The concept of the global control tower first appeared on the radar of supply chain leaders around 15 years ago. As more and more companies pursued end-to-end visibility for increasingly globalized supply chains, the idea quickly gained momentum. IndustryWeek noted global control towers as one of the hottest supply chain buzzwords of 2008.¹ Still, for an idea that has been buzzing for over a decade, many companies have been challenged to move from concept to reality.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping companies overcome these challenges by equipping them with the tools necessary to create digital supply chains that are highly collaborative, coordinated, agile, and demand-driven. With these new supply chain solutions in place, businesses can achieve real-time, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, breathing new life into concepts like supply chain control towers in the process.

Supply chain control towers

It has quickly become essential for businesses to invest in technology that can help them sense and predict supply chain constraints and disruptions and spikes and troughs in demand. From using advanced forecasting techniques to real-time collaboration between trading partners and commercial teams, business processes are increasingly geared to generate and proactively shape customer demand. Companies must also integrate the agility to continuously optimize supply and production plans in real-time, as forecast and predictions shift into actual customer order receipts. Supply chains control towers help in these efforts by building both agility and resiliency into the supply chain by delivering end-to-end operational visibility, all the way from planning to delivery and back.

Resiliency in this context is about driving business continuity. This can take the form of digitizing production in factories, automating operations on the shop floor, and providing unparallel transparency, in real-time, to leadership. By utilizing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights^preview to create a digital representation of the physical supply chain, whether called a control tower, digital twin, or supply chain nerve center, businesses can reach new levels of agility and gain the ability to sense and proactively mitigate disruptions before they occur. And to respond faster when the inevitable happens, such as an unpredictable or unforeseen event.

McKinsey & Company estimates that a $10 billion business with a high-performing supply chain can reduce cost by as much as $50 million annually through digital initiatives such as supply chain nerve centers.² This is because control towers enable supply chain organizations to blur the lines between planning and execution, allowing businesses to uncover and exploit improvement opportunities faster than ever before.

Building blocks

Visibility

Starting with the end in mind, regardless of the mixture of people, processes, data, organization, and technology used to erect a control tower, it must deliver end-to-end visibility across all supply chain nodes to be successful. This visibility should penetrate beyond tier 1 and tier 2 partners.

Agility

While visibility is the starting point, visibility by itself is not sufficient. Supply chain solutions must also deliver improvements to agility so companies can more effectively respond to changing customer demands. In practice, this means going beyond the ability to immediately grasp what is happening (system-wide visibility) and on to making predictions of what is likely to happen next. This way, business leaders can adapt and overcome challenges as they are identified in real-time.

Unified data

The value that a construct such as a supply chain control tower can deliver is proportional to the organizations’ ability to unify data from disparate sources. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, legacy business applications, supplier systems of records, siloed hard drives, PLCs, and even IoT data streams all must be incorporated and unified.

Automation

Businesses also need supply chain solutions that incorporate rules-based orchestration to model and automate responses to fulfillment constraints. By leveraging automation in this manner, organizations can proactively address issues with actionable, data-driven insights, allowing them to adapt faster to disruptions and constraints.

Vision

At Microsoft, we see supply chain control towers as a shared service process that can be brought together from a mix of supply chain solutions. For example, a control tower can be assembled using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights^preview together with Microsoft Power Platform, and our rapidly growing ecosystem of digital supply chain applications.

A supply chain control tower enabled by Dynamics 365 in this fashion positions organizations to respond faster and more intelligently to disruptions and opportunities. With seamless integration to many market-leading API-enabled applications using our configurable pre-built partner connectors, businesses can convert the action signals from what-if analysis into directives sent to the applications that guide day-to-day operational execution.

Organizational benefits

When organizations use Dynamics 365 to create a supply chain control tower, they can realize the benefits of a single platform. One version of truth brings together internal and external stakeholders to visualize constraints and disruptions at any point in the value stream. Then, affected agents and authorities can work together to analyze the upstream or downstream impacts, collaborate in near real-time to formulate and enact optimal responsesall from one location and one pane of glass.

In this way, a supply chain control tower created with Dynamics 365 enables organizations to adapt quickly to demand shifts by deliberately blurring the lines between planning and execution and effectively creating a continuous digital feedback loop across entities and distinct business processes.

