Setting up or overhauling a supply chain operation has traditionally been an arduous, complex process. Now, by deploying modern, intelligent cloud applications like Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, organizations are demonstrating just how rapidly one can transform operations, especially when guided by the right experts.

Invitalia, the Italian national agency for economic development, provided a great example of just how rapidly an organization can ramp up a supply network, especially when faced with a monumental, global crisis that won’t wait for tedious deployment or onboarding of new technologies and processes.

When the COVID-19 pandemic spread to Italy in early 2020, the country’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, contacted Invitalia CEO Domenico Arcuri and requested that the organization take over emergency responsibility for the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE).

“The situation in Italy was critical at the time, and the international market for PPE was complicated, with many buyers all chasing a limited supply of equipment.”Fabrizio Bellezza, Chief Information Officer, Invitalia

Invitalia took on managing the acquisition and distribution of essential PPE, medicines, medical devices, and other supplies from a variety of international sources. The agency needed a new logistics platform so that it could simplify the complex process of purchasing and distributing thousands of units of PPE from sellers in other countries.

“Because demand for PPE around the world was so high, and supply was limited, it was very often a first-come, first-served situation, so it was essential that we react as fast as possible,” Bellezza said.

Outrunning the pandemic

To help streamline management of PPE and other COVID-19 supplies, Invitalia worked with Microsoft Services and Agic Technology, a Microsoft Gold Partner, to get the new system up and running.

“The pandemic was running fast,” said Giuseppe La Mantia, partner at Agic. “Every day, Invitalia had new requirements to manage. They were really overloaded, and the solution needed to be fast and simple, but complete. To reach the objectives on time, we had to outrun the pandemic.”

Invitalia had already established a productive relationship with Microsoft that included moving all of the agency’s datacenter IT resources to Microsoft Azure, so its leadership felt comfortable bringing in more Microsoft technology at such a crucial time. Agic helped Invitalia deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, which includes planning, production, inventory, and transportation features that organizations can use to build agile, resilient supply chains and maximize operational efficiencies.

Over a period of two intense weeks, the Agic and Invitalia teams worked together to install the solution. “We worked night and day, seven days a week,” La Mantia said. “In a very short time, we performed all the steps of a project plan, from analysis to deployment. We worked together to make a solution design that could be representative of COVID task force needs. Each deliverable was shared with the IT project team and then the business team to be sure they would deliver the expected results. After solution design, we made the necessary setup and simple customizations, showing defined mockups to share the intermediate results. Then we made adjustments and moved forward toward the final goals. We tested the solution and trained the users, and then we arranged everything to deploy the solution.”

Without the need to retool or replace multiple systems, Invitalia was able to maintain their existing investment while deploying SCM rapidly to meet urgent supply chain needs. In addition, Agic Technology and Invitalia streamlined the deployment process and reduced complexity, dramatically accelerating the time to value.

Invitalia expects to expand its use of Dynamics 365 into other areas of public administration. “It connects easily with other Microsoft products, giving us the opportunity to create end-to-end solutions for enterprise resource planning,” says Bellezza.

Once it was ready, the Invitalia team launched Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with hundreds of suppliers on file. With it, the team could learn right away when any of the suppliers had products available, and Invitalia could respond appropriately. The solution also helped the Invitalia streamline the distribution of PPE from shipping locations to hospitals around the country, so they were able to get the equipment to the people who needed it most.

Better prepared for upcoming phases

Several months later, as Invitalia prepares for a new phase of the pandemic, Agic continues to offer ongoing support, helping the agency maintain the solution and providing any updates they need to comply with new government regulations.

“Now, Invitalia is able to manage worldwide suppliers, check and report about products, quantities and prices, and respect regulations from the Italian government and internal approval processes, to track in real time where materials are,” La Mantia said.

