With a growing labor shortage and access to new technologies and processes, businesses are adopting mixed reality to improve how employees learn, work, and understand the world around them. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is driving workforce transformation with hands-on training and step-by-step holographic instructions that are seamless, intuitive, and embedded into everyday workflows, equipping employees with the tools they need to access critical information and receive on-the-job guidance.

Today marks the release of two new features in Dynamics 365 Guides:

• Touch activity menuprovides users with an updated UI experience that introduces a touch-enabled main menu, while maintaining hands-free gaze UX for navigation.
• 1:1 calling (in preview)gives users the ability to make an outgoing call to seamlessly collaborate, knowledge share, and problem solve with a remote expert through task, demo, or inspection scenarios.

With these new features, users can streamline tasks within one application, improve the flow of work, and adapt in real-time, making frontline jobs easier, safer, and more efficient.

Calling (in preview): Solve problems in real-time with expertise and ease

With the new 1:1 calling (in preview) feature, any operator can remotely connect with experts, managers, and colleagues to get real-time support. For customers who already use Microsoft Teams, you can call your favorite contacts and easily share your view with a single click to get the help you need while staying hands-free and in-context.

Here are some common ways you might use the new 1:1 calling feature:

• Support callsmake a 1:1 call to a remote author or expert for discussion and additional guidance.
• Dynamics 365Guides demonstrationmake a 1:1 call to demonstrate product experience or a procedure in a guide.
• Remote inspectionsmake a 1:1 call to get approval from a remote inspector.
• Collaborative authoringmake a 1:1 call to an expert to discuss creating or updating steps within a guide.

Additionally, minimizing exposure and increasing workplace safety for frontline workers has become increasingly important due to the ongoing effects of COVID-19. Remote calling will make it easier to avoid travel, minimize carbon footprint from unnecessary travel, and reduce the risk of possible delays with remote audits and inspections in real-time.

Quickly navigate and access information at your fingertips

There are many ways to move through workflows using Dynamics 365 Guides, whether it be automatically anchoring digital content with physical objects using Azure Object Anchors or advancing to the next step in your guide using spatial triggers. We’re excited to introduce the latest feature to enhance navigation capabilities: a central menu with advanced touch and gaze functionality.

Using the new touch activity menu, you can efficiently switch between work activities, find the content and contacts you need to get your work done, and quickly launch and complete guides, making it faster, more reliable, and easier than ever. Summon and minimize the call window from anywhere at any time, ensuring your worldview remains focused with only the most important information displayed. While the new main menu is always at your fingertips, the work instruction can still be operated completely hands-free using gaze functionality, true to the original value of HoloLens and Dynamics 365 Guides.

New features spotlight: Toyota Motors North America uses 1:1 calling to author and adapt in real-time

Watch the video below to learn how operators at Toyota Motors North America collaborate with experts and make improvements to step-by-step instructions in real-time using the new calling feature in Dynamics 365 Guides.

Get started today

Transform your workforce, build a more agile factory, unlock innovation, and deliver new services using HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Guides. Ready to empower your frontline employees?

• Try the 30-day free trial of Dynamics 365 Guides.
• Read more about Dynamics 365 Guides capabilities and get your questions answered using our Dynamics 365 Guides documentation.
• Take the Dynamics 365 Guides learning path.
• Learn more about current offers on HoloLens 2.
• Learn how operators at Eaton connect with colleagues around the world to improve operations and optimize learning experiences.

The post Announcing new activity menu and 1:1 calling for Dynamics 365 Guides appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

It is imperative for organizations to create agile, connected, and sustainable manufacturing processes to customize products and services for their customers, accelerate innovation, and adopt to new business models like offering products-as-a-service. This requires hyper-automated processes and enhanced visibility across production floor and supply chains. In addition, more standardization and interoperability of software across plants is a critical capability to support more remote management and control.

Our latest investments in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management are enabling organizations to innovate with intelligent manufacturing operations by easily adapting to new business models, improving planning agility, enhancing visibility of your shop floor, and ensuring round-the-clock uptime and business continuity.

