Unified Service Desk for model-driven apps provides a configurable framework that allows you to build applications that give call center agents a unified view of customer data. Unified Service Desk version 4.2, available for public preview in April, enables you to host web applications using Microsoft Edge WebView2 Process based on the Chromium open-source framework, as well as delivering improved performance and other enhancements. The Microsoft Edge WebView2 control enables you to embed web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) in your native apps. Microsoft Edge WebView2 Process is based on CefSharp, which is an open-source framework in the Chromium core that powers many modern browsers. With support for Microsoft Edge WebView2, Unified Service Desk admins have these capabilities: Ability to select WebView2 Process as the hosting type for their organization. Ability to select WebView2 Process as the hosting type for web applications, along with Chrome Process. In addition, Microsoft Edge WebView2 Process delivers: Availability on supported versions of the Windows operating system. Easy configuration of host applications in Unified Service Desk. Ability to switch seamlessly from one browser to another for your entire organization. Enhanced performance and memory optimization. Next steps To learn more, check out the Unified Service Desk documentation or the Microsoft Edge WebView2 documentation. To test and validate the capabilities, download and install or update Unified Service Desk

The post Host web apps using Microsoft Edge WebView2 Process in Unified Service Desk (Preview) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we’re announcing new capabilities to help customer and field service teams deliver more consistent and engaging experiences, from the call center to on-site visits. The new features for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service provide the agility to adapt to changing customer needs, as well as streamline agent and technician workspaces, so they can resolve issues faster. Let’s look at what’s new in this release. Be sure to review the full release notes for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Field Service. Dynamics 365 Customer Service In our journey to help optimize support delivery and increase agent productivity, the following features are now generally available: Unified routing with modernized assignment capabilities leveraging custom rules and machine learning models to automate and scale work classification and assignment for large support organizations. Federated knowledge search to enable organizations to streamline and centralize the growth of their support knowledge base through other Dynamics 365 organizations, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Graph connectors. Embedded insights dashboards, which highlight important KPI insights for support summary KPIs, agent performance, support topic activity, and knowledge to alert supervisors to direct actions they can take to optimize support delivery every day. AI-powered suggestions to help agents resolve customer issues faster, and we’ve expanded these capabilities to support non-English languages. Streamlined, simplified set up for omnichannel through a new administrative experience. Intelligent work classification and assignment with unified routing Many people are involved in monitoring support queues to ensure incoming customer requests are properly classified in the right queues and assigned to available agents. This time-consuming activity can slow customer issue resolution and impact customer satisfaction. With unified routing, organizations can author custom rules, create and apply machine learning models to analyze incoming customer requests, and automatically classify the issue to better match the best available agent. Corresponding assignment rules can also be created with custom rules to analyze the classified issues and choose the best available agent to handle the issue based on the agent’s skills, spoken language, product expertise, or other attributes. Unified routing eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution. Agents can resolve issues faster when their strongest skills are being leveraged. This ensures customer issues are handled as quickly as possible by the best available agent resulting in increased customer satisfaction and customer retention. Expanding your knowledge base with federated knowledge search and knowledge insights Knowledge is something that most organizations have developed over time and it often resides in many different tools. This can make centralizing knowledge and making it easily accessible through a single interface costly and challenging. With federated knowledge search, organizations using Dynamics 365 Customer Service can enable agents to retrieve search results within multiple Microsoft Dataverse environments, SharePoint sites, and Microsoft Graph connectors through a single search interface in the agent productivity pane. Agents can deliver faster, more comprehensive service, knowing they have all the knowledge at their fingertips without having to browse disparate sets of information. Knowledge insights dashboards also help supervisors discover the topics agents are searching for most that lack sufficient knowledge article support. Supervisors can then take action to increase and improve the knowledge base for those topics. Optimizing service delivery with insights Analyzing support reports and deriving actionable insights can consume much of the supervisor’s time, reducing the amount of time to coach agents to support customers. With the latest insights dashboards, supervisors can quickly see what insights require action to drive improvement in customer sentiment, satisfaction, and speed of support delivery. The embedded summary dashboard surfaces key insights, showing supervisors what’s driving the trend in customer satisfaction, channel volumes, queue volumes, handle time, and other KPIs. Also surfaced are support topics to watch based on key KPIs that may require automation through virtual agents or additional knowledge articles to help agents indicate product-related issues. Agent dashboards provide deep agent analytics and important KPIs like active cases, resolved cases, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and customer sentiment. Supervisors can drill down to specific agents to determine what action is needed, such as reducing or increasing their capacity, adjusting their skills and queue assignments, providing additional training, or coaching them on soft skills to improve customer sentiment. Topic dashboards show how