With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Invitalia can now rely on a centralized solution that helps the agency assess medical needs across the country and then quickly provision and distribute critical medical equipment. The agency can process hundreds of orders a day and provide more than one thousand hospitals with the supplies they need to contain the spread of COVID-19 and help save the lives of affected individuals.

Overcoming personal limits to achieve a goal

Bellezza believes that the PPE project brought out the best in everyone involved.

“Agic and Microsoft really put forth their best resources to help us, and we very much valued their deep knowledge and expertise. We also learned a lot about our own capabilities because a critical moment like this teaches you a lot about yourself, and you discover strengths that you never knew you had.”Fabrizio Bellezza, Chief Information Officer, Invitalia

La Mantia agreed. “Each team member worked very hard, guided by the awareness of making a contribution to the most important cause for Italy in that moment,” La Mantia said. “As a company and team, we learned that we can reach very challenging goals, working together with partner and customers in the same direction. We also learned that if you are guided from a very strong motivation you can overcome personal limits and aim straight for the goal.”

Learn more

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is agile enough to help Invitalia address their high-stakes challenges without overhauling their entire supply chain operation. It can help you too.

Learn how your customers can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to rapidly streamline their processes and get quicker time to market while utilizing their current investment.

The post How Agic Technology deployed Supply Chain Management in 2 weeks to help Invitalia fight the pandemic appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today’s continuous growth of e-commerce sales drives the need for a stronger focus on fraud detection and protection. To meet demand and stimulate growth it’s become crucial to keep fraud and operational costs low by streamlining business processes. Automating the risk analysis and transactional review process with machine learning platforms, like Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, is one way to do that.

Platforms like Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection provide a rich set of APIs that you can use to assess the risk surrounding account logins, account creations, and purchases. Rule-based linear models then use the risk score, as well as purchase or account attributes, to segment traffic and return automated decisions. Rules are just one way to automate decisions on events. It’s equally important to have this information feed into your existing business workflows and then automate where possible.

Here are three ways to help you customize and automate your own end-to-end fraud management workflow.

First: Diagram your existing risk management framework

It’s crucial that you develop a business process diagram (from transaction processing to data flows for automated risk assessments, case management, reporting, and communications) with key stakeholders and metrics for tracking success at each stage. Getting a high-level view of existing workflows will help identify areas for improvement or automation.

Second: Identify real-time decision points

Use your fraud management process diagram to identify key metrics or flags that could require real-time actions. For example, the risk score is an actionable data point used to indicate fraudulent activity and could be monitored in real-time. API latencies, rule executions, or changes to existing rules or configurations in your fraud management platform, are other examples of key data points that could be valuable to track in real-time.

Third: Configure triggers and automate actions

After identifying the key real-time decision points throughout your fraud management process, it is important to find a platform that will manage the data egress and automation components.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection’s event tracing establishes a real-time telemetry platform that can seamlessly integrate and extend your existing business workflows. You can subscribe to events triggered by the user or system-level actions and forward the data associated with each event to Azure Event Hubs or Blob storage. From there, you can take advantage of powerful fast-development tools such as Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate to configure trigger conditions and real-time actions from all of your connected systems.

For example, if a user’s score is suspiciously low, you can subscribe to a transactional event that will be sent to Azure Event Hubs and consumed in Azure Logic Apps to check the score, trigger an email, and investigate the order before a chargeback occurs. Using an ever-growing library of third-party connectors available in Azure Logic Apps, you can create a highly customizable workflow to cover everything from order investigation, additional verification for suspicious orders, alerting on changes made in the portal, and updates to customized monthly business reports. These connectors work seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to provide you with a single solution for your business’ fraud detection and protection needs.

