Assess supply chain risk more easily in new workspace

Assess supply chain risk more easily in new workspace

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Understanding risk enables businesses to take proactive actions to balance cost and resilience as they optimize their supply chains. The new supply risk assessment workspace in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps supply managers understand the risk of encountering sourcing shortages and delays.

Discover supply chain risk based on performance metrics

The supply risk assessment workspace helps you to discover risks to future planned purchases. Risk assessment considers the past performance of your suppliers or product metrics like purchase order delivery date confirmed as requested, on-time in-full deliveries (OTIF), on-time delivery (OT), and in-full delivery (IF).

The workspace also identifies single-sourced products that didn’t perform as expected so that you can change your order strategy for the future. You can build a supplier and product ranking, analyze it, and filter OTIF metrics over time or against other dimensions, such as delivery method or site.

Explore the supply risk assessment workspace

Begin your exploration in the supply risk assessment workspace, which provides views of products and vendors that fall outside your performance goals. Customize separate goals for OT, IF, OTIF, and other metrics in a dedicated configuration page.

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Supply risk assessment workspace

Navigate directly from the workspace to Power BI reports to view product and vendor performance and ranking.

Supplier performance report

With the reports, you can:

  • Use filters to focus on specific legal entities, vendors, items, product groups, and vendor regions
  • Study performance history
  • Zoom in on specific time periods of concern

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Supply risk assessment report

  • Identify risks for future purchases by mapping past OTIF observations to planned orders and suppliers
  • Select the most impacted products by potential risks translated into quantity and amount at risk and validate the assigned vendors
  • Drill in on specific products or vendors with their planned amounts and volumes at risk

Enable the workspace in feature management

To take advantage of the new capability, enable Assess supply risks to prevent supply chain disruptions in feature management. You can change default thresholds for your metrics in Supply risk assessment parameters to specify what you consider a risk for your business. By default, the threshold is set to 96%. Then navigate to the Supply risk assessment workspace to start your discovery.

Tip: Supply risk assessment workspace doesn’t show updated data?

The performance metrics have been added to the Purchase cube. If you are not using the Purchase cube for analysis yet, go to the Entity Store page, refresh the Purchase cube, and enable it also for automatic refresh.

You might need to select the Refresh data link to view the updated data in the workspace. If the link is not available, go to the Data set cache configuration and enable the cache consumer VendSupplyRiskCacheDataSet to turn on manual refresh.

Learn more

To get started using the new workspace, read the product documentation: Supply risk assessment overview | Microsoft Learn

The post Assess supply chain risk more easily in new workspace appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

2022 release wave 2 in action: Bringing innovation into focus across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

2022 release wave 2 in action: Bringing innovation into focus across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

In October, we launched the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 2. This is our second release wave of the year and it includes hundreds of new capabilities and features.

This release wave is a big one, and it comes at a critical time for many organizations. We are committed to continually innovate and help your business grow, no matter what challenges or headwinds you face. Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help strengthen your technology ecosystem by seamlessly providing visibility into every area of your business, empowering employees to focus on what they do best, and enabling your teams to create world-class customer experiences.

To help you quickly get up to speed on highlights from this release wave, as well as provide context into what’s possible, we’ve created a set of demo videos dedicated to key areas of business. As introduced in the special Business Applications release launch session at Microsoft Ignite, each video showcases how real-world organizations are taking full advantage of the new capabilities to achieve new levels of efficiency, cross-functional engagement, and breakthrough customer experiences.

To get started, watch the overview below of some of the highlights from the 2022 release wave 2.

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Find out what’s new for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform in this introduction from Charles Lamanna.

Do more with less to empower growth and agility

You’ll hear a common theme across these videos: do more with less by becoming more agile and efficient with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. The 2022 release wave 2 unlocks durable growth by unifying business data, relationships, and workflows with a single, cohesive business cloud.

Watch the video below to learn howeven in times of uncertainty and disruptionDynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help reduce costs and complexity while empowering teams to focus on superior customer experiences and operational excellence.

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Learn how Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help reduce costs and complexity.

Sales | How Teleperformance boosts its sellers’ effectiveness with Viva Sales

We recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Viva Sales, a seller experience that enriches Microsoft 365 applications and Microsoft Teams with seller workflows. Your sales team can now automatically capture, access, and register customer data into any customer relationship management (CRM) system, including Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. Learn how Teleperformance, a global business process outsourcing and customer experience service provider, eliminated the administrative burden of manual data entry to give sellers more time to focus on selling.