AI-generated support topics are impacting KPIs and provide the ability to drill into individual topics and acts, such as adding knowledge articles or automating the topic to a Microsoft Power Virtual Agents bot through a seamless authoring flow. And finally, conversation insights help supervisors monitor customer issues across channels in a single dashboard where they can optimize support delivery by tracking metrics, such as wait time, abandoned conversations, and time to resolution, either at the ecosystem view or by channel. Increasing agent productivity with improvements to smart assistance In traditional contact centers, agents spend time searching for similar cases and knowledge articles that are relevant to the current issue they are working on. This delays resolution time and can cause decreased customer satisfaction. AI-driven suggestions help agents share the best-suited information by using the current case or conversation context and scanning thousands of cases and articles to suggest those that are the most relevant. We’re expanding AI-powered suggestions to now support non-English languages such as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. Streamlining setup and configuration in omnichannel Our new administrator experience for omnichannel makes configuring channels, such as adding Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice surveys, and configuring unified routing streamlined and easy. You can also experiment with live chat through a demo and test out your own configuration changes without having to implement them in an environment. Check out what’s coming up Microsoft Teams continues to provide powerful collaboration capabilities for businesses across organizational boundaries. In June, we will be releasing Teams integrated into Customer Service Hub for agents to be able to seamlessly reach out to other colleagues and subject matter experts for advice and assistance while helping customers from the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Hub agent experience. Agents can easily associate chats to records and visually differentiate Teams chats for faster discoverability. In August, our first-party voice solution built on Azure Communication Services will be generally available. We are excited to offer a truly all-in-one experience with our first-party voice channel. Learn more about how the new voice channel streamlines omnichannel customer experiences. Dynamics 365 Field Service As we continue to enable customers to transform their service experience, the following features are now generally available: Technician tracking enables customers to more effectively plan around their service visits. Streamlined onboarding experience for faster time-to-value and ability to use Dynamics 365 Field Service in productive environments. Empowering technicians with knowledge management in Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile, capturing ad-hoc inspections, and inspections in multiple languages. Enabling dispatchers with enhanced scheduling experience, including a map, and weekly and monthly views. Plus, view appointments from other sources included in the scheduling experience. Technician tracking for greater appointment accuracy With the ability to view the technician’s location on a map, customers can plan around the visit and be ready when the technician arrives. This can decrease overall service delivery time and eliminate trips that might otherwise be canceled, and increase customer satisfaction with the efficient use of their time. Streamlining setup for Dynamics 365 Field Service administrators To ensure field service app administrators can quickly get started with Dynamics 365 Field Service, we’re introducing a simplified experience. From this improved getting started experience, you can provision your frontline workers, service accounts, and create and schedule work orders. Additionally, we provide inline access to our Dynamics 365 Field Service documentation, release plans, community, and ideas forum in the event you want to learn more, view upcoming feature work, or submit product ideas. Empowering technicians with enhanced knowledge and inspections Knowledge management is now embedded in the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app to better service assets and resolve issues even without the internet. By embedding knowledge management into field service processes in the mobile app, technicians can more reliably resolve work orders and install assets the first time, reducing costs by avoiding follow-up visits. Technicians can also author and link knowledge articles to work orders, enabling knowledge sharing to help other technicians with the same issue on future visits. Capturing inspections while on the job is essential for many field service technician scenarios. In some situations, the inspection is required when the work order is created. However, in other situations, technicians need the option to do an “ad-hoc” inspection for a customer which was not specified in the work order. Technicians can now select and complete an inspection from the list of inspections relating to a customer asset, regardless of whether it is specified on a work order. In addition, inspections are now available to be viewed and completed based on the preferred language of the technician. Enabling dispatchers with a rich scheduling experience Having a single view with all relevant information is key for dispatchers to safeguard that customer commitments are being met while ensuring technicians are scheduled effectively. The new scheduling experience (introduced during last year’s release wave 2) has been enhanced to now include a map view that shows work and technicians by location. The experience now also includes multi-day scheduling for work which spans across multiple days. Another challenge for dispatchers is having visibility into other appointments, such as those on a technician’s Microsoft Outlook calendar, which needs to be considered when determining availability. In addition to typical bookings, the scheduling experience now provides visibility into appointments from other calendars. These enhancements enable the dispatcher to have a comprehensive scheduling view and ensure optimal scheduling in a single experience. Check out what’s in preview and what’s coming up Be sure to enable “preview” on your organization and check out the portal for customers to manage appointment scheduling. When organizations are solely responsible for scheduling field service visits, customers often must wait for contact centers to reach out to schedule and update them on their field service appointments. This process can