Manufacturers can now seamlessly work with any manufacturing execution system (MES) and eliminate data siloes. They can optimize production processes with enhanced visibility of the shop floor and improve throughput and quality.

Priority-based planning

One of the challenges that manufacturers face when it comes to supply planning occurs when multiple orders for the same items land simultaneously, and there is not enough stock on hand to fulfill all demand. Which distribution center or store orders should be filled and in what order? Which is most important, and how should manufacturers set priority? While it is relatively easy for someone to manually review and determine planning priorities in these situations, manufactures have lacked a systematic process to automate these decisions at scale.

Master planning with Planning Optimization is changing the situation for manufactures. The Priority-based planning feature can be utilized to configure optimal replenishment based on priority, instead of by date only. This enables businesses to increase service levels, reduce on-hand inventory, and optimize their supply chains by prioritizing replenishment orders to ensure that urgent demand is fulfilled before less important demand.

The planning priority is automatically calculated based on a flexible setup that considers inventory levels for minimum, reorder point, maximum, and projected on-hand that includes planned receipts and distributions. This data can be used to compare the importance of any orders across products and locations.

With priority-based planning, organizations gain the capability to:

• Calculate, manually edit, or default on planning priorities.
• Control replenishment by setting reorder point parameters.
• Split and optimize distribution orders using planning ranges.
• Group planned orders at firming.
• Utilize customizable planning priority ranges.
• Apply planning priority capabilities to intercompany orders.

With the introduction of Priority-based planning, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping organizations to eliminate stockouts by automatically prioritizing replenishment of high-demand items in near-real-time based on order priorities, current stock levels, and projected inventory. Watch the on-demand session on Innovate with Intelligent Manufacturing Operations to learn more.

MES integration

Recent decades have seen manufacturers invest heavily in two automation layers: production lines and equipment and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. MES resides between these two layers and manages manufacturing’s unique operational requirements. One challenge that manufacturers have faced when it comes to these two separate automation layers is how to keep data synchronized as transactions occur across both.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management’s MES integration solves this problem by providing the means to keep data and transactions synchronized between both systems. Plus, it offers manufacturers a path to realizing their Industry 4.0 ambitions by making it faster and easier to integrate Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with common manufacturing execution systems.

By integrating a third-party MES solution with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, data exchange is fully automated in near real-time. This is important for manufactures not only because it keeps data current in both systems but also because it eliminates the need for error-prone, manual data entry. For example, when material consumption is registered in the MES system, the integration ensures that the same consumption is also registered in Dynamics 365. This keeps inventory records up-to-date in support of other essential processes such as planning, sales, and so on. This is one reason that manufacturers, particularly those with advanced manufacturing requirements, can benefit from MES integration.

For instance, here is the benefit of integrating Dynamics 365 with Aegis Factorylogixone of the MES software that it integrates with:

“Aegis’ IoT-based MES platform orchestrates execution of ERP work-orders in real-time, across highly complex and technical assembly, test and inspection stations, with exact material, product and process traceability that satisfies the most stringent quality assurance requirements. The feedback of live operational data enhances ERP by providing detailed, accurate and timely information related to completions, material consumption and much more.”Jason Spera, CEO and co-founder, Aegis Software

Other benefits of MES integration include enhanced visibility of the production floor, improved throughput and quality by unifying data across ERP and MES, and the ability to track, trace, troubleshoot, and resolve issues by contextualizing MES data. Also, the MES integration solution offers business event interfaces to support key manufacturing execution processes and a centralized dashboard where the event processing history can be monitored.

With the introduction of MES integration, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is reducing overall implementation and operating costs and helping manufacturers to establish end-to-end visibility and control over the production floor. At the same time, we are providing a faster, easier, and cheaper means of integrating Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with third-party MES systems. Watch the on-demand session on Innovate with Intelligent Manufacturing Operations to learn more.

Total economic impact

Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the business impact of deploying Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. To understand and quantify the economics of implementing the solution, Forrester interviewed six senior decision-makers from five companies ranging in size from $100 million to $1 billion in revenue that had experience using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.¹ The purpose of the study was to discover the decision drivers and financial benefits and compare the cost of implementation to the realized value.