Let’s now look at how a customer, Breville Group, is creating a resilient supply chain of the future with Dynamics 365.

Looking forward

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides manufacturers, distributors, and retailers with the real-time visibility and intelligence they need to move from reactive to proactive. It unifies data and uses predictive insightsacross order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, warehousing, and transportationto maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability. And, with innovative technologies, such as AI and machine learning integrated into the solution, it helps organizations accelerate performance even further.

Learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights ^preview enable companies to strengthen and expand the Four Pillars of the Digital Supply Chain. To learn more, check out our recent webinar Create Agile and Digital Supply Chains with Dynamics 365, and join a panel of Microsoft Experts in the live Ask the Expert session scheduled for December 7, 2021, at 10AM Pacific Time.

1- IndustryWeek, A Guide to the Hottest Supply Chain Buzzwords of 2008, January 2008

2- McKinsey & Company, Building a digital bridge across the supply chain with nerve centers, January 2021

The post Enhance visibility with Dynamics 365 digital supply chain solutions appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Thank you to everyone from across the globe who attended Microsoft Ignite last week. This year’s virtual event was packed with learning sessions, announcements, engaging conversations, and Q&Asfar too much content to absorb in just three days. To help you catch up on the news and content from Microsoft Ignite, we’ve rounded up the highlights for you.

To get started, we recommend watching three featured sessions. Start with Satya Nadella’s opening keynotean overview of trends and innovations across the Microsoft cloud that will transform your business. Then, watch the session, “Microsoft Ignite into Focus: Business Applications,” for a closer look at new and upcoming capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Also, learn about innovation across the Microsoft cloud that will allow every organization to build a hyperconnected business, providing the agility and flexibility for organizations and employees to thrive now and into the future.

Next, explore innovation across Dynamics 365 discussed in breakout and on-demand sessions during the event, starting with the highlights below.

Context IQ: Connect and collaborate in the flow of work with anyone, anywhere

We’re making it easier to connect with people, information, and conversations from Dynamics 365 workspaces, reducing the need to switch between apps to access who and what you need in the moment. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced Context IQ, a set of capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 that make information, people, and conversations more accessible in the moment, reducing the need to switch between apps. Context IQ helps ensure business users can access documents and records, colleagues across the organization, and conversationsall in the flow of work, whether from within Dynamics 365 or Microsoft 365 applications.

Read a deep dive on the Dynamics 365 blog and watch the Microsoft Ignite sessionto see Context IQ in action.

Build deeper connections with Microsoft Customer Experience Platform

Organizations must be able to unlock the power of customer data to create experiences that build strong relationships. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, introduced at Microsoft Ignite, is a complete solution that puts organizations in control of their customer data to personalize, automate and orchestrate journeys during the entire customer lifecycle of awareness, to purchase, to service. With a deep understanding of customers and rich, out-of-the-box insights, organizations can now determine and predict intent to deliver the right content on the right channel and in the right moment.

Read a deep dive on the Dynamics 365 blog and watch the Microsoft Ignite session to see these capabilities in action.

Create an all-in-one digital contact center with Dynamics 365 Customer Service

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced the general availability of our first-party voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, built on the planet-scale communications platform that powers Microsoft Teams. The addition of the voice channel helps your organization provide consistent and personalized service to customers across all channels with one data-driven, AI-infused, end-to-end solutionno integration required.

The new first-party voice solutions join a host of other capabilities demonstrated at Microsoft Ignite, including conversational IVR, call transcription, sentiment analysis, proactive recommendations, and other built-in AI capabilities that empower your agents to resolve customer issues quickly.

Read a deep dive on the Dynamics 365 blog and watch the Microsoft Ignite session to see these capabilities in action.

Build a trusted and resilient supply chain

The current supply chain crisis spotlights the need for new levels of visibility across your entire supply chain. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, providing organizations with the visibility they need along with the intelligence to predict and proactively manage supply chain challenges.

We also announced updates to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to optimize production processes. New capabilities enable your organization to innovate with intelligent manufacturing operations by easily adapting to new business models, improving planning agility, enhancing the visibility of your shop floor, and ensuring round-the-clock uptime and business continuity.

In addition, Microsoft introduced the preview of the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, which connects experiences across the end-to-end product and service lifecycle and lights up the entire Microsoft cloud with capabilities specifically tailored to manufacturing.

