This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Unified routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service considers both work item requirements and your agents’ capabilities to direct incoming work items to the agent that’s best suited to handle them. Routing configurations can be complex. When unified routing issues occur and work items aren’t assigned as expected, you need to track down and fix the problem.
Unified routing diagnostics help by giving you advanced tools for analyzing your routing configurations. Often, however, you have to verify settings manually in different parts of the system, requiring a call to customer support. To help you resolve these routing issues on your own, unified routing diagnostics now include assignment trace and error indication capabilities.
Diagnose assignment issues with assignment trace
Assignment trace gives you insights into why some work items are taking longer to get assigned. In addition to showing the current assignment status, it provides details of the assignment criteria to help you understand why a certain work item is getting assigned incorrectly or is not getting assigned at all.
Identify routing issues with error indicators
Error indicators help you identify and understand the configuration misses that may be preventing a work item from being classified and assigned to the right agent. You can access these enhanced diagnostics at the record level in the Diagnostics tab in the system.
Scenario: Issue with skill matching algorithm criteria
Let’s consider a scenario with Contoso Coffee, which sells coffee beans. A new queue in its Consumer Division handles high-priority queries from Contoso Club members. Renee, the supervisor, added two new agents to the queue. While doing her daily analytics report check, she observes that although there is a new work item in the queue, it has not been assigned yet. She decides to diagnose the reason for it.
Drilling down into the logs per routing stage, Renee quickly finds out with the help of the new error indicator that no agent matched the criteria that were specified in the routing rules. She decides to take a closer look at the assignment trace details to understand the assignment criteria. After looking at the criteria, Renee realizes that the default skill matching algorithm has been set to Exact Match. Although both agents have the required skills to handle the work item, their skills weren’t an exact match. Since the criteria weren’t met, the work item wasn’t assigned.
Having error messages and assignment trace with criteria specified in the diagnostics saved Renee a great deal of time. She has all the information she needs to diagnose and fix the problem, all in one place.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The role of the chief financial officer (CFO) has been evolving for some time, from hindsight report generation to forward-looking advisor, business innovator, and change agent. During the pandemic, many finance leaders took ownership of large-scale digital transformation effortsa trend that is only accelerating. Indeed, a central lesson learned through the challenges of the past two years is the advantage of being able to rapidly adapt an organization to minimize the impact, or avoid altogether, the effects of disruption. Even as we move into a post-pandemic world, disruptive events are here to stayincreasing in both severity and frequency. At the same time, new business models are emerging, such as the subscription economy and service-based experiences like platform-as-a-service (PaaS), that require significant changes to financial and operational models.
Taken together, the need to adapt and overcome disruption and the opportunity presented by emerging business models offer a clear justification of why organizationsand in particular the futurist, change-making CFOmust develop flexibility and adaptability to achieve resilience. This point has not gone unnoticed. According to McKinsey, only 11 percent of companies believe their current business models will be economically viable through 2023, while another 64 percent say their companies need to build new digital businesses to help them get there.1 Despite having so much at stake, many finance leaders face roadblocks on the journey to become more agile. Therefore, this blog looks at 3 forces driving adaptability for CFOs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.
The first force driving adaptability is the modernization of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Recent technological advances, such as the shift from the rigid structures of monolithic ERP to highly adaptable, composable business applications, are a primary benefit driver of ERP modernization. This is perhaps one reason that, according to Gartner, by 2023, organizations that have successfully renovated their ERP platforms will achieve at least a 40 percent improvement in IT agility to deliver business outcomes.2 This will not surprise companies that had completed ERP modernization before or during the pandemic. These businesses grew US corporate equity, assets, and profit ten times faster than corporate debt during the 21 months of the pandemic3proving that savvy companies, boosted by digital transformation, can rapidly pivot to new sales and services models.
Dynamics 365 Finance offers businesses standardized capabilities on a composable ERP platform. Plus, it can function as both a stand-alone solution, allowing organizations to avoid costly rip-and-replace of legacy technology or as a tightly integrated and extensible system. As CFOs look to modernize existing ERP solutions as a path to unlocking adaptability, Dynamics 365 is enabling the transformation and improving IT agility to embrace new business models.