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Learn about new capabilities in the 2022 release wave 2 across Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Viva Sales.

Sales and marketing | Financial services provider Eika orchestrates personalized campaigns to fund sustainable businesses across Norway

Eika, one of the largest financial services providers in Norway, is an alliance of 53 independent banks supporting two Norwegian dialects. It is also focused on being a driving force for sustainability and has launched an initiative to provide loans to businesses that are installing sustainable solutions. Learn how new AI and automation capabilities in Dynamics 365 are helping Eika’s sales and marketing teams seamlessly collaborate on campaigns to provide a personalized customer experience.

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Learn how Eika is creating new customer experiences with AI and automation capabilities in Dynamics 365.

Customer service | Baylor Scott & White brings a new level of patient experiences to healthcare

Healthcare organizations today are being evaluated on their ability to deliver preventative services and improve overall health outcomes for the communities they serve. One way they’re meeting this challenge is through personalized omnichannel services. Baylor Scott & Whitethe largest not-for-profit healthcare system in Texas and one of the largest in the United Statesis a leader in overall patient experience in the United States.

Using our Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, Baylor Scott & White is streamlining patient communications through a combination of personalized self-service and an AI-driven contact center. Explore how the new features in the release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can support patient relations teams through enhancements and omnichannel engagement.

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Learn how Baylor Scott & White is streamlining patient communications with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Innovation across Dynamics 365 Field Service, Mixed Reality, and Connected Spaces

Field service operations are undergoing rapid changes due to a scarcity of skilled workers and the shift from a cost center to a revenue driver. In addition, technology spurred by the industrial metaverse is enabling new scenarios for mixed and augmented reality, as well as enabling organizations to monitor and optimize spacesfrom retail stores to factory floors.

In the video below, explore how 2022 release wave 2 updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces are transforming field service operations.

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Explore how 2022 release wave 2 updates to Dynamics 365 Field Service, Remote Assist, and Connected Spaces are transforming field service operations.

Operations | Global IT services provider Columbus Global elevates consulting experiences with AI, streamlined processes, and analytics

Columbus Global, a leading IT services and consulting company, acts as a digital trusted advisor for organizations across the globe as they reimagine their businesses. One of its many offerings is subscription consultancy services. Learn how new automation, process support, and analytics capabilities empower teams across finance, project operations, and HR to seamlessly build quotes, onboard customers, and track progress on time and on budget.

Learn how IT services and consulting leader, Columbus Global, has transformed its operations with Dynamics 365.

Supply chain | Improve inventory visibility, and planning and agility of your warehouses

Supply chain disruptions over the last few years have exposed supplier vulnerabilities and fragility across industries and countries. Enhancements to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help organizations exceed customer expectations, mitigate financial risks, and deliver on time.

In the next video, learn how Dynamics 365 can help digitally transform your supply chain without replacing existing systems and turn supply chains into a competitive advantage.

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Learn about new capabilities that will be released for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in the 2022 release wave 2.

Scale low-code across the organization to do more with less

With new enhancements to Microsoft Power Platform in 2022 release wave 2, we’re continuing to empower users to rapidly build solutions and transform their businesses with a comprehensive set of low-code development tools. Two big announcements are that Microsoft Power Pages and Managed Environments are now generally available! Additionally, with the new AI copilot in Microsoft Power Automate, you can create a flow in seconds simply by describing what you want to automate in a sentence.  

Watch the video below to learn how organizations like Degrees of Change and Rabobank are using capabilities across the entire Microsoft Power Platform to streamline and automate their business processes.

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Learn about new capabilities that will be released for Microsoft Power Platform in the 2022 release wave 2.

Learn more about the 2022 release wave 2

The updates featured in these videos are just a handful of the new and updated capabilities in the 2022 release wave 2. To learn more, check out our roadmap for detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform

The post 2022 release wave 2 in action: Bringing innovation into focus across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Assess supply chain risk more easily in new workspace

Use percentage-based routing to load-balance customer service requests

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Unified routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides capabilities to connect customers to the best agents. To provide a world-class customer engagement experience, around the clock and across the globe, large organizations rely on multiple vendors and expert pools. They need to balance the incoming workload across service departments, vendor queues, and their expert pools. Percentage-based routing, a new capability of unified routing, helps organizations to easily allocate work to different queues representing departments, vendors, or groups of agents in specific percentages.