Value drivers

Users reported increased production volume of $24.3 million, reductions in equipment downtime worth $1.5 million, improvements to production quality that reduced costs by $6.8 million, infrastructure cost reductions valued at $11 million, and increased developer productivity of $0.7 million, for a total of $44.33 million in financial savings over a three-year period.

Customers also experienced numerous other unquantified benefits to their organizations. These included increased flexibility to adapt, improved ability to deliver on time, improved customer satisfaction, better forecasting capabilities that improved supplier collaboration and planning, and improvements to team members’ day-to-day work realized by breaking down siloes between teams and functions.

Average payback in under two years

The Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management investment cost an average of $23.27 million, took 22 months to pay back, and produced a return on investment (ROI) of 90 percent and net present value (NPV) of $21.06 million across the three-year benefit study.

Customers also noted an overall streamlining of their supply chain due to the unification of systems, processes, and data. Plus, they were able to scale much faster and far cheaper than their previous environment would allow.

See the full details in the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to understand how your organization might benefit from a move to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Read the full report: A Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

What’s next?

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is an agile and composable ERP solution. It enables manufacturers, retailers, and distributors to create a connected, resilient, and digital supply chain by enhancing operational visibility, improving planning agility, and maximizing asset uptime. In addition, it unifies data from almost any source in real-time and generates intelligence by leveraging AI and machine learning to proactively detect opportunities and develop a long-term competitive advantage.

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. Or you can learn more about the benefits of a digital supply chain in our recent e-book: Four Pillars of the Digital Supply Chain.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sources

¹Forrester, The Total Economic Impact^TM of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, August 2021

The post Optimize production processes with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In supply chain management, when you have an urgent demand, you want it to be prioritized across your planning system. The ability to enable such a broad, yet flexible factor as prioritization, is now available in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Priority-based planning can help businesses optimize their supply chain while increasing service levels and reducing inventory levels. The 2021 release wave 2 includes a public preview of this feature for the Planning Optimization Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Benefits of priority-based planning

This feature adds support for demand-driven planning, which is one of the five steps related to demand driven material requirements planning (DDMRP). With priority-based planning, the optimization of supply to cover demand is based on priorities, not requirement dates, which are used in classic material requirements planning (MRP).

Priority-based planning lets you prioritize replenishment orders to ensure that urgent demand is prioritized over less important demand. For example, a stockout replenishment order will be prioritized over a standard refill replenishment order.

On top of this, the system can automatically split large refill orders into separate, smaller orders, with different priorities assigned to each order. This approach provides coverage of the critical portion of an inventory refill, instead of simply refilling warehouses to maximum with a single supply. This minimizes the risk of stockout by optimizing the use of available supply.

Another benefit of priority-based planning is that priority can be used to compare the importance of relevant orders across products and locations during execution planning.

Broad impact of the planning priority value

The new field, Planning priority, is now available for purchase orders, sales orders, transfer orders, planned orders, and forecast lines. This value is the backbone of priority-based planning; it is used to define the importance of demand and supply.

Planning priority is typically defined by the master planning calculation related to a planned order, or by a default value when manually created. Users can modify the planning priority value when needed. For example, it might be important to adjust the value to honor the importance of a critical sales order. For intercompany orders, the planning priority value is kept in sync between linked purchase and sales orders to ensure transparency of cross-legal entities.

Flexibility with the Priority coverage code

By using the new coverage code of Priority, you can control when Planning Optimization uses planning priority during pegging. This will calculate the derived planning priority on planned orders based on inventory levels and demand priority constraints.

This addition makes possible a flexible approach with a mix of 1) classic date-driven MRP using coverage codes of Min/max, Period, or Requirement, together with 2) item coverage using the new priority-driven approach defined by use of the Priority coverage code.

Planning priority models

The user-defined planning priority models enable a variety of options. One option is to do a standard DDMRP priority calculation, based on projected on-hand supplies as a percent of maximum (see “% of maximum” in the following graphic). However, another option is to use specific planning priority values, based on priority ranges (see “Zone grouping” below).