Next steps

Developing a robust fraud management workflow that enables your business to scale and operate efficiently is crucial. Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and its Event Tracing capabilities aim to support your business by easily connecting to and optimizing your existing business workflows. Get started today with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and learn more about how Event Tracing can provide real-time insights and workflow automation here:

• Start your Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection trial today
• Configure Event Tracing
• Sample Azure Logic Apps using Event Tracing

The post 3 Tips for Creating Intelligent Fraud Management Workflows appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, now that many people are working from home at least some of the time, having a streamlined mobile app for your sales team has become critically important. Whether they’re in the office, in their car, or just moving around their houses, sellers need to stay on top of their deals and get daily sales tasks done quickly. Being able to get work done on a phone is a huge time-saver.

The new Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app, now available for preview, is optimized to help your sales team stay productive wherever they’re working. The key capabilities of the mobile app enable sellers to prepare for customer engagements, log and share information quickly, and find the information they need.

Mobile app highlights

The Sales mobile app helps your sales team:

• Prepare for customer engagements. As a seller prepares for a meeting, they see the meeting details, attendees, and their responses from Outlook along with the related data for which the appointment is tracked, such as opportunity title, estimated revenue, estimated closed date, pipeline phase, notes, and AI-generated reminders.
• Log and share information using native device capabilities and simplified forms. Details can be captured in notes using the device’s keyboard or voice-to-text capabilities, and can include attachments and images taken with the device’s camera. To streamline updating information, sellers use a lightweight, customizable form that allows them to edit the most important fields. Or if sellers need more info, they can access the full record with a single tap.
• Find and interact with sales data from an optimized home screen and with relevance search. The home page is optimized to display upcoming meetings and recently viewed records. Additionally, with relevance search, sellers can find the info they need, faster and more efficiently.

Get your sales organization started

The Dynamics 365 Sales Preview mobile app is available for public preview. Before sellers can use the app, admins need to take the following steps for their organization:

• Enable the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app in Advanced Settings.

• Enable relevance search in the Power Platform admin center. Enabling relevance search is required for your sales team to use the mobile app and will also be available to all members of your organization.
• After you’ve enabled the mobile app and relevance search, let your sellers know they can install and start using the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app.

Next steps and continued learning

To learn more about the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app:

• Enable the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app
• Check out the documentation for more details on the capabilities, set-up process, and to get the link to install the app.

We’d like to hear your feedback, please share your ideas.

The post Enable the Dynamics 365 Sales Preview mobile app in Advanced Settings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This year, I’ve shared inspiring stories of organizations responding to adversity by building digital resilience into the fabric of their operations and cultures. A common thread between these organizations is the agility to be better prepared for change, as well as the ability to stay focused on putting customers first.

That’s why it’s apropos to close the year by spotlighting Grant Thornton, a public accounting and advisory firm that, at the start of the pandemic, rapidly adjusted operating and client engagement modelsfrom selling and engaging clients remotely, to focusing services on those that will have the most immediate and beneficial impact in a time of crisis.

Grant Thornton’s journey to transform sales and customer service delivery is a testament to just how far digital sales tools have evolved in recent yearsand how the right platform can help client engagement teams to guide customers at the most crucial times of need.

A shift to digital selling pays off in deeper customer engagements

Organizations in 135 countries depend on Grant Thornton’s expertise and insights to prepare for the future, whether applying new technologies or digital transformation, understanding shifting regulatory landscapes, and tax and advisory services.

In 2018, Grant Thornton had the foresight to reimagine how to engage customers and build deeper relationships. Microsoft Relationship Sales, which brings together Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, helped them to build customer relationships at scale.

Nichole Jordan, Grant Thornton’s Central Region Managing Partner, shared how the solution had transformed the business at the 2019 Microsoft Business Applications Summit. “We believe it’s critical to monitor the health of the relationship with our clients at all times and using technology is the best way to be able to do that,” explain Jordan, citing the relationship sales solution enables teams to understand the sentiment of the relationships at all times.

Jordon shared that LinkedIn Sales Navigator was making a big impact on the depth and breadth of relationships. “Those teams that have more LinkedIn connections with their particular customer base have a higher win rate and an increased amount of sales versus those who don’t. We can see that the technology is helping us to better understand these companies, build deeper relationships and wider across the entire organization.”