Explore updates to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, learn how to mitigate disruptions with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, and read about theMicrosoft Cloud for Manufacturing preview. Also, watch Microsoft Ignite sessions that take a deep dive into Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing.

Bridge the physical and digital worlds with Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces

Announced at Microsoft Ignite, the preview of Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces, previously Dynamics 365 Connected Store, signals our expansion from retail scenarios to all spaces, from retail to manufacturing. With Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces, your organization can harness observational data (the data we generate as we move throughout the world), use AI-powered models to unlock insights about your environment, and respond in real-time to trends and patterns.

Learn more on the Dynamics 365 blog and watch the Microsoft Ignite session to see these capabilities in action.

Read more news from Microsoft Ignite

Be sure to catch up on all the news and sessions from Microsoft Ignite, now available on-demandincluding downloadable videos of sessions, transcripts, and related resources. If you need a roadmap, check out our guide to Microsoft Ignite.

The post Microsoft Ignite recap: Dynamics 365 news and announcements you may have missed appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Customer engagement professionals still need to build relationships, trust, and loyalty to be successful, but how we achieve these outcomes has fundamentally changed. Those changes offer the opportunity to be more effective than ever at driving these results.

To meet customer expectations, marketers are looking to create end-to-end customer experiences that are customer-led, highly personalized, and that reach their customers wherever they are, across all physical and digital channels. Data and AI make all these things possible and bring us into an exciting new frontierfrom the reactive to the predictive era.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing brings together the worlds of customer experience and marketing automation, empowering businesses to orchestrate individualized journeys across all touchpoints to strengthen relationships and earn loyalty.

With the 2021 release wave 2, we focused on improving processes and capabilities for creating moments-based customer journeys that span all customer touchpoints, and on taking personalization to the next level, all with less effort. Here are a few highlights of these exciting new innovations that will be releasing over the next few months and what they can mean for marketers and business users alike.

Engage your customers in moments that matter across all customer touchpoints

To truly embrace customer-led journeys you must be ready to engage and respond when the customer wants to engage, in the moments that matter to them. Here are new ways Dynamics 365 Marketing will help you do just that.

Send SMS messages using Twilio and TeleSign integration. Engaging customers in moments that matter means that connecting with mobile users is a must. Dynamics 365 Marketing enables you to utilize the SMS channel to send fast, transactional communications and marketing messages. In this release, we have extended these capabilities by enabling integration with Twilio and TeleSign for the ultimate level of flexibility.

Reach more customers with a 10X increase in the scale of interactions in real-time marketing journeys. To reach your customers in moments that matter to them, you must be able to scale. Prospects and customers are starting to take the lead on how frequently they want to interact with companies they do business with. Companies must be able to respond to customers whenever they want to engage. We now support up to 100 million outbound interactions (email, SMS, or push notifications) per month to a maximum of 20 million contacts using real-time marketing journeys. With the added interaction capacity, you can communicate as much as you need to help move prospects and customers along their buying journey.

Personalize engagement for each customer

Engaging your customers in an individually personalized way is easier than ever thanks to the innovative new capabilities added to Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Deliver rich customer experiences by raising custom events from journey steps. Because every business is unique, you may need to define custom processes to enhance your journeys. By using Microsoft Power Automate Flows, you will have limitless customization and precise control of your customer experience.

You can call a Power Automate Flow from the journey canvas to connect with proprietary and external business systems. This end-to-end integration allows you to leverage the entire Power Automate ecosystem of connectors and controls to deliver the unique experience your customers demand. And what’s even better, is that anyone, from citizen marketing developers to pro marketing operations teams, IT professionals, or partners, can create very advanced custom scenarios in only a few clicks.

Personalize emails to include lists of related data. To save time and to further personalize your emails, you can now include lists of related data that are specific to the individual receiving the email. For example, you can add a list of sessions in a conference registration email or a list of items purchased in an order confirmation email. The ‘helper tool’ in real-time marketing generates the code for conditional statements and lists for you, making it easier to ensure your syntax is correct.

Gain more control over journey branching conditions through increased attribute support. Creating personalized journeys for customers based on their demographics and behaviors can help increase engagement. With this release, you can now create journey branches based on any attribute associated with the customer or event trigger that started the journey. In addition, for attributes based on date and time, you can create branches based on relative or partial dates.