With priority ranges, you can also choose to split planned orders according to the priority ranges. This ensures that available supply is distributed based on the risk of stockout. With this approach, you seek to fulfill the demand quantity to reach maximum inventory level by creating multiple planned orders, each with individual planning priorities. During firming, it is possible to group planned orders based on priority to limit the number of actual orders to process.

In supply management, sometimes your projected on-hand inventory will reach a critically low level because less important demand orders are repeatedly delayed. Eventually, this triggers a high-importance supply request. When you enable the Consider demand priority setting, a new planned order supply will never be assigned a planning priority that is more important than the demand that triggered the supply. This lets you balance the importance of supply when refilling stock levels in a supply chain with inventory buffers.

How to get started with priority-based planning

• Enable the Planning Optimization functionality. For more information, see Get started with Planning Optimization.
• In Feature management, turn on “(Preview) Priority driven MRP support for Planning Optimization”. For more information, see the priority-based planning documentation.
• Set up your first planning priority model to control the planning priority calculation and the default value of planning priority on new orders and forecast lines.
• Set up a coverage group that includes your planning priority model.
• Ensure that at least one product includes item coverage with coverage code Priority.
• Add the planning priority fields prominently to relevant forms like planned orders.
• Run master planning and try out the planning priority model setup to see the impact on the calculated planning priority on planned orders.

Next steps

Watch this video about the highlights of priority-based planning: Planning optimization support for priority-based planning in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The post Optimize your supply chain with priority-based planning appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Manufacturers often have manufacturing execution systems (MES) to control their manufacturing, machine equipment, and personnel, however it can be a challenge to reconcile such systems with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

There can be a number of reasons for setting up a custom MES tailored to the specific requirements of a manufacturer, or to the vertical industry that they are a part of. Conversely, many manufacturers have found it difficult to merge such systems with their ERP systems.

In this post, we’re going to look at the most common challenges of integrating the two systems and learn how integrating them can give you visibility into the production floor.

Common integration challenges

Integrating an MES with an ERP system, such as Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, can present a number of challenges.

• Cost: The integration effort usually takes a long time, meaning a lot of development expense. This cost might be more than the client was expecting.
• Debugging and traceability: When two different systems are connected, it is usually cumbersome to debug and troubleshoot any issues. There might be unclear error messages when specific data is not synced or if any validation fails.
• Persona-targeted notifications: In case of any integration issues, it can be difficult to notify the appropriate person or team. Even though a single person might have overall responsibility for the integration, there could be a delay before the correct party is identified for a specific issue.
• Archive and replay signals: When there is a failure in incoming or outgoing data, you usually need to replay a signal. This can be difficult to do if it is not implemented in the integration.
• Out-of-order deliveries or multiple deliveries: Each system has its own set of deliveries and releases. Delivery updates can come at different times, and updates in one system should not affect the other. Such synchronization can be a challenge for an integration.
• Spikes: It is the nature of work on the production floor for there to be spikes in signals, such as many reports being finished within a short time frame. It is essential for the integration to be able to handle such spikes.
• Limited reusability: Once the integration is completed, it is usually specific to the two systems. When another production site is involved, a whole new integration implementation might be needed.
• Data silos: Data is likely to exist in both systems, but the data might not be in sync. This consistency is needed to give an accurate view of production orders and their state on the shop floor.

Keep data current in an integrated solution

In an integrated solution, data exchange is fully automated and near real time, which keeps data current in both systems and eliminates the need for manual data entry.

For example, when material consumption is registered in the MES, the integration ensures that the same consumption is also registered in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. This means up-to-date inventory records are available to other processes, such as planning and sales.

To help customers with these integration challenges by building a true connection, we’re releasing a fundamental tool for building this integration. To learn more, see the Supply Chain Management documentation, Integrate with third-party manufacturing execution systems. The following screenshot shows a monitoring dashboard for messages in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

These integration components are generic and can be used with any MES provider. Currently, both Aegis Factorylogix and Oqton provide integrations to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Let’s hear from them on the advantage for manufacturers to having both systems integrated.

