The challenges of the past few years have highlighted that no business is immune to sudden changes. Embracing mixed reality as a strategic initiative is key to ensuring business continuity and solidifying future stability and resiliency. Microsoft’s comprehensive ecosystem of mixed reality solutions, including Microsoft HoloLens 2, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and Dynamics 365 Guides, help manufacturing organizations navigate complex situations, empower frontline workers, and create new customer experiences.

The benefits of adopting mixed reality today are significant. Based on the Microsoft-commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) report (“HoloLens 2 TEI study”), HoloLens 2 is delivering 177 percent return on investment (ROI) and a net present value (NPV) of $7.6 million over three years with a payback of 13 months. According to the HoloLens 2 TEI study, manufacturing organizations that have deployed mixed reality solutions on HoloLens 2 have:

• Reduced training time by 75 percent, at an average savings of $30 per labor hour.
• Saved an average of $3,500 per avoided expert trip.
• Avoided 240 to 320 hours of average lost throughput per year.

Increase productivity with remote inspection and audits

Dynamics 365 mixed reality is reducing the requirement to fly in an expert technician and/or an auditor on site to conduct an inspection. With Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2, manufacturing companies can conduct routine inspections and audits with remote experts from any place in the world at any time. Manufacturers can deliver real-time, interactive guidance from experts located anywhere in the world right to their employees on the factory floor. This solution allows onsite workers to collaborate with remote leaders and experts to solve business problems in real-time, using 3D annotations to access, share, and bring critical information into view. With accurate real-world overlay of 3D assets, instructions, and collaborative markup, workers are free to see their surroundings and use both hands during inspections.

Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2 enables manufacturer organizations to conduct site visits, inspections, maintenance, and repairs remotelyboosting efficiency and reducing costs. According to the HoloLens 2 TEI study, manufacturers saved an average of $3,500 per avoided expert trip.

Eaton, a multinational power management company, sought a solution to enable the company to conduct audits remotely. Traditionally, auditors had to travel to plants to conduct audits but during the COVID-19 pandemic travel was brought to a standstill and travel was restricted. With Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2, employees can walk through the audit checklist with the remote auditor and ensure that employees are following safety guidelines. Since launching Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2, Eaton is averaging more than 50 remote sessions per month across all global sites saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on travel-related expenses and empowering Eaton to pay-off its mixed-reality investment within five months.

“Using Remote Assist on HoloLens, we’re bringing the outside viewer perspective into the plant. Let’s say they are checking a quality dimension. If someone on the call has been on another Gemba walk in another site, they can say, ‘You should contact plant XYZ, because they do a similar measurement, but they’re using an automated process.”Alexandre Georgetti, Director of Eaton’s Vehicle Group Manufacturing Strategy. Read more about Eaton’s story here.

Address manufacturing skills gap with guided assembly and training

Dynamics 365 mixed reality is reducing the knowledge gap and helping enterprises adapt at the speed of change. Using Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2, manufacturing companies are accelerating learning, standardizing processes, and reducing errors with step-by-step instructions. Simply use your PC and the Microsoft 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 manufacturing organizations to offer expansive training programs that teach skills and processes that are specific to their offerings and production needs. Furthermore, manufacturers see direct improvements in learning and retention, quality of work and downtime, and training costs savings. According to the HoloLens 2 TEI study, manufacturers reduced training time by 75 percent, at an average savings of $30 per labor hour.

Toyota, a multinational automobile manufacturer, produces over a million vehicles each year in North America and depends on solid training programs that ensure team members are building every car to precise specifications. Traditionally, trainers worked one-on-one with team members, demonstrating a process, and then watching them replicate it. Toyota found this approach to be inefficient and susceptible to bottlenecks. With Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2, trainers create training materials and allow team members to train independently and understand the steps involved and repeating any necessary motions numerous times to develop muscle memory while allowing for one trainer supervisor to supervise multiple trainees at the same time. Since deploying Dynamics 365 mixed reality solutions on HoloLens 2, Toyota has reduced inspection time by 20 percent.

“Our training efficiency is increased, trainers and trainees are receptive to the technology, and they rank Dynamics 365 Guides on HoloLens 2 as their preferred way to learn.”Zach Reeder, Technology Development Engineer at Toyota Motor North America. Read more about Toyota’s story here.