How does percentage-based routing help?

Let us look at a customer scenario to understand how percentage-based routing can help your customer service organization.

Contoso Solutions is a Fortune 500 software product and services company. It has a large customer support organization covering more than 20 product lines, served by three vendors with more than 5,000 agents worldwide. Most of their customer queries are in the Billing and Subscriptions area. A single vendor team cannot handle the load. Rajeev, the director of customer support at Contoso, wants to distribute the workload across all three vendors based on each vendor’s pricing plan, quality of service, and the volume it can handle. He has come up with the following allocation:

  • 60% to Woodgrove Solutions, which has consistently delivered good customer support and has offered volume-discounted pricing to Contoso
  • 30% to Adatum Corporation, which has a smaller workforce but can quickly ramp up agents when Contoso releases new features
  • 10% to First Up Consultants, a new vendor that Contoso wants to try out

Rajeev is looking for a solution that can help him implement the percentage-based routing easily to control customer wait times during the busy holiday season. He learns about the percentage-based routing capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. In the Customer Service admin center, he opens the workstream and configures a Route to Queue rule with the work allocations he devised.

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From that moment, the algorithm dynamically routes every customer query from the Billing and Subscriptions area to one of the three vendor queues according to the configured percentages.

Monitor vendor queues in reports

Rajeev can check the number of customer queries that go to each vendor using the Omnichannel historical analytics insights dashboard.

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Conclusion

In a world of high-volume, 24/7 customer engagement, percentage-based routing can be extremely helpful for organizations that want to efficiently manage their workload across multiple vendors and deliver delightful customer experiences to their global customer base.

Learn more 

To get more information about unified routing and automated routing rules in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, read the documentation: 

Overview of unified routing | Microsoft Learn

Configure route-to-queue rules | Microsoft Learn

Haven’t tried Customer Service yet? Visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Service overview, where you can take a tour and sign up for a free trial. 

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization.See other posts in the series to learn more. 

The post Use percentage-based routing to load-balance customer service requests appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

The Dynamics 365 Business Central Universal Code initiative is live

The Dynamics 365 Business Central Universal Code initiative is live

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Last April I shared that Microsoft is working on an initiative that encourages partners to invest in a cloud-first strategy. Today, we are excited to announce that the Business Central Universal Code initiative went into effect with the launch of Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 release wave 2.

The Universal Code initiative is designed to encourage the use of a modern architecture in customer implementations of Business Central. It gives all on-premises customers the choice to select a cloud (SaaS) implementation when desired while also finding the right apps on the Microsoft AppSource marketplace. The initiative reduces the friction around potentially complex, lengthy, and expensive upgrades and frees up partner capacity over time. Partners can use the additional capacity for activities beyond (re)implementing customizations, providing more value to their customers.

Microsoft partners share the impact of Universal Code

On AppSource, you can easily discover the success of our modern Universal Code initiative. As of October 2022, more than 2,800 Business Central apps are available to respond to the unique requirements of customers. Our partner channel is sharing the positive impact a modern architecture has on their business:

“It was scary to change our industry solution from a customized code to Universal Code as we didn’t want to compromise its rich functionality, but our team succeeded faster than expected because of their great expertise and out-of-the-box thinking. The impact has been enormous!  Today, we are able to serve 14 localizations through fully automated means and we are able to generate weekly releases. In the past this took us a month of manual work. Universal Code in combination with our tooling is providing us the agility to stay in front!”

Richard Postborg, CTO, TRIMIT Group A/S

“For us here at LS Retail, Universal Code is all about sustainability for the customer. With Universal Code and the move to the extensibility framework, customers can upgrade their environments with a fraction of the effort it required before. This is good for everyone involved. The customer can stay current with a minimal effort. The partners can add value in other areas, such as providing business insights. This is a win-win for everyone involved.”

Dadi Karason, CTO, LS Retail

The future of Business Central on-premises is Universal Code

The modern architectural choice of Universal Code is key to the success of our customers, partners, and Microsoft. We encourage customers to have the Universal Code conversation with their implementing partner.

