Sensor Data Intelligence, a new feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, helps you drive business processes based on automated IoT (Internet of Things) signals from machines and equipment on the production floor. With Sensor Data Intelligence, you can:

• Drive predictive maintenance with details collected from machines and equipment.
• Use a simple onboarding wizard instead of manually installing and configuring components in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS).
• Configure, scale, and extend the solution as business logic running on your own Azure subscription.

Sensor Data Intelligence supports a variety of automated IoT scenarios

Sensor Data Intelligence supports several specific business scenarios, each with its own set of configuration options:

• Asset downtime: Accurately track the efficiency of machine assets by using sensor data to track machine downtime.
• Asset maintenance: Minimize maintenance cost and extend asset life by improving maintenance plans based on sensor readings of critical control points.
• Machine status: Ensure operation efficiency by using sensor readings to notify planners about machine outages and provide options for mitigating potential delays.
• Product quality: Ensure the quality of product batches by comparing sensor readings for properties of each product batch, such as moisture, temperature, or custom-defined quality metrics. The system notifies operators when deviations occur.
• Production delays: Use sensor readings to compare actual cycle time to planned cycle time, and notify supervisors when production isn’t on schedule.
• Custom scenarios: The architecture of Sensor Data Intelligence allows you to customize the out-of-box scenarios and even create new automated IoT scenarios to meet your unique business needs.

Fit equipment with automatic sensors for real-time monitoring and decision-making

You can fit your organization’s assets with a variety of automated IoT sensors, each designed to provide information for a specific purpose. For example, you might fit a metal stamping machine with a sensor that counts each stroke. You could then configure your system to receive a signal from that counter and set a threshold (for example, 40,000 strokes) at which Supply Chain Management should automatically generate a maintenance work order.

Enjoy fast, wizard-based setup for automated IoT scenarios

Sensor Data Intelligence is simple to onboard. Deploy a template of resources (including an Azure IoT hub and Azure stream analytics) by walking through a few steps in a wizard.

It’s just as fast and easy to add a new sensor to your system. Choose a scenario, identify the new sensor, and map it to the required system functionality.

Flexible and extendible Azure architecture lets you fine-tune the system

Because everything is deployed on your own Azure subscription, the solution is easy to scale and configure to your own requirements.

The following architectural diagram provides an overview of Sensor Data Intelligence and its components:

Learn more

Sensor Data Intelligence is a public preview feature of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. For more information, check out the Dynamics 365 release plan and the documentation.

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Sellers rely on email to reach out to contacts when working on deals. The new email address validation feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales flags email addresses in your customer relationship management (CRM) system that are in the wrong format or have an expired or fictitious domain. That lets your sellers connect with subscribers and boost their conversion rates without wasting time and energy trying to communicate with uninterested or non-existent customers.

Improve lead quality with email address validation

Email address validation in Dynamics 365 Sales finds and removes non-working email addresses in your CRM. This lets your sellers prioritize leads that have a valid email address for lower email bounce rates, improved engagement, and a better return on their time.

Email address validation looks for the following errors:

• Incorrect syntax: An address that does not have both a username and an email domain
• Disposable domain: An address that has a known disposable or temporary email domain
• Test or spam address: An address that has known indicators of a test or spam address in the email header or metadata, IP address, HTML code, and email content and formatting
• Expired address: An email account that has expired and can no longer receive or send email
• Address with unregistered domain: A domain that does not appear in the domain registry

You can view flagged email addresses on primary entity and sales insights forms as well as on the Up next widget and work list items.

If you try to send an email to a flagged address, a notification gives you the reason the system marked the address as not valid.

• If you know the email address is correct, select Mark valid. The system marks the address as valid and removes the alert.
• If you don’t know the email address is correct but you still want to send the email, select Compose anyway.

More data hygiene improvements in Dynamics 365 Sales

In addition to email address validation, we have also implemented duplicate detection for leads. Dynamics 365 Sales uses AI and “fuzzy” matching algorithms to detect duplicate leads. By “fuzzy,” we mean that the system identifies as duplicates not only records that have exactly matching field values, but also records that have approximately matching field values. This helps sellers focus on the records that truly matter and clears out any “noise” that they would otherwise have to spend time manually reducing.

On top of that, we are continuously working on even more improvements to data hygiene in Dynamics 365 Sales to help your sellers be more focused and productive. 