Jason Spera, CEO and co-founder of Aegis Software states:

With Dynamics 365 supporting modern Smart manufacturing from the ERP perspective, Aegis’ FactoryLogix, as a fully complementary MES solution, provides the real-time, surgical precision required for visibility and execution of manufacturing, synchronized through Microsoft’s API-based Smart supply-chain interface.

Aegis’ IIoT-based MES platform orchestrates execution of ERP work-orders in real-time, across highly complex and technical assembly, test and inspection stations, with exact material, product and process traceability that satisfies the most stringent quality assurance requirements. The feedback of live operational data enhances ERP by providing detailed, accurate and timely information related to completions, material consumption and much more.

Oqton supports manufacturers with the optimization of their end-to-end workflows and continues to demonstrate that it can meet the challenges of any production processes, including additive manufacturing and post processing. The Oqton platform has been successfully deployed in demanding vertical sectors such as dentistry, healthcare, biotech, aerospace, and automotive. Agnostic in terms of hardware and software, the Oqton platform works across the entire ecosystem, while being modular in nature and interoperable with other systems. This is why it integrates so well with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to offer a comprehensive solution for users.

According to Oqton CEO, Ben Schrauwen:

The integration of Oqton and Dynamics 365 offers a high level of production management, efficiency and productivity for manufacturers. The automation capabilities enabled and optimized by Oqton for the production workflow complements Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to ensure manufacturers are in complete control, which is more important now than ever before.

Gain visibility into your manufacturing

When you are able to integrate your MES and ERP systems, you can enhance the visibility into your manufacturing floor The new manufacturing execution systems integration from Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps you to address the challenges of such an integration and break down your data silos.

Next steps

If you are planning on building an integration between Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and your MES, or you want to improve your existing one, learn more in the documentation.

The post Break down data silos with an integrated manufacturing solution appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Engaging with customers in today’s world is multifaceted, spanning everything from generating that initial spark of interest, to closing a sale and nurturing the relationship, to delivering exceptional ongoing service and support. Today, those experiences are often disconnected, and customer relationships are fragmented. On top of that, our expectations as customers have risen dramatically.

We expect that brands know enough about our preferences to provide high-quality interactions with us. We also prefer our experiences with a brand to be personalized and consistent across every touchpoint. However, this expectation is met with our own wariness about sharing personal information and fear that our data will be misused, or that we will be inundated with a barrage of advertisements, emails, and intrusive outreach. Yet, it is a balance, and most of us are receptive to content that is relevant to us at the right moment.

As we’ve worked with large enterprise customers around the world, their marketing leaders consistently stress that to meet today’s customer expectations and deliver privacy-aware, consent-enabled personalization, they need insights from multiple, diverse data sourcessomething they struggle with because data about their customers is often locked in silos.

This is why we are introducing the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, a customer engagement solution that gives you control of your customer data to deliver connected experiences. With full ownership of your data, you can connect directly to your customerson your own terms. Rich out-of-the-box AI and insights enable you to better predict customer intent, accelerate your time to market, and deliver the right content on the right channel at the right moment. And, with AI-orchestrated journeys, you can engage your customers in powerful new ways, delivering connected experiences across every customer touchpoint.

Own your customer relationships

As the industry faces the imminent deprecation of third-party cookies and the continued fragmentation of digital identities, having a strong customer data platform is essential. Marketers need to build holistic customer profiles and protect them with robust privacy and security controlsall in real time. With Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, you can power customer data unification and understanding, enrich customer data with privacy-friendly insights from multiple sources, and ensure compliance, all while honoring your customer’s consent.

Data privacy and security, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, is top of mind for companies and customers alike. This is the reason Walgreens and Boots Alliance, Inc. chose Microsoft to gain a unified, 360-degree view of their customers and deliver a world-class digital experience. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Walgreens and Boots Alliance, Inc. is now able to deliver more engaging and tailored healthcare and shopping experiences, while protecting the privacy choices of patients and customers.