Though expensive to maintain and resource-intense to customize, legacy ERP often becomes highly customized and fragmented as businesses grow and add new solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or warehouse management systems (WMS). These additions are disparate and disconnected from a central ERP, leaving data silos that are difficult to integrate and reconcile. Without unified data available in real-time across the organization, finance leaders can remain stuck in the function of economic guardians and unable to rise to the role of business innovators.
Dynamics 365 Finance is built on a modern, open platform that can be easily connected to both legacy internal solutions and modern, cloud-based systems via RESTful APIs. This flexibility and extensibility serve to unlock adaptability, automate data harmonization, and create a single source of truth. Ultimately, this allows finance teams and the broader organization to confidently make quicker, data-first decisions.
3. Deliver AI-driven insights
As we have discussed previously, AI is poised to transform the finance function. The core set of financial management processes that support the work of every organization are often highly manual, making them slow to innovate and challenging to transform. While progress has been made through automation, specific tasks, like predicting when a customer will pay an invoice or creating an intelligent cash flow forecast, require more person-hours than are available in a month, let alone on demand. This is because these tasks require comprehensive knowledge of large, complex data setsa job ideally suited to the application of AI and machine learning.
Dynamics 365 Finance recently announced the general availability of finance insights, a set of AI-powered capabilities that help companies improve the efficiency and quality of financial processes by leveraging intelligent automation. Finance insights provide three new financial management tools: customer payment insights, cash flow forecasting, and budget proposals. When combined with Dynamics 365 Finance, these tools improve business decision-making by delivering AI-driven business insights that are clearer and faster while also improving operational efficiency by utilizing intelligent automation.
As we have seen here, businesses and the finance leaders who support them need the right technology solutions to drive adaptability if they are to thrive in an era of disruption and to capitalize on emerging trends, such as PaaS, direct-to-consumer (DTC), and the subscription economy. To this end, we walked through three forces that are driving adaptability for CFOs with Dynamics 365 Finance: modernizing ERP systems, enabling a real-time, single version of truth, and delivering AI-driven insights.
GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Governments are increasingly turning to data to address their most urgent issues. But many struggle to unlock the value of their business data to meet the challenges facing their communities. Housing, economic recovery, public safety, and infrastructure are more complex, requiring coordination and data-sharing among many departments and agencies. The pandemic has only reinforced this challenge to turn to digital government services and programs to meet changing expectations and new social norms.
The Microsoft Dynamics 365 government accelerator acts as an information blueprint for partners and developers who are building solutions for government organizations to advance their missions in an all-digital world. An industry-specific data model and building blocks fast-track the development of government business processes and applications in the areas of public finance, public health and social services, public safety and justice, and critical infrastructure. It’s available as a standalone data model that partners can use and build on.
The first release of the government data model supports use cases centered around policy, services, programs, benefits, eligibility, licenses, permits, grants, and more. This standardized data blueprint improves interoperability by unifying and shaping the data in a consistent way for easy use across government applications, processes, and workflows in Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and the entire Microsoft technology stack. With a shared understanding of the data, partners and developers can use these data elements to accelerate their time to value and deliver mission-focused solutions for government agencies.
In addition to the data model, the government accelerator includes:
A customizable Power Apps sample portal that residents and businesses can use to apply for government services, programs, and benefits.
A customizable sample app for digital government services, programs, and benefits to show how Power Platform and Dynamics 365 can use the data model to manage applications and approvals, and transform government programs and services.
Partner and developer documentation, reference guides, entity relationship diagrams, and metadata documentation on the data model, all available on GitHub.
The government data model was built in collaboration with over a dozen partners, including the following founding partners.
Arctic IT is excited to partner with Microsoft on the development of a data model designed for the needs of government organizations. The new data model allows Arctic IT to start with a defined data structure that will enable our government clients to bring multiple departments to work together like never before. This government data model will open opportunities to generate greater citizen insights and actions to improve service delivery and help deliver mission-focused solutions.
Bryan Schmidt, Principal Solution Architect, Arctic IT
We are excited to partner with Microsoft on this project, it’s been great to collaborate with the team on a common data model for government and the public sector. This alignment not only helps build on our partnership with Microsoft, but also provides great value to our joint Government clients using Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. It will enable government organisations to increase productivity, accelerate time to value, and deepen trust.