cause frustration, decrease customer satisfaction, and increase back-office overhead. To empower customers with flexibility and transparency to schedule, adjust, and monitor their field service visits, we’re introducing a self-service portal. Through the portal, customers can schedule their service appointments, view upcoming appointments, receive reminders, and track their technician’s location while en route to the visit. Giving customers the ability to manage their service appointments can help reduce scheduling errors and rescheduling of appointments. This has the added benefit of reducing your organization’s back-office costs by decreasing scheduling call volume and freeing up team members to focus on delivering quality service. In June, we’ll launch the preview of embedded Teams collaboration, which allows users to collaborate within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 workspace and link conversations to work orders. With this embedded functionality, all stakeholders involved in the service process can collaborate through Teams with full context. Dispatchers, asset managers, and other field service stakeholders can link existing Teams conversations or initiate new conversations, such as informing the scheduled technician of added information about the service. If your organization allows for Teams collaboration with customers, they can collaborate on work orders, too. We are honored to continue supporting you on your journey to deliver amazing service and earn customers for life. We look forward to continued engagement and your feedback on these new features and continuing to deliver the capabilities you need to enable great service delivery in your organization. Learn more Read more about the April 2021 release wave 1, and how Dynamics 365 Customer Service transforms the contact center and the new Dynamics 365 Field Service customer empowering features. Review the October 2020 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Field Service

The post Introducing new capabilities to transform customer service and field service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Businesses need to deliver exceptional Customer Experiences (CX) to be successful. Customer experiences are critical whether your customers are individuals involving business-to-consumer marketing (B2C) or other businesses in the form of business-to-business marketing (B2B)happy customers are loyal customers, and they impact your bottom line. Since last year’s release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, we’ve been hard at work refining and enhancing product features across the board that can help you up your CX game. Here are highlights from three capabilities that will launch with Dynamics 365 Marketing 2021 release wave 1 that I think you’ll be excited about, I know I am. Real-time customer journey orchestration. Get ready for a more intuitive journey designer with a huge, game-changing element: the ability to trigger customer journeys in real-time, pick the right channel for each individual, and react to customer-led actions in the moments that matter. A completely redesigned email editor. Take advantage of AI to help you quickly create impactful, professional, and personalized content and deliver it at the right time. Enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams. This integration is more powerful than ever thanks to the new webinar capabilities within Teams and the improved event participant engagement functionalities within Dynamics 365 Marketing. Read on for more details on how each one of these capabilities can help you transform how you engage with your customers. Real-time, event-based customer journey orchestration in preview Move up from the segment-based marketing campaigns to moments-based interactions to deliver a highly personalized experience for each individual. Journeys can be triggered based on real-world interactions, like walking into a store and connecting to Wi-Fi, or be triggered by virtual interactions such as visiting a shopping site. The real-time nature of the journey ensures that you can respond to customers immediately and convert their expression of interest into a sale. An easy-to-use and delightful journey designer The new journey designer is intuitive, flexible, and infused with AI-powered capabilities throughout. To create the steps along your journeys, use the built-in events catalog, create your own, or use natural language to specify conditions and branches. Use AI-guided channel optimization to ensure your message is delivered in the right communication channel for your individual customer for even more personalization. The beauty of using AI optimization is that it analyzes behavior data, learns from it, then picks what is right for each individual, automatically. Deliver just-in-time experiences with event-triggers The power of event-triggers is hard to overstate. Journeys created with Dynamics 365 Marketing are customer-led, they can start (or stop) when an event is (or is not) triggered. You can orchestrate journeys quickly and easilywith no coding requiredwhen you use the intuitive event trigger catalog with both built-in and custom events, such as “new opportunity created” or “incident resolved.” Or, for unlimited flexibility and integration, connect to external systems, such as a web page or payment application, to raise events to respond to unique customer interactions. With the right event triggers in place, you can break silos between your business functions and applications and remove clutter and potential errors from the journey so you can focus on the actual customer experience rather than exception paths. Analytics and insights right where you want Once the journey is running, you can monitor how many customers are flowing through various paths, plus see relevant analytics for the business and user goals you set, all on the same canvas you used to design the journey. In today’s always-connected online world, customer experiences transcend the physical and digital divide. Real-time, event-based customer journey orchestration lets you deliver customer experiences at the right moment and at the right touchpoint. These features will be available in preview in North America the last week of April and in Europe in early May. Create emails quickly and personalize with ease, without compromises, using the new email editor Email continues to thrive as an essential channel for reaching people throughout the customer lifecycle, and marketers spend a big part of their work hours crafting emails. To address the top requests we heard from you, we built a completely new email editing experience