Make faster and better decisions leveraging the power of analytics and AI

A deep understanding of your customer coupled with knowledge of what has worked before can bring amazing customer experiences to life.

Use AI-powered ideas to automatically generate content for emails. Looking for the right email copy to catch a customer’s eye? Use Content Ideas to help you get writing inspiration and move faster from concept to execution. No more needing to start from a blank screen. This new capability uses powerful AI technology to generate custom text ideas in your Dynamics 365 Marketing email editor.

We’re taking an intentional approach to integrating our responsible AI principles by building this experience with transparency and control, while boosting value for you. The automated ideas are based on your key points and recent emails sent by your organization. Now you can take advantage of this breakthrough technology to deliver the most impactful content to your audience.

Optimize the performance of emails in the new outbound marketing email editor with A/B testing. A good way to create an email that resonates with your audience is to test different versions with subsets of your recipients, and then analyze interaction records to determine which one is better received. The new editor in Dynamics 365 Marketing now can A/B test your emails, allowing you to optimize the performance of your emails.

Use natural language to create targeted segments. You can also use natural language sentences to build segments faster in Dynamics 365 Marketing. We introduced a preview of this capability in our previous release and have been working to refine, enhance, and continue the AI model training, so it’s better than ever before. Just use simple words to specify the attributes and logic for the segment you want to target, the AI-powered model does the rest for you. For example, using natural language, you can create a segment of “Contacts who were born between 1970 and 2000 and make more than $50K”, the correct query fields will be filled in for you and the segment will be generated automatically.

Leading the next generation of business applications

The innovations in this 2021 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Marketing support our Dynamics 365 vision to build data first, AI-enabled applications. Starting from data, we bring new insights and automation to your business processes and customer experiences. We power those processes and experiences with AI and next best actions while upholding Microsoft’s commitment to building AI responsibly, using our six principles as a lens for innovation. I’m excited to take you on this exciting journey with usas always, there will be more to come.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Marketing

To learn more about how your organization can elevate your customer experiences, visit the Dynamics 365 Marketing webpage and sign up for a free Dynamics 365 Marketing trial to explore real-time customer journey orchestration and the other rich capabilities offered in Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Dynamics 365 Marketing is leading the way with personalized engagement appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we are excited to announce the new guided tour for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management. We are also taking this opportunity to talk about businesses’ need for order management solutions to move beyond the limitations of traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and keep pace with the fast-changing landscape of e-commerce.

View of one of the steps of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management guided tour.

Moving beyond traditional ERP

An excellent customer experience is a requirement for organizational success in today’s modern business environment. This is particularly true for retailers, distributors, and manufacturers that are embracing direct-to-consumer business models. When it comes to selling, manufacturing, or distributing physical goods, a critical component of providing an excellent customer experience is ensuring that customer orders are shipped On Time and In Full (OTIF), every time.

And more and more companies are realizing that traditional ERP systems lack the adaptability, agility, and resiliency necessary to keep pace with the ever-evolving demands and growing complexity of modern digital commerce. To meet these challenges, forward-thinking organizations have found that order management solutions provide them the required capability to accept orders from anywhere and fulfill them everywhere in a cost-efficient manner. To this end, let’s look at two ways that Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management allows businesses to move beyond the limitations of traditional ERP systems.

Faster delivery

The accelerated shift to buying online that accompanied the global pandemic came alongside the trend of consumers demanding shorter delivery times. The result is that for companies interested in selling direct-to-consumer, delivering within two daysif not soonerbecame table stakes. It makes sense then that when McKinsey & Company surveyed apparel, hard goods, and specialty retailers in 2021, they found that the overwhelming majority75 percenthad active plans to build out fulfillment networks that offer two-day or faster delivery times by 2022.¹

And this is just one area where traditional ERP systems face challenges and where organizations need advanced solutions to move beyond their limitations. For example, consider that modern digital commerce companies frequently need to add new partners and apps for e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), shipping, billing, tax calculations, etc. To be effective this requires an easy-to-deploy solution that integrates with internal and external ecosystems without the need for costly and time-consuming rip and replace processes. Enter Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, a modern, and open platform that allows organizations to overcome supply chain constraints and disruptions, and capitalize seasonal peak volumes.