Jacques Le Grange, Principal Consultant, The Factor
When it comes time to provide the customer with the detailed documentation needed to properly scope out an implementation, the Microsoft Public Sector data models aid in the solution design process and provide a way to respond much faster and more economically to the customer.
Adam Brun, Public Sector Industry Lead Ellipse Solutions
Having a Public Sector unified data platform provides consistency and assists our government clients to deliver on their initiatives more effectively. IBM is partnering with Microsoft to deliver a data model that will allow us to bring our clients’ data and applications together enabling us to deliver government solutions on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.
Darren Clark, Associate Partner, IBM Consulting
Using federal or state funds to deliver grants and other assistance to citizens, businesses, and other government agencies is a complicated process. The number of stakeholders involved, type of recipients, size of transactions, use of disparate systems, and lack of a common data model present challenges for which many state and local governments are not prepared.
These challenges along with the demand for speed, efficiency, and compliance must be met with feature-rich enterprise solutions that can scale to support future programs. Stralto has implemented enterprise grant management solutions on the Dynamics 365 and Power App platform, and we are excited to partner with Microsoft on a government data model that will help improve interoperability and break down the siloed information so agencies can deliver improved experiences.
Shane Lucas, President, Stralto, Inc.
Next steps
To learn about and explore the Dynamics 365 government accelerator, get it now on AppSource or download it from GitHub.
Learn more about our intelligent government solutions to see how Microsoft and our partners drive economic growth and development, enable personalized digital experiences, deliver trusted and secure services, and build a resilient, sustainable future for many government agencies around the world.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are excited to share two new investments in Microsoft Dynamics 365 supply chain portfolio that we are launching in preview. We had announced a partnership between FedEx and Microsoft, in January of 2022, to launch a cross-platform, logistics-as-a-service solution for brands. This partnership is now in preview. As e-commerce is exploding, businesses are challenged with growing their brand affinity while operating profitably to meet their consumer expectation like delivering orders in two days and offering a seamless returns experience. To achieve this, we are combining data insights from FedEx with order insights from Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management so that brands can optimize their transportation, and proactively overcome delays and disruptions enroute to deliver customer orders on time, in a cost-effective manner.
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This partnership will also bring a powerful returns management experience to Dynamics 365, including hassle-free returns options at over 60,000 FedEx drop-off locations, convenient at-home pickups, printer-less QR return labels, and no-box returns. Ultimately, Microsoft and FedEx’s intelligence-driven logistics return services will empower brands with end-to-end visibility of customer returns while also allowing them to update consumers in real-time on the status of their return and refund generation.
Next, we are also excited to announce that we will launch embedded Microsoft Teams collaboration within Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management in preview on May 15, 2022.
This enables hybrid supply chain teams to seamlessly connect over chat, share screens for discussion, post updates on issues in Teams. On top of improving communications, users will also be able to collaborate by sharing sales orders, return orders, and fulfillment order tracking data more effectively, all without exiting their flow of work within Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management. These capabilities help build a hyperconnected business that empowers people to collaborate as one business, everywhereso people can thrive wherever, and however, they work.
Digital transformation of supply chains
We recommend three initiatives to kick start the digital transformation of your supply chains for a resilient and sustainable futureenhancing supply chain visibility, improving collaborative capabilities for better decision making, and designing sustainable operations with a circular economy in mind. You can achieve this by surrounding your existing supply chain and ERP systems without replacing them. Let us dive deeper into these areas and get a sneak peek into how some of our customers are transforming their supply chains.
Enhancing supply chain visibility
It is easier said than done to get real-time supply chain data across the value chain. At Microsoft, we have been investing in bringing new capabilities within our Dynamics 365 Supply Chain portfolio to market over the last year to really help organizations enhance visibility into every aspect of their value chain.
With the latest enhancements to Inventory Visibility Add-in, a highly scalable microservice for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, companies can pull inventory from multiple third-party systems, allowing them to create a single, global view of all inventories. By creating one pool of global inventory from which all orders can pull, companies can often increase inventory accuracy and thereby maximize sales opportunities. Plus, when coupled with the soft reservation capability, sales order fulfillment can avoid over-selling, effectively mitigating the risk of missed sales opportunities that may challenge some organizations.
Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is the number one Coca-Cola bottler in Africa and the eighth largest globally by revenue.
“CCBA is currently implementing a set of Dynamics products including Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with Inventory Visibility, Field Service, and Customer Engagement products. CCBA envisage using Inventory Visibility to provide critical parts availability to field service technicians and to validate in near real-time the sales demands generated from Dynamics Customer Engagement. It will also be a key component of CCBA’s integrated Advance Warehouse Management solution. Eventually, all the orders and inventory journals will be synced or directly created in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for financial and logistics processing.”Elmar Els, Enterprise and Integration Architect, Coca-Cola Beverage Africa (CCBA).
Improve decision making with enhanced collaboration and a data-first approach
From a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft in March 2022, we learned that over one-third of supply chain and operations leaders surveyed are taking steps to improve productivity through system and process improvements to mitigate future challenges.1 While it is imperative to generate insights from real-time supply chain data, the ability to act quickly on these insights is a whole different ball game. Organizations need to collaborate effectively across the different functions globally and with external suppliers and logistics partners to proactively overcome disruptions so that the orders can be delivered on time.
From the Forrester study, it’s clear that transformation is taking place across the entire customer journey, with nearly a third of businesses wanting to improve their operating model by making processes more streamlined across the board. To achieve their goals, companies require a tactical focus on being data-driven, improving the customer journey, and driving operational efficiency at scale.1
Peet’s Coffee is a California-based brand that delivers craft coffee and tea. They offer a variety of productsfrom a single cup to k-cups, capsules to whole beansfor sale in its stores, online, and in the supermarket.
Pre-2020, Peet’s Coffee ran the business on a dated and highly customized, on-premises system and Excel spreadsheets. The company had reached the point where the legacy system was near the end of its life and, after a rigorous software selection process, found Dynamics 365 to be the most comprehensive solution for a multi-channel organization with the best flexibility to adapt to the unique needs of coffee production.
“Dynamics 365 gives us the cloud-based architecture we require to support the growth requirements of the business. The combination of Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Azure cloud services provides Peet’s with a scalable and supportable technology foundation for the future.”Allan Smith, Chief Information Officer, Peet’s Coffee.
By the early days of 2020, Peet’s Coffee had begun a digital transformation process by implementing Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. But what Peet’s Coffee couldn’t have planned for was the dramatic shift in demand that stay-at-home orders would create with the onset of the pandemic. Suddenly, Peet’s Coffee saw sales volume from its traditional channels, wholesale and coffee shops, plummet, while direct-to-consumer (DTC) and grocery channel sales surged 2x. Peet’s Coffee radically modified its implementation plan for Dynamics 365 to support immediate business needs. Ultimately, Peet’s Coffee adopted a new business model (DTC) and pivoted to supply grocery demand while successfully completing the implementation.
“with the pandemicit has been a heck of a year. I’m pleased with the investments we made. I’m pleased with the Blue Horseshoe relationship. I’m glad Dynamics 365 is live at Peet’s. But I wish we had done it earlier.”Eric Lauterbach, President, Peet’s Coffee.
Reverse supply chains and circular economies
One way that manufacturing organizations are improving sustainability is by standing up circular economies. Circular economy, or circularity, is rooted in reverse supply chain management, which deals with what happens after a product’s useful life.
Setting up these circular economy flows can be challenging without an agile and composable supply chain management application. The Microsoft Circular Center program uses Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Microsoft Power Platform to facilitate the reuse and recycling of servers and hardware within our datacenters, which is part of our commitment to achieving zero-waste and carbon-negative operations by 2030. To date, the Circular Centers model has achieved 83 percent reuse and 17 percent recycling of critical parts while contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions by 145,000 metric tons CO2 equivalent.
“We were looking for a warehouse management system that would allow us to model all the product flows that we needed while also connecting to datacenters and other systems used to manage our cloud assets. Dynamics 365 had all these functionalities to build exactly what we needed.”Anand Narasimhan, General Manager of Cloud Supply Chain Sustainability, Microsoft.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain solutions enable organizations to create a digital supply chain that connects global teams, suppliers, and logistic partners for end-to-end visibility and frictionless collaboration. Our agile and composable Supply Chain solutions unify siloed data sources in real-time to detect opportunities, predict and overcome disruptions, and deliver sustainable competitive advantage. Reach out to learn more or get started with a free trial of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management.