Next steps

Increasing your sales team’s productivity could be as simple as eliminating leads with incomplete, non-working, or spam email addressesand Dynamics 365 Sales makes it easy.

To get started with email address validation, read the documentation:

• For admins: Enable email validation (preview) | Microsoft Learn 
• For sellers: Work with invalid email addresses (preview) | Microsoft Learn

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial at Dynamics 365 Sales overview.

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As the world started unwinding from the pandemic, Sarah joined thousands of travelers in booking flights for a long-planned vacation. Realizing she forgot to add her food preferences, she immediately opened a chat on the airline portal. After a long wait, the virtual agent told her to try again later. All the human support agents were busy. She returned after a few hours and started another chat, but she was too late. The chat service had ended for the day. Super upset and frustrated, she left the chat giving the lowest rating.

Busy queues often lead to lower CSAT

Service delivery organizations dread scenarios like Sarah’s, where the customer must wait a long time in the queue, abandons the attempt with a low satisfaction rating, orworst of allboth. Managing workloads effectively during periods of peak demand is a frequent problem for all businesses. Service organizations face the additional challenge of support requests that arrive outside of business hours. Companies are looking for ways to enhance their customers’ experience to drive higher CSAT. Efficient queue overflow management is an essential part.

Introducing queue overflow management in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

With queue overflow management, businesses can proactively manage overflow when callers are experiencing abnormally long wait times or a queue has many unassigned work items.

Corrective actions are specific to service channels or modalities. During peak demand, organizations can transfer calls to a different queue or to voicemail or offer to call the customer back later. Similarly, conversations and records can be transferred from an overflowing queue to a different queue.

How to set up queue overflow management

In the Customer Service admin center, select Queues > Advanced queues. Select Set overflow conditions in the Overflow management tile.

Then define the conditions that will determine whether the queue is overflowing and what action to take if it is.

Overflow evaluation happens before a work item is added to the queue. You can think of it as a sort of “pre-queueing” step.

How queue overflow management would make Sarah a happy customer

Let’s return to our excited traveler Sarah to learn how queue overflow management would help the airline avoid a dissatisfied customer. She’s bought her tickets and initiated a chat to add a meal preference to her reservation. The airline now has two queues for customer chats. With customers already holding in one, queue overflow management automatically routes Sarah to the other, where there’s no wait.

Investigate queue overflow events with routing diagnostics

Dynamics 365 Customer Service captures information about queue overflow events in routing diagnostics. Admins can use the information to understand failure scenarios and plan their business workflows accordingly.

Prepare better to serve better

It’s hard to predict peak demand events. Queue overflow management can help. Admins and supervisors are better prepared for contingencies, and customers like Sarah get a faster resolution to their issues.

Learn more

To find out more about queue overflow management in Customer Service, read the documentation: Manage overflow of work items in queues

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 Queue overflow management keeps customers happy during peak demand appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Skill-based routing automatically assigns the agents with the right skills to work on customer support requests. With skill-based routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, your call center can reduce the number of queues it operates, improve agents’ productivity, and increase customers’ satisfaction.

To get the most out of skill-based routing, it should be easy to onboard your agents with the right set of skills, proficiencies, and queues. It should be just as easy to modify your workforce configuration to keep up with the ever-changing demands on your call center. With the October 2022 release, Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduces a new skills hub and an enhanced user management experience that helps you onboard and manage the agents in your workforce more efficiently than ever before.

One-stop skill-based routing in the new skills hub

Let’s look at a common scenario. Morgon is the call center administrator for Contoso Enterprises, a global e-commerce company. Morgon has observed a surge in service requests around “Returns” in the North American region. Customers are facing long wait times because of it. In response, Morgon wants to make two changes to his workforce.

First, he wants to boost the “Returns” skill and support the additional requests using agents who have lower proficiency in handling returns but can provide timely support. Second, he wants to move some agents from the Latin American queue to the North American queue to assist with the additional demand.

Previously, Morgon would have had to visit separate admin centers to accomplish these tasks. Now he can do everything in one place: the skills hub.

Skills, skill types, proficiency scales, and intelligent skill finder models are all important parts of skill-based routing. The new skills hub is the one-stop place to manage these attributes across your entire call center.