Composable approach

Gartner predicts that by 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80 percent in the speed of new feature implementation.² A primary reason for adopting a composable approach is because it provides greater agility and resiliency. Traditional ERP falls short on delivering this agility and resiliency because of their lack of real-time inventory visibility into siloed data. Plus, traditional ERPs don’t have the ability to easily support customized rules for the latest fulfillment methods such as Buy-online, Pickup in-store (BOPIS), and AI and machine learning capabilities.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management seamlessly works with existing ERPs and supply chain solutions to enhance end-to-end visibility. It enables customers to create an execution-based control tower, suited to companies that must delight customers with accurate, timely fulfillment of frequent orders, perhaps using third-party logistics (3PL) providers.

It uses rules based-fulfillment orchestration and AI-based anomaly detection models to proactively identify and address fulfillment constraints and improve delivery times while reducing costs. This helps accelerate decision-making to mitigate the impact of disruptions. As massive amounts of data are generated across the order management processes, technologies such as AI and machine learning are increasingly necessary because businesses must be able to deliver actionable insights at scale.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management enables organizations to extend and operate in complex environments, where there are many internal and external supply chain partners. Moreover, it is designed to easily configure order orchestration flows through low-code or no-code interfaces and quickly scale by adding new partners’ connectors to the best-of-breed solutions for e-commerce, shipping, tax calculation, and more.

At this point, it makes sense to conclude that order management systems need to be open and flexible solutions, capable of handling and integrating with multiple order sources and order orchestration applications. In this way, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is far more flexible than traditional ERPs. It can be used as a started point to build a control tower with this desirable composable approach, as it integrates with existing ERPs, making them much faster and cheaper to customize and support.

In summary, this composable approach is what makes it possible for organizations to connect their existing supply chain systems, enhance these systems with an order management solution, and to integrate all business platforms with new e-commerce, payments, shipping, taxes, and other partners. This is accomplished by using prebuilt connectors to manage the entire order life cycle more efficiently and to provide more organizational agility and resiliency in the process.

Learn more about how to create agile and digital supply chains in this webinar.

What’s next?

We have reviewed some of the areas where Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management allows businesses to move beyond the limitations of traditional ERP systems. We invite you to experience a free trial of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management or visit our new guided tour to learn more.

1-McKinsey & Company, Retail’s need for speed: Unlocking value in omnichannel delivery, September 2021.

2-Gartner, Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications, June 2020. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc., in the U.S. and internationally, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management launches new guided tour appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As the retail industry rebounds from the unparalleled disruptions to store operations over the last year, the store’s role in merchant strategy is evolving and being reimagined. For retailers to thrive in ever more competitive marketplaces, they must embrace technology solutions that enable a modern and intelligent store. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce stands ready with the capabilities to accelerate and empower retailers in their digital transformation journey.

Enhance customer shopping experiences

As physical stores return to pre-pandemic operating capacity, retailers realize the extent to which a new normal for store operations has taken hold. The result is that they are searching for opportunities to leverage technology to improve and automate the in-store experience, reduce costs, enhance operational efficiencies, and ultimately, enhance customer shopping experiences.

As the amount of data generated is growing exponentially across the customer journey, from online to in-store and beyond, retailers need to leverage this data to bridge the digital to physical divide in a seamless and frictionless way. Dynamics 365 Commerce assists companies in these efforts with solutions that delivercurated customer interactions, enable contactless selling, maximize physical store revenue, streamline store operations, and reduce loss due to fraud.

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

Curated customer interactions

We have previously talked about how Dynamics 365 can deliver personalized digital customer engagement. The natural extension of personalized digital customer engagement is to bring the same strategy to the physical store. In this case, we speak about curating customer interactions by augmenting store associates with an unprecedented view of consumers, also known as clienteling.

This strategy is not new. Retailers have long sought ways to build long-term relationships with their most important customers. In the days before box store chains, repeat customers could reasonably expect sales associates to remember who they were, what their preferences were, and even have a good sense of the items in which they might be interested. As retail chains grew and expanded into e-commerce marketplaces, in-store associate turnover and customer mobility also increased. The result is the personalized experiences that customers desire decreased due to a lack of continuity of in-store associates and, to a lesser extent, the different stores that customers may visit. Another factor at work here is the disconnect between e-commerce marketplaces and physical stores, leaving frontline workers lacking critical data about customer purchases and preferences.