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1- A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft. March 2022.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER and MAGIC QUADRANT are trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Healthcare providers around the world are accelerating their digital journey and embracing secure solutions that empower health team collaboration and boost clinician productivity. Embracing mixed realitya set of technologies that superimposes digital data and images in the physical worldbrings new opportunities for healthcare providers to work together more effectively, optimize operations, and accelerate learning all while improving patient care.
With HoloLens 2 and mixed reality, health professionals can connect with remote experts, and call up patient data and go beyond x-rays to consult Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images in 3D at the point of care. Microsoft’s comprehensive ecosystem of mixed reality solutions, including Microsoft HoloLens 2, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides, empower teams to cooperate more effectively and reduce time-to-care.
The benefits of adopting mixed reality in healthcare are significant. According to the commissioned Total Economic Impact of Mixed Reality Using Microsoft HoloLens 2 (“HoloLens 2 TEI study”), Forrester found that healthcare organizations experienced the following benefits:
Improved efficiency to complete ward rounds by 30 percent at an average savings of $41 per hour.
Reduced training time by 30 percent, at an average savings of $63 per labor hour.
Reduced average annual PPE costs by 75 percent, saving $954 per employee.
Forrester also estimates an ROI of 177 percent and a net present value of $7.6 million over three years with a payback of 13 months with HoloLens 2 and mixed reality.
Adapt to the speed of change and improve clinical operations
Dynamics 365 mixed reality on HoloLens 2 is enabling healthcare providers to train medical staff more effectively and efficiently with holographic step-by-step guidance. Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2 enables medical institutions to provide continuous learning and widespread knowledge sharing while removing the need for subject matter experts to be physically present. Simply use your PC and the HoloLens app to author instructions and easily place 2D and 3D content in the real-world environment, showing users how and where to complete tasks.
Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2 empowers doctors, nurses, and technicians to train and to practice using hands-on, simulated learningensuring the entire organization keeps pace with the technological advances in science and technology. According to the HoloLens 2 TEI study, Healthcare providers reduced 80 hours of training time by 30 percent, at an average savings of $63 per labor hour.
When the pandemic hit, like many hospitals, Sheba Medical Center, a comprehensive hospital in the Middle East, sought solutions that would allow it to scale its workforce and expedite task shifting. With Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2, Sheba Medical Center deployed a self-serve training solution that supported staff to learn to operate physical ventilators quickly and easily. With holographic instructions overlaid in their physical environment, hospital staff were able to walk through a guided training simulation proficiently and successfully without requiring a supervisor. As a result, Sheba Medical Center was able to expedite task shifting across medical staff and meet staffing demands, enabling over 60 members of its staff to learn how to operate new devices in just 20 minutes.
“One of the key advantages of the technology is that it works on several layers of the brain you hear it talk, see the presentation in front of you, and also physically touch the ventilator. The more senses involved simultaneously, the better the brain can recall. I ‘tested’ myself later to check what my brain remembered, and it was incredible. It also gave me a sense of empowerment that I can learn and embrace new technologies.”Shiraz Shushan, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) nurse, Sheba Medical Center. Learn more about how Sheba Medical Center optimized staff training.
Empower care teams to collaborate effectively and securely from anywhere
Multidisciplinary care teams encompassing specialized clinicians, clinical staff, and healthcare administrators often span multiple hospitals or locations, adding time, cost, and complexity to patient care. Enable care teams to collaborate remotely and conduct virtual patient consultations with real-time spatial information to accelerate diagnoses and reduce time-to-treatment with HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 mixed reality solutions.
Using Dynamics 365 mixed reality solutions on HoloLens 2, medical staff can consult colleagues’ heads-up, hands-free through an interactive collaborative experience from anywhere in the world. Additionally, healthcare providers can improve access and care delivery to aging and underserved populations with remote assisted care consultations. These remote consultations also lead to major cost savingsthe HoloLens 2 TEI study shows that healthcare providers reduced ward round time by 30 percent saving $41 per hour.