Create raving fans

Driving down customer acquisition costs and increasing lifetime value is a top priority for every business. And today’s marketers need granular data, scalable technology, and sophisticated analytics to achieve these goals. AI makes it easier to identify trends and insights to reveal new opportunities, but the average campaign led by data sciences can take months to execute, with a large portion of this time spent collecting data, cleaning it up, and running predictive models.

The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform helps you understand the intent, journeys, and behavior of customers on your web and mobile properties to optimize funnels and trigger personal experiences. With Microsoft, marketers have access to powerful out-of-the-box AI and pre-built models to predict key customer attributes like lifetime value, churn, lookalike, and interests, all designed to accelerate your time to market and deliver results.

Chipotle serves millions of customers a year and wanted to gain a deeper understanding of individual customer preferences and how they change over time. They needed to put multiple sources of customer data to work for them, including a loyalty program with more than 17 million members, point-of-sale data, a customer care center, and digital platforms. To accomplish this, Chipotle needed a comprehensive customer data platform to drive business insights and improve their return on marketing efforts. Today, Chipotle can gather and analyze longitudinal data in a more effective way to track key performance indicators such as repeat visitors, customer lifetime value, and customer sentiment. With greater insight into customer behaviors and marketing analytics, Chipotle can now directly target customers with messages that appeal to themat times when they’ll be most receptive.

Engage in new ways

Customers today want real connections with brands that go beyond simple personalization. They want high-quality experiences that improve the way they live and work. To maximize reach and ROI, marketers must think beyond a linear customer journey and connect experiences across marketing, commerce, sales, and service. This requires precise use of customer data, integration into line-of-business applications, and seamless activation across a growing number of customer touchpoints.

The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform provides AI-orchestrated journeys so you can acquire and retain high-value prospects based on their interactions across advertising, email, mobile, social media, custom channels, and in-person touchpoints. With the integration between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Advertising, you can easily activate your audience segments, expand your target lists with lookalike audiences and auto-generated remarketing. You can distribute these segments into Microsoft Advertising and other ad platforms without barriers, further extending your reach by meeting customers where they are.

Leatherman, the originator and category leader in high-quality multi-tools, pocket tools, and knives, sought a solution to meet their growing D2C (Direct to Consumer) communication needs. Leatherman leveraged customer journey orchestration to curate a more personalized customer journey and to create user experience continuity with their online store. The team was able to create a multi-touchpoint journey which allowed them to engage their customers across their commerce and marketing solutions using real-time custom events. This journey was executed every time a customer signed up or started to check out on their website. This allowed Leatherman to seamlessly activate new customers and to create opportunities for continued engagement along the way.

When decision journeys bring customers to your retail website, Microsoft PromoteIQ helps you monetize that interest. This was the goal when the world’s largest home improvement retailer, Home Depot, partnered with PromoteIQ to enrich customer engagement on its e-commerce site in the U.S. Managing and scaling these vendor-funded digital marketing efforts generated incremental revenue for Home Depot while also giving Home Depot’s vendor partners enhanced marketing controls to drive better conversion, increase visibility and learn from real-time performance insights.

Tap into a rich ecosystem of partners and digital agencies

Microsoft is excited to be working with a growing list of digital agencies to help organizations more efficiently unlock their data, predict customer intent, and deliver impactful end-to-end journeys.

“We are excited about the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform and how Microsoft continues to invest in this space. It has never been more important to have the right capabilities to unlock data to more effectively engage customers, to predict customer intent in the moment, and to deliver connected end-to-end experiences across the entire customer lifecycle.”David Mitchell, CTO, VMLY&R.

“The advantages of digital transformation go well beyond a simple cost-benefit analysis. The announcement today of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform gives businesses an end-to-end platform that encompasses transformation across infrastructure, data, and artificial intelligence to create real-time predictive customer experiences that create deeper understanding to deliver the right experience and brand behaviors and preferences clients want.”Adam Good, Executive Director, Marketing Technology WPP Australia and New Zealand.