At Microsoft, we are actively enabling technologies such as AI and machine learning to change this situation by empowering store associates with better customer insights based on data gathered across every customer touchpoint. And by connecting the once siloed data of digital and physical enterprise systems, we are helping merchants provide an end-to-end digital buying experience across every stage of the customer journey. In physical stores, this means that associates can utilize handheld digital shared devices to access a full 360-degree customer profile. This provides frontline teams with AI-driven recommendations, access to real-time up-sell and cross-sell guidance, and even unlocks customer brand affinity or product preferences.

Enable contactless selling

One of the trends we highlighted in our recent blog on the 4 post-pandemic retail trends was contactless payments. And with good reason. Market studies in recent months found that a large percentage of consumers were still anxious about shopping in stores. One way that retailers can reduce this anxiety is by enabling seamless contactless selling experiences.

By enabling contactless payments, either via store associate handheld devices or with automated checkout systems, consumers have one less physical surface to touch. While no panacea for eliminating consumers’ health risk and associated anxiety, contactless selling has other benefits like reducing time spent in checkout lines and eliminating a point of friction in the purchase process. Ultimately, Dynamics 365 Commerce enables contactless selling with mobile point-of-sale (POS) and contactless payment solutions so that merchants can deliver safe and secure shopping experiences.

Learn more about contactless payments and other retail trends in our recent e-book: The Future of Commerce in a Post-Pandemic World.

Maximize physical store revenue

Successful merchants understand the importance of maximizing physical store revenue. With Dynamics 365 Commerce, retailers have a deeper understanding of purchasing habits that allow them to tailor product selections, offer timely and data-driven recommendations, and access any relevant promotions. Additionally, by developing a single view of customers for use at physical POS and connecting this with a real-time view of cross-store inventory and purchasing options, merchants can enable endless aisles to ensure that they never miss a sales opportunity. This translates into increasing the number of units sold per transaction and maximization of sales per square foot. Plus, Dynamics 365 Commerce also helps boost in-store team member productivity with inventory, shift, and cash drawer management actions across all role-specific workspaces.

Streamline store operations

Retailers that are seeking to streamline store operations should look to utilize edge-based technology to unlock new insights, such as identifying and responding faster to in-store profit gaps and improving the efficiency of store team members-actions that ultimately serve to improve overall store profitability.

A byproduct of streamlining store operations by adopting innovative and connected technology solutions is that it decreases the time required to open new stores or add new franchises by removing friction from every part of business operations and processes. This is a pivotal area where the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Commerce can help to optimize retail operations and deliver friction-free shopping experiences to customers.

Reduce fraud loss

While retailers are rightly focused on reducing loss due to fraud, they must also focus on delivering data privacy and security. Dynamics 365 Commerce helps merchants maximize profitability by providing loss prevention tools that combat internal fraudulent practices. At the same time, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection provides even greater protection for purchases and accounts with industry-leading enterprise-grade security that also reduces losses due to return fraud.

Learn more: Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

Creating the store of the future

By connecting digital and physical store systems, unifying the data that these systems collect, leveraging that data with AI and machine learning, and connecting that data to in-store team members, Dynamics 365 Commerce is helping retailers to create the store of the future. We believe that the modern and intelligent store is one where retail operations are transformed and reimagined, and we are enabling merchants on this journey to delivercurated customer interactions, enable contactless selling, maximize physical store revenue, streamline store operations, and reduce loss due to fraud.

What’s next?

At Microsoft, we will continue to deliver timely and innovative solutions that help companies enable the modern and intelligent store. If you are ready to start delivering unified, personalized, and seamless buying experiences for your customers and partners, we invite you to try a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce today.

The post Dynamics 365 Commerce enables the modern and intelligent store appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Where and how we work has changed. The hybrid work environment is here to stay, and with it, comes a new set of demands on our sales organizations. The tools that sellers are currently using are not helping meet these new demands.

Yesterday’s tools don’t serve our modern objectives. Sellers can’t afford to work in siloed systems and manually enter data at the end of the day. Manual tracking contributes to poor data quality and prevents sellers from connecting well with customers.