to make email authoring much easier and more productive, and we went a step further and infused it with AI throughout to give you suggestions and aids to assist you in creating the most engaging content for your messages. New look, better productivity, easier personalization: better emails We have completely streamlined the creation process. The new layout has a modern look and feel with much more editing space, thanks to a slim header and significantly fewer tabs and menus. We have also redesigned the toolbox, all property panes, and given you an intuitive point-and-click interface that guides you through all your available data, so you can personalize your messages with speed and ease. In addition to spam score and auto-scheduler, take advantage of other new AI-powered capabilities that the new editor offers. Use the new centralized library which lets you upload files then AI automatically tags them for you. Use AI-driven recommendations for the best media to complement the content. Everything is simpler to find and use. Now, you can quickly create professional emails, personalized for each individual, leading to messages that better resonate with your customers. More editing capabilities You requested it, we made it happen: expanded editing capabilities including more flexible layouts, easier image resizing, and text line-height adjustmentsno HTML coding skills required. But, if you still want to use our HTML editor, no problemit’s still available, and with improvements. An improved email rendering and preview experience so you can trust that your target audience will receive the email you meant to send, regardless of the recipient’s device or email client. We look forward to hearing from you about our new email experience. This is just the beginning, and there will be a lot more comingstay tuned. These capabilities will be available to all regions by the last week of April. Teams webinars and Dynamics 365 Marketing integration, the new secret for online events The new Teams webinars capabilities are remarkable by themselves, but when you add the integration with Dynamics 365 Marketing into the mix, the capabilities are extraordinary. The power, flexibility, and unlimited possibilities that these two products working together can offer will change the way that you interact with your event attendees. Organizing your webinar your way The option is yourscreate a webinar from within Teams or from within Dynamics 365 Marketing; both ways are easy and intuitive and have improved functionality. If you already use Event Management from within Dynamics 365 Marketing, when you create your online event, you will now see a more robust set of event management options that allow you to have better control over your webinar. Let’s say that you’re a Dynamics 365 Marketing user but don’t already use Event Management, great, we have exciting news for you too. You can create your online event from within Teams and have the power of Dynamics 365 Marketing in your back pocketthat secret kicks in after the event. Whichever way you choose to create your event, you can send the automatically generated registration link to webinar invitees through the communication channel you prefer. Registration and attendance information is tracked using the event or session registration and check-in records within Dynamics 365 Marketing. Effortless post-event follow-up The new Teams webinars automatically track attendee engagement information. You now have insights into which registrants attended, canceled, or did not attend, plus the join and leave time for each attendee, as well as summary data for the event, like the total number of attendees. For Dynamics 365 Marketing customers who use Event Management, you can use this new data to fine-tune segments, create specific messaging for each of those segments, and launch each off on the journeys you create in the new journey designer. If you’ve organized your event from Teams, on the other hand, with a single mouse click, all that rich attendee engagement data is transferred seamlessly into Dynamics 365 Marketing and automatically populated into pre-built, commonly used segments, such as “attended,” “canceled,” and “did not attend.” Each of those segments corresponds to built-in, ready-to-send, editable email templates for your post-event communications. The powerful integration of Teams and Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to convert a single interaction into an ongoing relationship to win customers and earn their loyalty. These features will be available to all regions by the last week of May. We look forward to hearing from you about the release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 Marketing and what’s even more exciting is that we have a lot more coming, stay tuned

The post Highlights of the Dynamics 365 Marketing 2021 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Customers are looking for connected business applications to increase productivity and agility. With digital selling, it’s imperative to have a landscape of work tools that orchestrate seamlessly across a seller’s workflow. For the best outcome, solutions must offer automated and integrated workflows, enhanced with prescriptive, yet configurable intelligence. The combination of Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 generates insights directly into Dynamics 365 mobile and desktop workflows. And, our passion for intuitive user interfaces is showcased through a streamlined pipeline manager workspace with data visualizations that keep sellers on top of their key metrics. As part of release wave 1, updates for Dynamics 365 Sales showcase the best of Microsoft productivity, collaboration, and intelligence in one business appwith the sole purpose of guiding sellers to close deals faster. Keep sellers closing deals with an integrated workflow A complete digital selling solution with Microsoft Teams in Dynamics 365 Sales: In our 2021 release wave 1, an embedded Teams chat experience allows sellers to remain focused on sales motions while collaborating with stakeholders. While in Teams, a seller can search for Dynamics 365 information and share it with participants in Teams chats and channels. Also, a seller can log an activity, note, or other action in Dynamics 365 while having a Teams conversation. From Dynamics 365, sellers can access linked Teams chats and channels and view recent Teams chat lists. A seller can immediately act on important action items and information generated from deal-related Teams chats. Additionally, sellers can see a message preview, a collaborator’s Team avatar, and their meeting availability all from within