Connect workers with experts to enable always on service

Dynamics 365 mixed reality is helping enterprises deliver exceptional service with personalized customer experiences. Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2 connects field technicians with remote experts for a seamless collaboration that includes content capture abilities, interactive annotations, and contextual data overlays for easier repairs and fixes. Equip field technicians with all the important, relevant information directly into their line of sight, creating actionable experiences for employees.

Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2 improves field task efficiency, reduces rework, and improves first-time fix ratesincreasing capacity for work and improving customer outcomes. According to the HoloLens 2 TEI study, manufacturers avoided 240 to 320 hours of average lost throughput per year.

L’Oral, one of the top multination cosmetics manufacturers with employees in 150 countries, has a wide range of products that require sophisticated machinery for production and packaging. When a machine requires service, L’Oreal flies out an expert to address the issue, increasing downtime machine and travel costs. To solve this challenge, L’Oreal deployed Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2 to enable remote experts to effectively collaborate with frontline workers to resolve the issue expeditiously and reduce operational costs. With Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2, remote experts can see what the technician sees and react to the same image with annotations and share critical information in real-time. Since deploying Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2, L’Oreal has reduced downtime by 50 percent.

“The time we spend on diagnostics and resolving issues has been cut in half. This has led directly to lower operational costs. It has also allowed us to be more agile and flexible”Georges-Alban Farges, Industrial Performance Manager at L’Oral. Read about L’Oral’s story here.

Next steps

Stay tuned as we continue this blog series with a deep dive spotlight on healthcare, education, architecture, engineering, and construction industries. In the meantime, learn more about mixed reality applications on HoloLens 2 and get started today:

• Learn more about Microsoft HoloLens 2 and mixed reality capabilities.
• To learn more about business benefits and cost savings of mixed reality solutions, read the Total Economic Impact Of Mixed Reality Using Microsoft HoloLens 2 report.
• 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”.

Sources:

1- The Total Economic Impact Of Mixed Reality Using Microsoft HoloLens 2 Report, Forrester, 2022

The post Manufacturers are mitigating disruptions with HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 mixed reality solutions appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

I am thrilled to share an overview of the exciting new capabilities coming in the 2022 release wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, and more importantly, the value that these new capabilities will bring you because we’ve tailored it to meet, and exceed, the needs of today’s marketers and their customers.

Marketing has always been a team sport and is even more so in today’s landscape.

Marketers are being chartered to think about the entire customer journey and to champion across the organization to elevate end-to-end customer experiences. They’re asked to be more agile in responding to market conditions, to be more efficient in content creation, and to deliver it all with higher quality, greater impact, and proof that they’re delivering business impact. With the upcoming release wave, Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you meet every one of these challenges head-on.

It will give you the flexibility like never before to easily collaborate across people, departments, and applications, to personalize customer interactions across the entire customer journey, and to design custom experiences to happen in the moments that matter, thanks to real-time customer journey orchestration.

Here are a few highlights of some of the exciting new innovations that will be released for general availability over the next few months and what they can mean for business users and marketers alike.

Easily collaborate to leverage the full power of your team

Marketing teams need to respond to market conditions quickly in order to create impactful moments. This has gotten more complicated with hybrid workplace scenarios and the fact that more and more marketers are engaging with colleagues in other departments to land the right engagement across the end-to-end customer journey. To keep these cross-functional teams (and frankly all of us) productive, we must avoid context switching, and instead, keep people in the flow of work.

With this release, we bring Microsoft Teams chat natively into Dynamics 365 Marketing to allow you to easily collaborate with your team without leaving the flow of work. Because each Teams chat is tied to the individual work item, it enables everyone involved with the project to have the same context and increases focus so they can create the highest-impact journeys, emails, and other content more efficiently.

For Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service users, the new unified customer activity timeline will bring cohesiveness across the end-to-end customer journey. The timeline is interwoven with activities from these Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps, so you don’t need to leave your flow of work to view your Dynamics 365 Marketing real-time marketing interactions. With the full picture of engagement history at their fingertips, customer-facing teams can better create impactful journeys, plus easily search or filter to find the relevant interaction history.

And to offer the ultimate in flexibility, in addition to the comprehensive list of out-of-the-box triggers, you can now trigger journeys or measure goals from common customer data changes across any Dynamics 365 customer data. Each interaction, such as a completed application, a renewed contract, or a closed service ticket, represents an opportunity to engage more deeply with your customers. Those interactions can now be used to kick-off, drive, and measure customer journeys in just a few clicks, without requiring developers or customizations.