Here’s what you’ll find in the new skills hub:

• An overview of all the skills you’ve configured in your call center and the number of users associated with each one
• A single seamless flow to create a skill, add agents to it, and assign the agents’ proficiency in the skill
• A simple way to add or remove multiple agents from a skill in just a few steps
• An out-of-box proficiency scale to help you start using skill-based routing in as few steps as possible
• An intuitive experience to create or modify proficiency scales

Enhanced user management

Along with skills, Customer Service uses queues and capacity profiles to efficiently route work requests to the agents best suited to handle them. With enhanced user management, you can easily view how your agents are configured across these attributes. Managing the attributes for multiple agents takes just a few simple steps.

Here are some highlights of the new user management experience:

• A page that lists the skills, proficiency scales, queues, and capacity profiles of all agents in your organization
• Search functionality to find agents with specific skills or other attributes
• The ability to update the attributes of multiple agents at once
• One place to manage skills, proficiencies, queues, and capacity profiles of users

You can even enable agents to participate in swarming requests as part of the collaboration features in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

With the new skills hub and enhanced user management, call center administrators can now quickly configure their workforce and make changes on the fly to keep up with customers’ varying demands.

The skills hub and enhanced user management are available as a public preview in the Dynamics 365 Customer Service admin center for all organizations.

Next steps

To learn about the new features and try out their capabilities, read the documentation:

• Skill-based routing in Omnichannel for Customer Service | Microsoft Learn
• Set up skills and assign agents | Microsoft Learn
• Overview of user management | Microsoft Learn
• Overview of unified routing | Microsoft Learn

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 Skill-based routing and one-stop user management help you keep up with customer service demands appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Accounts Payable teams around the globe spend hours processing invoices that come from different channelsfax, mail, email, handwritten, and electronic data interchange (EDI). The sheer volume of invoices is a difficult burden to overcomeand the number grows exponentially with the number of office locations. Resource-strained finance teams must manually transfer invoice details to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This error-prone process increases finance cycle times, delays closing the books, and prevents timely financial statements. Misplaced invoices and delayed payments cost organizations thousands in lost vendor discounts. Wouldn’t it be great if all that manual work could be automated? With the new invoice capture feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, it can.

Invoice capture automates the entire AP invoice-to-pay process using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With invoice capture, employees scan invoices as they arrive, OCR extracts critical data, and the system matches invoices with purchase orders, identifies exceptions and data errors, and updates financial records. Employees can quickly route coded invoices for approval through workflows that follow rules based on the invoice data and amount.

Invoice capture helps control spending and reduce paperwork

Invoice capture delivers the following benefits:

• Spend control: Automated processing and better audit trails deliver more real-time visibility into spend and better reporting, which results in faster responses to time-sensitive vendor inquiries. This can help your business avoid late bill payments, take advantage of time-based discounts, and accelerate approvals.
• Faster cycle times: Freeing your AP teams from manual data entry reduces errors, trims weeks from the payment cycle, and allows the team to focus on more strategic tasks like improving vendor relationships, optimizing sourcing contracts, and negotiating deeper discounts.
• Paperless AP: Say goodbye to filing cabinets, lost invoices, and printer jams. With a fully digitized process, not only do you reduce your carbon footprint and printing costs, but documents are more secure.

Key capabilities of invoice capture

• Invoice data extraction from multiple channels: Invoice capture offers flexible configuration settings that allow you to automate invoice processingregardless of how invoices come across your desk, whether they’re faxed, EDI, or even handwrittenand consolidate them centrally for approvals.
• Empowered by AI Builder and Azure Form Recognizer: Invoice capture contains a prebuilt AI model powered by Microsoft AI Builder and Azure Form Recognizer, which can process most invoice formats from all over the world without extra model training effort. The Microsoft AI Builder continuously improves the model.
• Custom AI model for invoice processing: When business complexity prevents the prebuilt model from recognizing an invoice format, invoice capture provides a way to build custom models to supplement the prebuilt model.
• Intelligent and flexible business rule engine: Sometimes the AP team needs more information to make the right decision than the basic details on the invoice. It’s often helpful to have information from the supply chain or bank account details, for instance. Using an intelligent business rule engine, you can define derivations and validation rules to accommodate the complexity of your vendor invoice processing. This helps to streamline the accounts payable automation and relieves the AP team from repetitive work, allowing them to focus on more value-added tasks.

Next steps

Take the first step by downloading our public preview of invoice capture from Microsoft AppSource. Check out the documentation to get started. Then tell us what you think!

The post Automate your Accounts Payable process with invoice capture appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.