Dynamics 365 Sales introduced a constant stream of intelligence to Grant Thornton teams around the globe, tracking changes at client organizations, from personnel to mergers and acquisitions, to customer and competitive trends, “providing automated insights and research to Grant Thornton partners twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,” said Jordan. “These alerts go to our partners on their phones so they are constantly getting the latest about our client base so that they can provide more relevant information for them.”

Responding to a global crisisone customer at a time

When the pandemic struck, Grant Thornton had to rapidly pivot priorities. “It was critical that we could reach out to our clients,” explained Jordan, in a recent conversation with Chris Weber, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, “to be there for them, to listen, to learn, and to offer help.”

Jordan shared with Weber how Grant Thornton leveraged its digital sales tools to help its team keep customer relations personal and impactful in the face of emerging challenges.

The first step was to reach out to its extensive customer base. “In our business we don’t regularly send messages to all of our customers so this was a first and we really relied very heavily on our Microsoft relationship and our customer relationship management (CRM) system with Dynamics 365, just our central repository for all of our customer contact information, so we started there.”

Sales staff offered clients a complimentary pandemic resiliency tool, a risk assessment dashboard that helps quantify risk through data-driven analysis across multiple impact zones and risk factors, plus tailored benchmarking by competitor or industry. “In order to leverage the toolwe had to dig in deep to the relationships that we had. And to do that we leveraged our CRM, so we were fully engaged in Dynamics 365,” explained Jordan.

The sales team is also continuing to leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator, as well as Microsoft Power Platform. “All of our teams have access to our sales pipeline management through Microsoft Power BI,” said Jordan, “that gets updated every night and our teams have access to it every morning. So it’s built into their routineto be able to access the pipeline and the wins and the losses, and helps them understand the winning areas so that we can double down on that and bring that value across other clients.”

The sales team is also exploring Microsoft Power Apps to help target sales opportunities. For example, enabling teams to quickly pull up previous engagements that helped banks solve regulatory challenges, which could then be replicated at a different client or industry sector.

Real results

This combination of digital selling tools, from Dynamics 365 to Power Platform and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, has resulted in markedly improved business outcomes, according to Jordan.

The teams are able to connect with a broader number of clients and deepen relationships widely across an organization. They can prioritize opportunities that have a higher likelihood of winning. And they can do it all with speed and accuracy, enabling teams to respond to opportunities faster, including delivering proposals in days, rather than weeks.

“The technology improves our speed, it improves our accuracy with all that we’re doing, it’s helping us connect more broadly with clients, and it’s helping us focus our time, our money and our resources on areas where we can really bring the greatest value to clients and where we can win as a firm.”

Get the full story

Watch ademoor take aguided tourto see howDynamics 365 Salescanempower your sellers with actionable insights.To learn more about how Grant Thornton has deepened engagements with customers,read the full story and watch the full conversation between Nichole Jordan and Chris Weber.

The post Digital selling helps Grant Thornton engage clients at scale appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In this blog series we are exploring the latest fraud-related events and issues on the rise in our digitized world. The first installment in the series explored account takeovers (ATO) and the $7 billion yearly loss affecting even the largest organizations.

In this post, we are examining three current trends contributing to increased fraud in the retail and e-commerce verticals:

1. Increased online transactions
2. Data breaches from the early pandemic chaos
3. Omnichannel fraud

This topic is especially timely as we are well into the holiday season. With the dramatic surge in online transactions driven by the pandemic, fraudsters are showing no hesitation targeting the unprecedented volume of new accounts and new methods for getting products and services to consumers. Deloitte is forecasting e-commerce sales to grow 25 35 percent with sales expected to reach $182 $196 billion, compared to a 14.7 percent increase in 2019.