Dynamics 365. LinkedIn Sales Insights in Dynamics 365: Sales teams will discover valuable account data in Dynamics 365 thanks to real-time market and company information powered by the LinkedIn network. Our solution brings up-to-date company profile data from LinkedIn to Dynamics 365 and associates it with every matched account. We remove the time-consuming and manual labor involved in reconciling out-of-date and irrelevant data. Now, it’s even easier to identify the fastest-growing target buyers and make key prioritization decisions when account planning. Optimized opportunity management with pipeline manager: In this release, we’re introducing an optimized seller workspace focused on opportunity management workflows. Sellers can immediately understand pipeline health with out-of-box interactive charts and metrics, and course-correct fading deals with AI-driven relationship and opportunity scores. One-click actions and built-in collaboration from Teams keep sellers focused on their sales workflow and remove the need to bounce in and out of disparate sales tools. Sellers can update key information fast with access to robust data that can be searched, filtered, and personalized in many ways. Automating sales tasks: The most common, mundane tasks that sellers are often required to perform can now be automated. No longer will a sales rep have to manually manage menial follow-up tasks based on a change to customer status. Creating a new email, editing an email with relevant information, sending an email to customers, and manually checking for responses can now be automated to keep sellers focused on selling, not juggling administrative busy-work. Level up sellers with intelligence across the deal cycle Conversational intelligence: Dynamics 365 Sales automatically extracts actionable business insights directly from sales calls. Dynamics 365 Sales processes and analyzes conversations across multiple channels and multiple formats, such as inbound and outbound audio and video calls, and calls that are made from a desktop computer, mobile device, and desk phone. Teams calls can be made directly from Dynamics 365 Sales. And, we have extended these capabilities to third-party telephony providers and other recording platforms used by our customers through admin configuration. Pipeline telemetry: Simple, intuitive, and out-of-the-box pipeline data visualizations will give sellers clear visibility into the deals in their pipeline. In this release, sales managers can enable KPIs for their sales teams through a new dashboard that allows them to track team progress in real time, providing insightful coaching and guidance throughout the sales cycle. Likewise, sellers can see their performance against management key metrics and proactively adjust to meet management expectations. Manager KPIs include a number of active leads in the org versus previous periods, conversion ratio between leads and opportunity, leads by source types, and per seller. Seller KPIs include a number of qualified leads, number of calls made, number of meetings scheduled, and estimated deal value. Activate a mobile safety net for successful customer engagements Meeting preparation card: The new Dynamics 365 Sales native mobile app provides sellers with relationship and logistics data sourced from LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Sales. In a single meeting card, the seller knows key meeting details and attendee responses from Outlook, paired with up-to-date LinkedIn information. Dynamics 365 Sales data is pulled so the seller sees associated opportunity title, estimated revenue, closed date, pipeline phase, notes, and AI-generated reminders. Push notifications, smart deep linking, and lookups for Outlook calendars, emails, files, notes, and one-click launch of Teams meetings are additional key release wave 1 highlights for the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app. Conversation transcripts with follow-up actions: The mobile features introduced in release wave 1 save sellers from missing details from customer engagements. Sellers conduct numerous customer interactions from their mobile devices. Nuances can be easily overlooked, especially if the seller’s attention is spread across multiple items while speaking. Call transcriptions with market-leading natural language processing are now available in the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app. The app will apply AI insights, sentiment analysis to the call transcripts, and provide suggested follow-up actions for the seller. And, each call will be automatically assigned to its relevant Dynamics 365 entity and populate the appropriate data fields within Dynamics 365, taking manual data management out of a seller’s day-to-day activities. Personalize your customer outreach for a seamless brand experience Enhanced Dynamics 365 Customer Voice surveys with customized scoring matrices: Gather and track the customer metrics that matter to your business, and respond swiftly, with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. In this release, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice introduces enhanced headers, allowing users to upload custom images, specific branding imagery, and format text to create a more personalized survey experience. Additionally, significant survey scoring enhancements now include the ability to customize satisfaction metrics, creating a scoring index with points assigned to survey questions so organizations can analyze data in their preferred way. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, automatically available for users with select Dynamics 365 applicationssuch as Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketingtransforms the organization’s ability to understand their customers. Sellers have been operating, and will continue to operate, in an almost entirely digital world. What has been made clear over the past year is that in order to succeed, sellers need a consolidated, streamlined, and integrated set of sales tools that allow them to conduct their day-to-day selling activities in a frictionless environment. And not only that, with the abundance of digital signals being created by the customers in a digital world, AI intelligence can guide sellers to more deals won, more often. Learn more Activate digital selling with Dynamics 365 Sales and realize your sales goals. Check out additional information about the 2021 release wave 1 highlights for Dynamics 365 Sales. Or, if you are ready to get started, discover how Dynamics 365 Sales can transform the way you do business