As of October 2022, new Dynamics 365 Business Central customers deploying on-premises and customers transitioning to Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises deployments will have to deploy a “cloud-optimized extensions” architecture (Universal Code) or license payable modules that unlock classic customization behavior.

Learn more

Find supporting materials with details about the Universal Code initiative at https://aka.ms/BCUniversalCode.

Partners can also learn more about next steps by watching the Universal Code session at the Dynamics 365 Business Central virtual launch event. Register to watch on-demand at https://aka.ms/BCLE.

The post The Dynamics 365 Business Central Universal Code initiative is live appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Bring agility, connectivity, and sustainability to the forefront—at Supply Chain Reimagined

Bring agility, connectivity, and sustainability to the forefront—at Supply Chain Reimagined

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Today, many companies face global supply chain challenges. From unexpected demand to ever-increasing fulfillment expectations, the stakes have never been higher. In response, some are looking for new strategies and solutions to help them quickly predict and overcome disruptionsto keep goods moving and their businesses profitable.

Create resilient supply chains with innovative new offerings

Join Chris Capossela and Panos Panay, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Product Officer at Microsoft, for the Supply Chain Reimagined digital event on November 16, 2022, to explore how to bring visibility, agility, connectivity, and sustainability to your supply chain.

You’ll learn about product innovations, essential insights, and the latest trends shaping supply chains, today and tomorrow. We’ll also take on topics like end-to-end visibility and data connectivity. You’ll leave with a better understanding of how technology is being used to improve both the customer experience and the bottom line. 

And you’ll discover real-world best practices for supply chain resilience from thought leaders, industry experts, and Microsoft customers and partners. Plus, you’ll get valuable lessons learned from Microsoft supply chain leaders across our Xbox, devices, and global Azure datacenter teams as they share the inside story of our own supply chain transformation.

Don’t miss this opportunity to engage in energizing conversations with leading experts about how to overcome today’s supply chain challenges.

Register for the Supply Chain Reimagined digital event today.

Learn how to create a connected, agile supply chain from your existing systems

Many of today’s leading supply chain systems are siloed solutions that don’t talk to each other. Because of that, some can’t handle the complexity of supply chain ecosystems that span providers, manufacturers, distributors, third-party and fourth-party logistics, delivery carriers, and consumerswhich leads to inefficient, reactive supply chain operations.

This digital event is a great opportunity for you to explore an effective solution to traditional supply chain issues. You’ll learn about a composable approach to supply chain transformation, which brings together various best-of-breed solutions on a common platform. You’ll see how to use this modular approach to enhance your existing systemsto deliver faster solutions to urgent problems and help your business become more resilient.

At Microsoft, we believe that a modular approach is key to supply chain resilience. That’s why we’re committed to providing solutions that work with your existing application landscapeto add extensible, scalable, and intelligent technologies that immediately improve supply chain practices, workflow, and value. This boosts agility by giving your teams the ability to quickly rearrange and reorient as needed depending on internal or external factors, like a sudden change in materials or a shift in customer priorities.

Moving from a siloed data infrastructure to a unified data platform is another key to supply chain resilience that highlights the benefits of an open, composable solution. Data is at the heart of supply chain operations and having a system that connects data across disparate systems is a critical advantage. You’ll gain end-to-end visibility across inventory systems, supplier schedules, and inbound and outbound orders, and you’ll empower your workforce to move from reactive to proactive, data-driven decision making throughout all areas of your supply chain.

Getting these essential insights is the first step toward building a connected, agile supply chain for your business. And it’s just one aspect of this information-packed digital event. We hope you’ll join us.

Bring sustainability into focus for your organization

Sustainability is a growing imperative for business as customers, regulators, investors, and employees are all asking organizations to do more to reduce their environmental impact. The pressure for measurable change is on supply chain leaders, as their systems often have the largest environmental impacts due to emissions or resource consumption.

At this digital event, you’ll find out how to build sustainable value chains on a secure, connected platform. You’ll learn from leaders in supply chain transformation how to reframe your strategy around sustainability and gain insights into practices that will empower you to deliver sustainability by design.

You’ll also gain insight into how Microsoft leaders have prioritized sustainability in our own supply chain practices, including building circularity into our design and striving to improve the impact across environmental, social, and governance factors.