1. Record setting creation of new online accounts

In April, ACI Worldwide reported a 209 percent year-over-year growth in global ecommerce retail sales. A significant contributor to this rapid growth is new customer accounts which now represent 30 percent of transactions, a fivefold increase from pre-pandemic times, according to Help Net Security. Less experienced online users are at increased risk of fraud, as they are less likely to employ advanced security steps. With the responsibility of providing quick and seamless customer experiences, retailers must protect customer data while keeping up with the surge in new customer accounts.

The explosion of online shopping transactions is diluting the percentage of fraud attacks across all channels, giving the false perception they are on the decline. While the percentage is shrinking, the number of fraud attacks in real terms has risen. Large online merchants selling digital goods and physical goods have been hit hardest. They’ve seen an average monthly increase in fraudulent transactions of 37.1 percent and 14.3 percent, respectively, according to Digital Commerce 360.

Additionally, there’s been a 66 percent increase in fraudsters re-targeting websites that previously failed to identify their attacks. Often these repeat attacks are occurring in newer and more vulnerable areas of the customer journey including loyalty programs and return policies.

Also on the rise is the cost of fraud for United States-based merchants. Shooting up 7.3 percent from 2019, both store-based and online retailers are paying $3.36 for every $1 of fraud. For United States e-commerce merchants it’s $3.73 per $1 of fraud, according to Digital Commerce 360. What’s more, United States merchants in 2020 were projected to see roughly $33 billion in payment card fraud loses before the pandemic.

2. Perfect storm of record setting transactions for the holiday season

In a survey of 500 e-commerce companies, 96 percent agreed that this year’s holiday shopping season is more important to their business than in 2019.

However, it will also be a prime time for fraudsters to capitalize for a few reasons. Primarily it’s due to the same confluence of events that already made more fraud possible: high transaction volumes, minimal or legacy security measures, and merchants and users who are new to online retail. Second, is the speculation that fraudsters will operationalize data they’ve already stolen. Chaos and confusion early in the pandemic created opportunities for data breaches and social engineering scams. The holidays offer an opportunity to exploit that data with fraudulent purchases, money stolen, or rewards points and credits usurped, according to TechRepublic.

3. Omnichannel delivery is convenient for fraudsters too

With the overnight changes in the ways that retailers could sell and consumers could buy, omnichannel delivery options became a must. However, as merchants have been pushed to provide new channels to serve customers, it has exposed new vulnerabilities. Therefore, omnichannel fraud is also on the rise. Buy Online, Pick-Up In Store (BOPIS) fraud rose 55 percent, according to Help Net Security. This trend is expected to increase with the surge in online shopping over the holidays.

How Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection can help prevent fraud

While many of the challenges that retailers and e-commerce merchants are facing are a result of operating in a vastly different landscape, several are coming from their legacy fraud prevention systems. That fivefold increase in new users we mentioned earlier is taxing to a legacy systems’ ability to identify legitimate users. Companies trying to keep up with the overwhelming number of fraud signals often rely on systems that generate false positives, incorrectly rejecting legitimate and loyal buyers. During a time when a single transaction can seemingly make or break a business, merchants cannot afford to lose customers or sales.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps merchants combat against the types of fraud and legacy security systems gaps that are threatening to make the holiday shopping season less than merry.

A cloud-based solution recently awarded the Juniper cybersecurity platinum award, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is designed to help e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, and omnichannel merchants protect revenue and reputation. Deploying adaptive AI technology that continuously learns, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection defends against purchase, account, and omnichannel return and discount fraud while reducing operational expenses and increasing acceptance rates. It also safeguards user accounts from fraud exposure helping to retain customers and maintain satisfaction.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection offers three capabilities which can be integrated together or used individually, providing merchants the option to use the capability that best suits their business needs:

1. Account protection helps protect online revenue and reputation and safeguard user accounts from abuse and fraud by combating fake account creation, account takeover and fraudulent account access.