Each year, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust provides acute and specialist healthcare in northwest London for over a million and a half people. Like many healthcare providers around the world, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust rapidly began to redeploy and retrain its staff while at the same time coping with an increasing number of affected patients. With Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust was able to successfully conduct virtual ward rounds and treat very ill patients while limiting staff exposure to the deadly virus. Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust reduced ward rounds from four doctors to one doctor by holding video calls with colleagues and experts from anywhere in the world heads-up, hands free. Doctors were also able to simultaneously access patient data such as medical notes, X-rays, and MRIs to effectively treat patients.
“What it means is that you have all the information, all the specialist care you need at the patient’s bedside there and then and it’s all in one headset.”Dr. James Kinross, consultant surgeon and senior lecturer, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Learn more about how Imperial College NHS Trust enabled virtual ward rounds.
Preparing the next generation of healthcare professionals while reducing costs
According to World Health Organization (WHO), to achieve the goal of universal health coverage by 2030, the world needs nine million more nurses and midwives.2 Dynamics 365 mixed reality and HoloLens 2 are advancing the learning of nurses and removing location barriers of in-person training while reducing costs.
Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2 enables healthcare providers and institutions to enhance the upskilling of nurses and reduce PPE costs with continuous, hands-on learning experiences remotely. Instructors and supervisors can track and monitor student and faculty progress with Power BI dashboards that pull in real-time performance data to maximize participant development and identify areas for operational improvements. The HoloLens TEI study reports that healthcare providers reduced annual PPE costs by 75 percent, saving $954 per employee.
The pandemic disrupted the operations of institutions around the world casting a clear gap in the effectiveness of hybrid learning tools. The School of Nursing at the University of Michigan (the University) turned to Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2 to support hybrid learning because of its ability to provide hands-on skills to nursing students remotely. The University piloted a program allowing students to conduct simulated, repeatable augmented medical procedures one step at a time. Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2 enabled students to follow the guided training heads-up, hands-free and simultaneously perform the procedures on mannequins. The University is continuing to develop and scale the program for more advanced nursing procedures.
“Once we were introduced to HoloLens 2 we learned about Dynamics 365 Guides, and it was pretty exciting because we realized that we could use the guides to create training tools to teach the nursing students how to do these necessary, rudimentary, required skills, and procedures that they have to do in order to move to the next level and go out and practice.”Deborah Lee, clinical assistant professor, School of Nursing at the University of Michigan. Learn more about how University is transforming nursing education.
Next steps
Our customer evidence stories, in addition to the material ROI showcased above, demonstrate that Microsoft offers not only innovative results, but long-term and sustainable solutions for healthcare organizations and beyond.
Request a Dynamics 365 Mixed Reality demo on Microsoft HoloLens 2. Book an appointment with our Microsoft Stores team today. Select ‘Other’ under Choose topic and reference HoloLens 2 demo in “What can we help with”.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
There’s no doubt about it: technology has revolutionized how we do business. But the same technologies that allow consumer goods brands to reach customers worldwide have created an environment in which change happens fast and continually, competition is fiercer than ever before, and even incremental adjustments in strategy can significantly impact a company’s profitability and growth. At the same time, the past two years’ events have laid bare how companies of all sizes are vulnerable to global, social, political, and economic disruptions. With so much change it can be difficult to understand what trends are worth the investment, which is why we’ve taken a data-driven approach to cut through the noise. Four key trends are highlighted below and a more in-depth look can be read in the Consumer Goods Trends in 2022 report by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce.
1. Social commerce makes every online touchpoint a potential storefront
Social media has revolutionized how people connect and is now transforming the way consumers discover and engage with brands. One clear example is social commerce, which is an integrated and seamless strategy for allowing customers to discover, browse, share, and purchase without ever leaving a social media platform. Now brands are opening significant new revenue streams by delivering seamless purchasing experiences to consumers on the social media platform of their choice. The results are staggering, with the value of social commerce sales worldwide in 2021 hitting an estimated $732 billion and projected to grow to $2.9 trillion by 2026.1
Unsurprisingly, social commerce, or live commerce according Gartner Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies, 2021, “can increase brand awareness and generate a large amount of traffic in a short time.”2 One country that is leading the live commerce trend is China.