To help our customers thrive in this new normalwe have to break down the silos that not only exist between applications but also those that exist between people across the department, the company, and externally with customers and partners. We need to blur the lines between business applications, productivity tools, and collaboration capabilities so we can help our customers drive efficient and effective customer engagements. Sellers demand this, and their customers expect it.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents the new era of business apps that start from data, use AI, and are built for collaboration.

Given all of this, how does that change what’s top of mind for us as we build and refine our Dynamics 365 Sales app? Our approach is to deliver data first, intelligent, and collaborative business applications. The Dynamics 365 Sales 2021 release wave 2 enhancements can be broken down into three focus areas:

• Conversational intelligence to be more effective in closing dealsEnsuring we support users with valuable, productive experiences that ultimately delight the customer.
• Collaborate anywhere and everywhere to bring deal teams togetherGet better connected across the team with interactions that surface context, and enable easy action and history capture wherever they work.
• Personal productivity to be more efficient and effectiveSave time with prioritization, preparation, and tracking, taken care of for you whether in the office or on the go.

Conversational intelligence to be more effective in closing deals

With the enhancements made with conversational intelligence, sellers can now focus on effectively responding to buying signals to maximize that customer moment. No more selling regrets post-call by missing a trigger. For instance, as sellers prepare for calls, they can quickly review a summary of the previous call, action items, and scan highlights. Using Microsoft Teams within Dynamics 365, sellers can easily make their calls while having access to business data and take notes while the call is being transcribed automatically. Any business-critical insight mentioned during the call is captured and highlighted and suggested actions are surfaced. With all these tips, this approach is so much more effective than having this conversation over Teams aloneeven more effective than doing it face to face. Sellers can now focus on responding to buying signals to maximize that customer moment. No more missing a follow-up or forgetting a customer promise.

Call summaries with suggested actions

See this demo in action: KEY05 Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Business Applications [approx. min 15:00]

Collaborate anywhere and everywhere to bring deal teams together

With our hybrid work styles, the lines between business productivity and general productivity are forever erased. Business users are using Microsoft Office, Teams, mobile applications, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Selling is messy. As much as we’d like it to, it doesn’t follow a linear process. Many different people need to be involved and it’s a changing environment as new requirements are surfaced or people change roles, or new questions come up. At Microsoft Ignite 2021, we announced “Context IQ” a new set of capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 that enable better collaboration by surfacing information and people in the moment, in context with the task at hand. We will vastly improve the ability for a seller to get a job done with others, retain context before, during, and afterward, no matter what application you are in.

Collaborating with team members from within Dynamics 365

Learn more: BRK203 – Accelerate cross-organization collaboration with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365

Personal productivity to be more efficient and effective

The more data-driven sellers are, the more opportunities they have to work on the right priority deals to close. And who wouldn’t want to remove time spent on data entry and instead focus that time on being more effective in customer interactions? In Dynamics 365 Sales, work items are prioritized based on AI so sellers know what action to take and when. Contact information captured through emails and meetings in Outlook is directly brought into Dynamics 365 Sales, helping sellers to instantly discover new contacts and expand their networks. And so you don’t skip a beat when you’re on the go, you can keep track of everything using the built-in Outlook and Teams integration in the intuitive mobile-friendly UI that allows you to follow up on action items and to update records while being away from your computer. All of this is rolled into seller KPI and manager dashboards that help your sales teams be more data-driven with their decision-making to drive better outcomes.

We have been on an incredible journey with our customershelping them evolve their business applications from systems of record capturing data, to intelligent applications that use data and collaboration to drive action. I am incredibly excited to continue this journey as we blur the lines between business application, collaboration, and productivity tools so that we can empower each user with what they need and where they need it so they can achieve better business outcomes.

Resources and links

Learn more about what’s included in Dynamics 365 2021 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Sales.

Missed a session at Microsoft Ignite? Watch it on-demand. Dynamics 365 Sales is highlighted in the following sessions:

• CTS01 Empower everyone for a new world of hybrid work
• CTS02 Build a hyperconnected business
• KEY05 Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Business Applications
• BRK203 Accelerate cross-organization collaboration with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365
• OD168 Unlock your next best opportunity with digital selling

To learn more about how your organization can supercharge your digital sellers, visit the Dynamics 365 Sales webpage and sign up for a free trial.

The post Revolutionizing the future for sellers in Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.