In the first trend above, new customer accounts represent 30 percent of transactions. These online users with weaker security could utilize account protection capability to help safeguard accounts. Businesses and merchants with account protection could protect their customers’ data by preventing fraudulent account access. Rather than worry about keeping their customers data safe, merchants can focus back on seamless customer experiences. With both fraud attacks and cost of fraud to United States merchants rising, there is no better time to add the account protection capability to your toolkit.

2. Purchase protection helps protect revenue by improving the acceptance rate of e-commerce transactions with insights and tools that help balance revenue opportunity verses fraud loss and checkout friction.

The second trend highlights the need for purchase protection. With a higher number of transactions and new online users entering their card information, purchase protection can help keep good customers happy while helping mitigate fraud loss.

3.Loss prevention helps protect revenue by identifying anomalies on returns and discounts arising from omnichannel purchases, enabling store managers and loss prevention officers to quickly investigate potential fraud and take action to mitigate losses.

Our third trend, omnichannel delivery, is a growing area for fraudsters to strike. Loss prevention helps analyze merchant’s data and to identify patterns of anomalies to increase merchants’ visibility into potential fraud on returns and discounts while notifying store managers so action can be taken to prevent losses. It’s time to fight Buy Online, Pick-Up In Store (BOPIS) fraud with the loss prevention capability.

Learn more

Learn additional information about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection capabilities including account protection, purchase protection, and loss prevention and check out the ebook, Protecting Customers, Revenue, and Reputation from Online Fraud.

Questions? Please contact your Microsoft sales representative to learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection capabilities.

The post Fraud trends part 2: holiday fraud and account protection appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

To run an effective manufacturing and distribution operation, you need an accurate understanding of your inventory and where it’s located along the supply chain. What’s more, having clear visibility into your inventory has become critically important as organizations shift to omnichannel order fulfillment and distribution and therefore need to manage inventory located in multiple places at any given time, such as in different warehouses or on delivery trucks.

The Inventory Visibility Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, now available for preview, helps large volume retailers and manufacturers accurately track global, cross-channel inventory in real-time. Built for scalability, the add-in can handle a high volume of transactions every minute. With the Inventory Visibility Add-in, you can mitigate stockouts and overstocking that tend to happen when you lack visibility into all the inventory you have on hand at any given moment.

Feature highlights

The Inventory Visibility Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (preview) enables real-time global inventory visibility with external systems:

• All information that relates to on-hand inventory is exported in near real-time through low-level SQL Server integration. On-hand inventory changes post to the inventory service with a specified index, modifier, and dimension values. Real-time queries on RESTful APIS enable the retrieval of a list of available positions. You can also query across legal entities to get a single global view of inventory positions.
• Partitioning defines a scheme that allows for small groupings of data while still allowing for meaningful data queries, thus significantly improving the performance of the inventory visibility. Site and warehouse are the default partition keys for the Inventory Visibility Add-in.
• Indexing provides the flexibility to configure queries on the dimension or a combination of the dimensions.

The add-in is highly scalable as a microservice and built on Microsoft Dataverse, which supports extensibility, provides better data management, and gives you the ability to build Power Apps and use Power BI for advanced customizations.

Integration with third-party and ancillary systems

The Inventory Visibility Add-in is extensible and integrates easily with third-party systems:

• Configuration of the add-in standardizes how inventory changes are posted, organized, and queried across the multiple systems.
• Supply Chain Management is the default data source for the add-in. You can add new data sources to the inventory system configuration entity to connect with third-party systems.
• When a data source posts an inventory change, the add-in posts with the physical measure, which is a list of modifiers that reflects a summary of the inventory transaction status. New physical measures can be configured for custom inbound or outbound change modifiers from the new data source.
• The custom calculated measure allows the configurable calculated quantities for the query output.

Next steps

Still have questions? Please feel free to reach out to us at D365InventVisibility@microsoft.com. You can find more details in our documentation, Inventory Visibility Add-in. You can also become part of the conversation on our Yammer group.

The post Increase visibility into inventory across your supply chain appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.