Dynamics 365 Commerce can help organizations consistently deliver great customer experiences on any social channel or front-end application. This is because Dynamics 365 Commerce can utilize both headless and other modern commerce architectures to seamlessly connect enterprise systems, such as payment processing, content management, and omnichannel inventory.
2. Digital shelf analytics improve online merchandising
In 2021, US merchants recorded a record $870.8 billion in online sales, an increase of 14.2 percent compared to the year prior.3 As online sales continue to increase in volume and importance, brands will need to collect, measure, and monitor product and sales data from a growing variety of sources. One way brands can stay on top of this information is by using digital shelf analytics (DSA) to improve online merchandising.
DSA applications give retailers the ability to monitor data and metrics from all their digital sales channels, including retail digital commerce sites and online marketplaces. DSA solutions may often provide product data from social sites and collect competitive pricing data. These applications use API connections and automated website scraping to ingest data on metrics such as ratings and reviews, product availability and placement, search rankings, and product information content quality, alerting users to updated content.
Another technology related to DSA is the Smart Shelf. According to Gartner, “Smart shelf refers to the connected shelf in a physical retail store, which can include computer vision, weight or other sensors, electronic shelf labels (ESL) or LCD displays.” Gartner classifies the technology as “emerging” with a “high” benefit rating,2 which we believe makes it a technology to watch in the near future.
3. Immersive commerce helps retailers combat the rising cost of returns
One technology trend helping companies improve how they interact with consumers is immersive commerce (IC). IC reinvents customer experiences by integrating physical and virtual worlds via augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality. With IC, brands can give customers a new way of visualizing a product in their space, such as seeing the way a Microsoft Surface Laptop looks on a desk in a home office or how different shades of makeup look before ordering online. Experts believe that AR-enabled shopping will soon become a must-have for furniture retailers. Home Depot, Wayfair, Target, Overstock, and Houzz have already adopted the technology.4 Significantly though, IC goes beyond improving and augmenting the customer experience. It also presents opportunities to solve costly inefficiencies, the most obvious and expensive being returns.
The growth in e-commerce and virtual shopping that accompanied the pandemic led to a corresponding increase in returns. In 2020, total return losses, including the value of lost sales, reached $428 billion, with an estimated $101 billion purely from returns.5 The loss from returns is expected to increase in the next several years, eventually reaching $1 trillion annually. According to Gartner, “Size and ‘best fit’ recommendations using AR can drastically reduce return rates and improve conversion.”2 We agree and believe that in the face of growing losses from returns, brands will likely increase their investments in AR because of its ability to help consumers avoid returns altogether. For example, by allowing customers to see how furniture will look in their house or how clothes will look in a virtual fitting room, they are more likely to purchase the product they need and will enjoy.
Add AR, VR, and mixed reality capabilities to your digital storefronts using apps available in Microsoft AppSource, like Web AR with D365 Commerce from Hexaware Technologies.
4. Supply chain resilience is more crucial than ever
The events of 2020 unleashed a series of disruptions to global supply chains, such as border closures, stay-at-home orders, severely depressed demand in industries like travel and in-person services, and demand booms in others, such as healthcare equipment and operating supplies. The cost of these disruptions is significant: in a study conducted by Deloitte, 32 percent of chief financial officers (CFOs) said that shortages and delays were responsible for depressed sales, and 44 percent said that their costs have increased by 5 percent or more this year as a result.6
For retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, a primary beneficiary of supply chain resilience is the consumer, who will switch retailers if an item is out of stock and expects to be able to order from any channel with fast and convenient delivery to anywhere. This means that retailers need technology solutions that enable omnichannel retail and fulfillment while also ensuring inventory availability.
Interested in learning more about live commerce or digital shelf analytics? Need to cut through market hype to prioritize your retail technology investments? Download Gartner Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies, 2021.
What’s next?
These are just a few trends that you can find inside our report on Consumer Goods Trends in 2022. In the full report, you’ll find relevant and impactful insights drawn from extensive research curated by industry professionals, subject matter experts, and thought leaders. Download your copy of the Consumer Goods Trends in 2022 report. And, be sure to register for the corresponding webinar on Top Retail Trends which you can attend live on Wednesday, May 4, 2022, 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Time or watch afterward on-demand.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER and HYPE CYCLE are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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