Strengthen business resiliencenow and in the future

Finally, at the Supply Chain Reimagined digital event on November 16, 2022, you’ll also get an exclusive look at the future of supply chain transformation and the new solutions that can take you there. In addition to learning how to create an agile, connected, and sustainable supply chain, you’ll:  

  • Get key insights you can act on from thought leaders on topics like customer satisfaction, business agility, and operational efficiency.
  • See what’s shaping supply chain innovation today and tomorrow with real-world best practices and lessons learned from Microsoft and industry leaders.
  • Learn how our customers, including Mitch Arends from the Kraft Heinz Company, are partnering with Microsoft to improve supply chain resilience. 
  • Hear exciting announcements and be among the first to see new product innovations unveiledall designed to help protect your business from supply chain challenges.
  • Ask Microsoft supply chain experts all your most pressing questions in a live Q&A chat.  

Join us on Wednesday, November 16, 2022, from 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM Pacific Time (UTC-8).

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Supply Chain Reimagined

Start reimagining your supply chain for a more agile, resilient future.

The post Bring agility, connectivity, and sustainability to the forefront—at Supply Chain Reimagined appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

New sales sequences experience improves seller productivity

New sales sequences experience improves seller productivity

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 sales accelerator helps sellers sell smartly by building a strong and prioritized pipeline, offering context, and suggesting next actions through sales sequences that expedite the sales process. We’ve made three improvements to sales accelerator that can help sellers be even more productive:

  • Sellers can now build their own sales sequences
  • We’ve made the sequence designer even easier to use
  • Sellers can add the Up next widget to any form

Let’s examine each of these improvements in more detail.

Empowering sellers to build their own sales sequences

Before now, sales managers enforced best practices by defining a set of consecutive activities for their sellers to follow throughout their workday. Managers could connect these sequences to leads and opportunities that appeared in the sellers’ work queue. Sales sequences helped sellers prioritize their activities and focus on selling to be more productive and to better align to business processes.

Now, we’re empowering sellers to build their own sequences. Often sellers are in a better position to decide the best engagement strategy to follow with a prospect. Now they can create sequences for themselves and connect them to records. They can also personalize a sequence with their own language and steps.

The following screenshot shows the new functionality in the Personal settings > Sequences page in the Sales Hub app:

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Use security roles to manage permissions to create, connect, and share sales sequences.

Improved design experience for sales sequences

As we give sellers the power to create sales sequences, we need to make sure it’s easy to do. That’s why we created a new sequence designer with a modern UX and an enhanced editing experience. Sellers will realize several immediate benefits:

  • Consistency between the marketing journey and sales sequences means sellers don’t have to learn two different systems.
  • A side panel makes editing easier and scalable with more space.
  • Changes are automatically preserved in the browser and can be saved with a single click.
  • The updated top command bar shows relevant options, leaving more space for editing.
  • An exit icon effortlessly identifies the end of any sequence branch.
  • Enhanced error handling enables easy identification and resolution of any errors.

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Add the Up next widget to any form

Sales organizations may have hundreds or even thousands of records their sales teams are working on. As they start using sales sequences, they typically create a few to try out and use them to determine the best way to grow and scale based on business needs. The trouble with that is that then the organizations have a few records that are connected to sequences and a multitude of records that aren’t. For sellers, this means that only the few connected records appear in the Up next widget in their worklist, because the Up next widget is fed by sequences. They have to juggle the worklist and their leads, opportunities, and other entities tables, where their non-sequenced records live.

To solve this challenge, we now allow sellers to add the Up next widget to any form. Previously, the Up next widget and sales sequences were available only in the sales accelerator workspace.

To help new users easily discover the benefits of the sales accelerator, we’ve started adding the Up next widget to the default lead, opportunity, contact, and account forms. Sellers can easily start using the sales accelerator to create sequences, streamline customer interactions, and win more deals.

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Learn more

New to Dynamics 365 sales accelerator? Watch the overview video and read the documentation: Configure the sales accelerator | Microsoft Learn

Read how to add the Up next widget to any form: Add the Up next widget to a custom form | Microsoft Learn

Read how to allow any security role to create or connect sequences: Sequences in sales accelerator | Microsoft Learn 

Read the seller guide to creating sequences: Create and connect sequences for yourself | Microsoft Learn 

The post New sales sequences experience improves seller productivity appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.