped to the previously generated crawled property. Mapping the refinable property will define the data type for the custom property, which can then be used to query the custom information. There are several different refinable managed properties, but here are the most common – along with the available operators that type supports:
Managed Property
Data Type
Supported Operators
RefinableString00-199
String
= : <> *
RefinableInt00-49
Integer
= : <> * > >= < <=
RefinableDate00-19
ISO 8601 Date/Time
= : <> * > >= < <= reserved keywords
The following image gives an overview of the process each custom property goes through before it can be queried using KQL from within an adaptive policy scope:
Adding a custom property initiates a crawled property which then must be mapped to a managed property to become queryable.
NOTE: Since a tenant-level crawled property is created automatically the first time a custom property is added to a site, the managed property only needs to be mapped once. After mapping, the custom property can be added to more sites and the same managed property can be used to query them all (after indexing occurs).
Adding a custom property for use in adaptive policy scopes
Now that we have a basic understanding of the various components involved under-the-hood, let’s walk through how to create custom properties that can be queried using KQL from within an adaptive policy scope.
Step 1: Adding the custom property to the site property bag
At this time, there’s no way in the UI to add a custom property to a site property bag. So, to make the process as easy as possible, we’ve worked with the open-sourced PnP.PowerShell module team to create cmdlets designed specifically for easily adding/managing custom properties for use with adaptive policy scopes:
To get started, you’ll need to make sure you have the latest version (1.9.0+) of the PnP.PowerShell module installed. Refer to their documentation for installation instructions.
Once installed – at least the first time that you connect to your tenant using PnP.PowerShell – you’ll need to give administrative consent to use the module. To do this, you must authenticate interactively. Choose a SharePoint Online site (we will use Project Wallaby), then use the following cmdlet to connect:
Connect-PnPOnline –Url <SPOSiteUrl> -Interactive
You must first connect to PnP Online interactively to consent to required permissions.
Once connected, use Set-PnPAdaptiveScopeProperty to add a custom property to the site’s property bag.
To provide a real-world example, let’s consider the following scenario:
Contoso wants to create a retention policy that applies to all project sites in the marketing department. The policy will apply indefinite retention while the project is active.
Given the above scenario, it would make sense to add three new custom properties to the property bag of all applicable sites. For our first site, we’ll use the marketing department’s Project Wallaby site:
customDepartment:Marketing
customSiteType:project
customProjectEndDate:2023-01-01
NOTE: You don’t need to add ‘custom’ to the property name, but it can help distinguish custom properties from other properties.
We can then use Get-PnPPropertyBag to verify the properties were successfully added:
Use Get-PnPPropertyBag to verify the custom properties have been added.
Step 2: Mapping the refinable managed properties
As we described above, once we’ve added the custom properties to the site’s property bag, the SharePoint search crawl process will generate a new tenant-level crawled property (if one doesn’t already exist). This requires the site to be crawled, so it may take some time. Once the crawled property has been generated, it can be viewed within your tenant’s SharePoint search schema:
A tenant-level crawled property is created for each custom property added, but they are not mapped to any managed property.
In the above image, notice that there are not any current mappings. This is where we would need to map each crawled property to a refinable managed property which will assign a data type and enable the ability to query the data based on that type.
To do that, select one of the newly created crawled properties to open the crawled property settings. Then, within “Mappings to managed properties”, search for and choose an applicable refinable managed property. You’ll need to do this for each custom property that was created, but as mentioned before, will only need to do it once for each.
In order to make a crawled property queryable, you must map it to a managed property which gives it a data type.
It is important to emphasize that the refinable property is what gives the crawled property a data type that we can then query. So, when deciding which refinable managed property to use, consider how you want to query the object, then choose the type that makes the most sense. For example, a date supports more operators than a string. Given the 3 properties/values we created, we can map them to the following managed properties:
Custom Property
Data
Data Type
Managed Property
customDepartment
Marketing
String
RefinableString00
customSiteType
Project
String
RefinableString01
customProjectEndDate
2023-01-01
DateTime
RefinableDate00
The mappings can be viewed from the tenant-level crawled property page.
After creating the mappings, crawling of the site is again required before being queryable, which may take some time.
Step 3: Create the query
Finally, now that we’ve added the custom properties and mapped them to refinable managed properties so that they can be queried, we can create the query for use in an adaptive scope.
If we had chosen to use only refinable strings then the simple query builder would be fine to use – but since we chose to use a refinable date too, we must create a KQL query for use in the advanced query builder.
Remembering the example scenario outlined above – and given the custom properties we created – we could query the mapped refinable managed properties using the following KQL query:
RefinableString00=Marketing AND RefinableString01=project AND RefinableDate00>today
Once an adaptive policy scope is created, it generally takes about 24-48 hours for it to start populating with sites that match our query. Since that is a while to wait to simply confirm the query is valid, we can first test it using SharePoint search by navigating to:
https://<tenant-name>.sharepoint.com/Search
SharePoint search can be used to verify/validate KQL queries.
Now that we’ve confirmed it works, we can confidently create a new adaptive policy scope using the same KQL query that was tested above within the advanced query builder of the new adaptive scope wizard:
Creating a SharePoint site scope using KQL
Automating the process
As you can see, this process is very manual and would be extremely time-consuming to perform over a large number of sites.
For existing sites, we have an example script that can export all existing sites and allow you to set a custom property on any number of them: https://aka.ms/BulkPropertyBagScripts
For future sites, we recommend implementing a site provisioning solution to start integrating custom properties into your workflow. PnP has a provisioning framework, as one option: https://aka.ms/PnP-ProvisioningFramework
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We hope you found this blog post useful. Thank you for reading!
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