The post Intelligence and collaboration converge in Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Launch event highlights new 2021 release wave 1 capabilities and spotlights how they benefit BNY Mellon, Patagonia, Rockwell Automation, and The Coca-Cola Company Today officially kicks off a six-month wave of hundreds of new capabilities, feature updates, and applications across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. These updates include the first of two release waves this year, ensuring we continue our commitment to helping you adapt to rapid change in your industry, innovate and solve challenges collaboratively, and harness insights to stay focused on what matters. As the world prepares for life beyond the pandemic, we are laser-focused on helping build agility and resiliency into every layer of your business. At this morning’s Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event at 9:00 AM Pacific Time (then available on demand), we will preview some of the new capabilities spanning end-to-end customer experience, commerce, and supply chain and fulfillment, in addition to low-code tools to power insights and innovation. For a complete list of new capabilities, please review the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 release wave 1 plans, as well as the overviews of new capabilities for Dynamics 365, integrated Microsoft Teams experiences, and Power Platform announced at Microsoft Ignite in early March. Modernizing end-to-end customer experiences At the launch event, we will demonstrate the very latest innovation to orchestrate customer journeys for seamless engagement at the right moments. Additional customer journey orchestration capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing bring together the worlds of customer experience and marketing automation to engage customers in real-time based on interactions across marketing, sales, commerce, and service. And the latest customer analytics capabilities, such as surveys, segmentation, churn analysis, and product recommendations help create more personalized experiences. We’ll walk you through how one of the oldest banks in the world, BNY Mellon, is leveraging some of these new capabilities to usher in a new era of customer engagement for financial services. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RWAWID What’s next for Microsoft industry clouds In October 2020, we launched Microsoft Cloud for Healthcarethe first end-to-end, industry-specific cloud solution that unlocks the power of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform to transform customer engagement and optimize operations. Today we will discuss the Microsoft industry clouds approach, recently announced. Microsoft Cloud for Retail and Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services are now available for preview. Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit will be available in the near future. All four clouds enable organizations to tackle digital transformation by focusing on priority scenarios, then continue to transform customer engagement and operations at the right time. At the launch event, you’ll learn how Patagonia, a leader in outdoor clothing, is activating solutions in the Microsoft Cloud for Retail to orchestrate seamlessly personalized experiences at every point in the customer journey. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RWAPqY Over the next few months, we will continue to share new innovations across the applications and services that comprise Microsoft Cloud for Retail, such as new capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce that introduce B2B e-commerce offerings, synergize task management with Microsoft Teams, and further bring together frontline and back-end operations, improving the way retailers engage customers. We’re also building on our strong legacy in inventory management, order fulfillment, and intelligent orchestration by bringing these together in a new application, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, helping you optimize for speed, experience, and profitability by meeting future order and fulfillment complexities while supporting contemporary methods like buying online for in-store or curbside pickup. Empowering unique data experiences and insights with Power BI At Microsoft Ignite, we announced Power BI Premium Per User general availability and autoscale preview for Gen2, which automatically adds a vCore to Premium capacity when utilization peaks and removes it when no longer needed. At the launch event, we demonstrate how Rockwell Automation, a worldwide leader in Industrial Automation, is using Power BI and many of our AI capabilities to get great insights from data and act on those insights in familiar experiences such as Teams and Microsoft Excel. They are also leveraging Power BI Premium Gen2 as a way to create a better user experience, with deeper resource management and cost control. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RWB6ff Build and deliver applications faster and more cost-effectively As announced at Microsoft Ignite, new capabilities across Power Platform will accelerate low-code application development for business users, business analysts, IT admins, and professional developers. The Coca-Cola Company has recently started using Power Platform as part of its digital transformation efforts and has created some remarkable business solutions with Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, and Microsoft Power Automate, including the new Power Automate Desktop robotic process automation (RPA) capability. In a demo at the launch event, we will share how they are using Power Platform to help their bottlers easily update the expected sales date of its industry-defining syrup concentrates through an end-to-end seamless digital process. In addition, Coca-Cola UNITED, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, has also taken advantage of Power Platform to transform and reduce costs while improving customer and partner experiences through advanced automation. The video below tells their story. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RWAPnj Attend our launch event for a closer look at this wave’s highlights Tune in to the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event today, April 6 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time or on-demand after the broadcast, for a first look at the new innovations on the way over the next six months. Be sure to check out our detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, key dates, and deep-dive demo videos. Don’t miss your chance to learn from and connect with your worldwide Dynamics 365 and Power Platform communityregister for Microsoft Business Applications Summit on May 4, 2021