“Over the next few years, we’ll see the impact of the changes we’ve been through. We’re invested in experience because as we move to cloud, we’ll have data to make those experiences equitable, personalized, sustainable, & simple. Microsoft’s CX Platform helps pull it all together to make what’s next.”Jos Reyes, PwC Partner, Chief Creative Officer and Experience Center Leader.

Learn more

Learn how to create tailored, delightful customer journeys with Microsoft Customer Experience Platform that safely leverage and protect your customer data while inspiring trust and loyalty. We help you get the most out of your data by connecting with customers on your own terms, applying rich AI capabilities to glean the best insights, and engaging in powerful ways across the customer journey.

All of this is made possible with the combined power of products like Microsoft Advertising, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Promote IQ, Microsoft Clarity, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, and Microsoft Azure Purview. Find out more at Microsoft Customer Experience Platform and Microsoft Ignite breakout webinar.

1- PWC, Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right

The post Introducing Microsoft Customer Experience Platform: A solution for connected customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are excited to announce the preview launch of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insightsto help organizations achieve a supply chain of the futureone that is resilient, sustainable, and capable of sensing, predicting, and mitigating disruptions before they occur.

Recent worldwide supply chain disruptions have resulted in economic losses and missed opportunities that stretch into the billions of dollars. Since the beginning of 2019, nearly 70 percent of supply chain leaders have been constantly responding to disruptions.¹If there’s anything the recent supply chain disruptions have taught business leaders in supply chain management, it’s the importance of having a robust, nimble and transparent system that can withstand radical changes in supply and demand, and that can anticipate and flexibly work around such changes before they play out their widescale domino effects. That’s where Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights (preview) comes in.

At Microsoft, the future of global supply chains is being reimagined. Slow digitization of the supply chain is significantly inhibiting organizations from quickly responding to changing customer demand and supply challenges. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights enables organizations to create a digital representation of their physical supply chain and enhance the end-to-end visibility of their entire value chain.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights breaks down data siloes by connecting and taking inputs from existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain systems across the organization. Businesses can further invite suppliers to securely share data and gain visibility into their first, second, or third-tier suppliers.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights will also be available through Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, which is also announced in preview today.

Predict risks

This data is brought into Dataverse and then harmonized using industry data models and enriched with AI-powered news curation, weather, and environmental risk signals from Bing and other third-party sources, such as reinsurers like Swiss Re. The external risk signals are available out of the box without needing to set up any connections.

Generate insights powered by AI

Built on Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights uses these inputs and creates a digital twin of the supply chain. Using advanced analytics powered by Azure’s AI and Machine Learning, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights performs predictions and What-if analyses to simulate the impact of potential disruptions and gauge the impact of decisions made to mitigate them at any point along the supply chain.

Get operational fast

Using these insights, companies can seamlessly collaborate with their suppliers, logistic partners, and internal stakeholders using Microsoft Teams and take optimal action. With out-of-the-box connectors from Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights can connect to other ERP and supply chain execution systems, enabling businesses to truly get operational fastwithin weeks. These insights can then be seamlessly implemented through your existing supply chain execution systems, thus initiating a powerful digital feedback loop.

Recent shocks to supply and demand have impacted just about every industry and every economy around the world, with everyday products like coffee and paper, and more technical products like semiconductor chips equally affected by an increasingly taxed supply chain. At Microsoft, we believe in empowering you with the solutions you need to mitigate supply chain risk and deliver a customer-first approach across your business.

A customer like Daimler Trucks North America can use Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights to predict supply chain issues before they happen so that they can proactively mitigate them to meet their commitments to the Dealerships and Customers. They can improve their end-to-end supply chain process to reduce downtime and part shortages.

Learn more

To experience the impact of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, sign up for the preview. To learn more about creating a resilient supply chain, watch “Enhance supply chain visibility, predict risks and improve decision making with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights” and “Make better decisions with proactive risk mitigation to create a resilient supply chain“. You can further learn about other Microsoft innovations that were launched today at Microsoft Ignite.

¹-Gartner Supply Chain Executive Report: Shaping Supply Chain Disruption in a Volatile Risk Environment, May 2021

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.

The post Mitigate disruptions with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights—now in preview appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.