The post Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 2021 release launches with hundreds of new capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are amid one of the most rapid global transformations of trade that the world has ever seen. The past 30 years were a constant drumbeat of globalization, weaving geographically dispersed markets together with breakthroughs in technology and the widespread adoption of lean thinking. The result was the creation of complex and interconnected global supply chains that controlled costs through practices such as just-in-time (JIT) inventory management. Then COVID-19 forced markets to lock down and trading partners to scramble to deliver products to customers. What has become clear is that our supply chainswhile having succeeded at reducing costs, and connecting business and consumer markets worldwidewere far less robust than we had imagined. Today, there is a new push to improve the world’s supply chains, but the focus is now on resiliency. Cost containment is still a factor, so simply ordering and holding more inventory is not the answer. What holds promise is tighter integration and collaboration with both internal and external trading partners, faster access to data, and a new level of transparency and visibility into the end-to-end value chain made possible by digital transformation. The backdrop to these challenges is an accelerating fourth industrial revolution that brings with it the promise of leveraging more data and automation to produce highly-resilient and globally-optimized supply chain networks. At Microsoft, we are at the forefront of this historic transformation, providing clients worldwide with the digital solutions they need to remain competitive. The four success stories that follow bring to life how Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps organizations realize supply chain transformation and leverage the benefits of a modern, cloud-based, intelligent platform to deliver versatility, scalability, and rapid time to value. GWA Group enhances efficiency in end-to-end chain GWA Group Limited (GWA) was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 1993 and is a leading innovator, designer, and supplier of product solutions, services, and intelligent technology focused on the Bathrooms & Kitchens (B&K) segment. Like most businesses, GWA Group struggled with multiple challenges through the pandemic as customer demand shifted, markets locked down, and nodes in the supply chain became unreachable. GWA Group leadership faced a choice: continue with its digital transformation agenda or scale back and redeploy resources elsewhere within the business. The decision to accelerate digital transformation rather than scaling back was an obvious one to GWA. The company viewed digital transformation not only as a mechanism to allow them to efficiently meet shifting customer needs, but also as a step to prepare the company for future growth covered by a global data platform. GWA Group worked with Microsoft consulting services to reduce complexity from the business by deploying Dynamics 365 as its end-to-end solution for data and actionable insights. Today, GWA Group has gained digital transparency into its operations, transforming the way they do business and the way the business thinks. “We are deploying Dynamics 365 to manage the entire business ecosystem lifecycle across Customer Care, Warehouse Management, Finance & Operations, Supply Chain, Commerce, and Marketingwe’re not just transforming the way our business works, we’re actually transforming the way our business thinks. Stripping out complexity across business processes introduces greater flexibility and agility as the industry changes.”Alex Larson, General Manager Technology & Transformation, GWA Group Read more about how GWA Group embeds innovation culture with Dynamics 365. Michael Hill optimizes inventory and boosts sales Founded in New Zealand in 1979, Michael Hill is one of the world’s largest high-end jewelers. Nearing 300 retail locations across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the company has closely maintained exclusive, long-term relationships with its customers for over 40 years. Michael Hill believes that great in-store retail experiences are the key lever for increasing customer loyalty. To realize its goals for continually improving its support operations and delivering the retail experience it envisions, the company correctly identified the need to increase efficiency in its shipping and warehousing processes. “Michael Hill has been running a transformation journey to completely change our operating paradigm so that we put the customer first at the very beginning, from production to fulfillment.”Matt Keays, Chief Information Officer, Michael Hill The company worked with its implementation partner DXC Technology and Microsoft to replace its legacy retail operations solution. The business needed a solution to manage global store operations and a platform capable of delivering end-to-end multichannel capabilities and connected processes. The company found this solution by building a vastly improved retail platform using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce. Next, the company launched an internal initiative to optimize operations, customer service, warehousing, inventory, and retail financial processes by implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. The changes were planned for March 2020, but the global pandemic demanded an accelerated plan of action. Indeed, with 300 stores holding high-value inventory, many facing temporary closure, the company confronted logistic complications that forced expensive, indirect, and inefficient shipments to its customers worldwide. The international jeweler moved quickly to avoid harm to its business and its brand. Dynamics 365 was deployed rapidly and almost immediately began providing increased visibility into inventory availability across its supply chain. This gave Michael Hill the ability to treat each of its stores as a warehouse location, which seamlessly allowed customers to order items online with the option to pick up at the site of their choice or ship direct from that location. Today, Michael Hill powers its new retail operating platform to generate better insights about what customers are looking for, transforming their approach to customer service and improving their ability to respond to changing business needs and new market conditions. “The really exciting part about using Dynamics 365 is how fast we can adapt to changing business needs. We are driving efficiencies in our warehouse, trialing new fulfillment models, and unlocking deeper insights into customer experiences faster than ever before.”Ian Dallas, Program Manager of Supply Chain and Finance, Michael Hill Read more about how Michael Hill optimizes inventory allocation and boosts sales with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce. TBM digitizes processes for efficient reporting Tan Boon Ming Sdn Bhd (TBM) is Malaysia’s one-stop appliances superstore. Founded in 1945 as a neighborhood bicycle store, the company quickly expanded its offerings to appliances, furniture, and radios. From the beginning, the company was founded with a vision to be the best-in-class service retailer, striving to deliver quality in everything it does, from the products it sells to the services it offers. It was this vision that compelled TBM to begin a journey of digital transformation in 2016. The company’s key challenge was the lack of data synchronization and integration with its existing Warehouse Management System (WMS). Because the existing WMS was not integrated, the company was forced to use heavy manual processes to take stock across 40 locations printing stock sheets and manually tallying the results. To overcome this challenge, TBM implemented Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to enable greater visibility into its warehouse and inventory while simultaneously reducing the effort required to access this critical data. TBM has since adopted other Dynamics 365 modules across its business to bring all business processes under control into a single, integrated, and seamless platform. Dynamics 365 Finance was implemented and now allows the company to enjoy efficient accounting and reporting. Dynamics 365 Commerce enabled TBM to overcome the challenges of the pandemic and continue to serve customers without delays during Malaysia’s Movement Control Order period. With Dynamics 365, TBM has a cohesive view of its warehouse, logistics, and inventory integrated with an agile storefront, allowing them to provide consistent and scalable customer experiences. Read more about how this Malaysian appliances store digitizes processes and enables more efficient reporting using Dynamic 365. Chemist Warehouse migrates to the cloud for enhanced customer experiences Over the last 16 years, Chemist Warehouse has grown from a single shop in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs to become one of Australia’s top 10 retailers. Today, the group has over 400 stores across Australia, serves more than 1.5 million customers, and dispenses more than 500,000 prescriptions a week. The rapid growth and success of Chemist Warehouse compelled the company to take on a business transformation aimed at improving customer experiences. As a longstanding user of Microsoft Dynamics AX on-premises, the company was interested in moving to Dynamics 365 in the cloud. This aspect of its business transformation would support international expansion goals by providing a scalable and agile end-to-end ERP platform capable of leveraging the cloud’s benefits. Chemist Warehouse began its international expansion in Ireland in 2019. The company quickly realized that to support local and global operations, everyone, including its network of over 500 franchisees, needed to work on a single information system. The company decided to implement Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and point of sale. This change would provide the necessary foundation to support international expansion and serve to underpin the deployment of an array of new health-related services and ultimately create an entirely different class of customer experience. “The main reason to leverage the Dynamics 365 platform is time to value-add. The mantra for us is scalability, agilitythey’re the two things that we bear in mind with everything we do. It’s really to be able to provide a better experience to the customer.”Jules Cardinale, CIO, Chemist Warehouse After implementation, Cardinale and his team rapidly transformed how they operate and moved to roll out many process improvements across the value chain. Today, Chemist Warehouse can offer a true omnichannel retail experience. With the integration of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, the business has greater visibility into what products are on order and when items are shipped and received. These improvements created the necessary infrastructure to allow the company to introduce a new click-to-deliver option for their customers and to provide it seamlessly, side-by-side with its traditional click and collect. Read more about how Chemist Warehouse prescribes cloud transformation to boost customer wellbeing. Connect with us to transform your supply chain Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps organizations meet the fast-changing customer demand, by performing distribution planning in a matter of minutes. It enables companies to resolve demand and supply imbalances by enhancing visibility of their supply chain and inventory in real time. They can easily scale to handle large volumes of transactions while fulfilling orders from multiple channels, mitigate stock-outs and overstocking, and seamlessly integrate with third-party systems. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers an integrated out-of-the-box warehouse management system that enables companies to consistently deliver products on time. Companies can create no-code or low-code customized heatmaps and automate workflows to optimize capacity, layout, consumption, and flow of raw and finished goods in real time. Also, it further helps create resiliency by keeping critical warehouse processes running around-the-clock at high throughput on the edge and ensure business continuity in remote locations when disconnected from the cloud. It helps organizations increase competitive advantage, overcome adversity, and proactively detect opportunities all the way from planning to procurement to manufacturing to distribution, order orchestration, and delivery. Learn more You can learn more about Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, how to build resilience with an agile supply chain, or if you are ready to take the first step towards implementing the one of the most forward-thinking ERP solution available, then contact us today to see a demo or start a free trial. You can also learn what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and listen to our recent podcast “Preparing for your supply chain’s next normal” with Frank Della Rosa and Simon Ellis

The post 4 successful supply chain transformation stories with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.