Hyper personalize experiences with ease

Personalization is no longer a luxury. It is critical to increase the likelihood that customers will make an initial purchase, repurchase, and recommend your products or services to others. Personalization drives impact. Companies with significant growth generally have a higher usage of personalized marketing.

One of the first steps in personalization is to create compelling content that will resonate with your customers. To make this easier, we are introducing reusable content fragments to allow your team to quickly assemble beautiful emails with just a few clicks. These content fragments can include layout, advanced elements, and personalization, so there is no limit on the content you can create and save for reuse. With a library of reusable content, you can simply mix and match different pieces to create your messages.

Next, personalize your emails to delight your customers. Personalization within the email editor is also faster and easier than ever before. You can use pre-defined dynamic text to personalize your emails without the need to know the underlying data model to do it.

You can also personalize and customize your emails by creating conditional content with an easy-to-use, no-code experience. Use any mix of personalized text, images, and layouts, and create rules for selecting the right content, using segment membership, attributes, or triggers. For instance, members of the Contoso Winery Red Wine Club will receive the images/text/layout for red wines, while members of the White Wine Club will receive those pertaining to white wines instead. You will also get detailed analytics to help monitor how each variation is performing.

Build personalization into customer-centric journeys that can boost your return on investment (ROI) with the help of AI-powered next best content. In addition to allowing you to specify manual rules for content/offer selections, you can leverage AI-based optimization to tailor content/offers to match the preferences, interests, and motivations of each of your unique customers. After all, compelling content and offers are powerful tools in getting customers to engage or keeping them from churning.

And for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights users, when it comes to getting your message out to the right customers, you can choose to use customer insights data from your own Azure Data Lake Storage to build segments, specify conditions, and personalize messages to build rich, real-time journeys while maintaining full control over the underlying data.

Design custom experiences with flexibility and agility

Customer expectations of today demand that businesses rise to a new level of customer obsession to meet them. Winning and keeping customers is becoming increasingly more competitive. Brands must provide the best experience possible when customers engage. This is why we continue to invest in building out more and more real-time engagement capabilities into our Dynamics 365 applications.

In the last Dynamics 365 Marketing release, we introduced native support for SMS providers Twillio and Telesign to enable organizations to connect around the world via SMS. Capabilities in this release enable you to continue the conversation with your customers by taking action on SMS keyword replies. You will be able to create custom keywords for use in SMS replies that will guide the journey based on the response to ensure flexibility and agility are built into your customer experiences.

Additional capabilities allow you to trigger journeys more selectively based on qualifying conditions to better drive customers to action. We eliminate the need to create cascading branches or specifying conditions with more than two possibilities. For instance, to re-engage buyers who have abandoned carts, you may want to qualify buyers who have more than $100 in their cart for a journey that gives a $10 coupon incentive to complete their purchase. This empowers your marketing team to engage the right audience in the most impactful way, and to have more flexibility by re-using the same event trigger for a variety of scenarios. These capabilities increase a marketer’s productivity by simplifying, not only the journey logic and creation, but also the analysis when journeys are live as well as the readability and maintenance of more complex journeys.

And finally, if you can dream it, you can do it. With a seamless integration between real-time marketing journey orchestration and Power Automate, we enable you to have limitless customization possibilities and fine-grained control of your customer experience by leveraging a wealth of connectors and actions. This allows semi-technical marketers to automate journey steps quickly and easily leaving deep technical resources to be more focused on complex needs.

Leading the next generation of business applications

We are excited to be delivering so much value in the 2022 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing, value that will enable you to elevate end-to-end customer experiences, be more agile in responding to market conditions, be more efficient in content creation, and to deliver it all with higher quality and greater impact.

The capabilities highlighted above are planned to be released from April 2022 through September 2022. Consult the release notes for the most up-to-date details.  

I’m excited to take you on this exciting journey with usas always, there will be more to come.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Marketing

To learn more about how your organization can elevate your customer experiences, visit the Dynamics 365 Marketing webpage and sign up for a free Dynamics 365 Marketing trial to explore real-time customer journey orchestration and the other rich capabilities offered in Dynamics 365 Marketing.

And join us at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on April 6, 2022, for an inside look at what’s new across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

The post Get unparalleled value with Dynamics 365 Marketing 2022 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As discussed in our previous blog, Microsoft Dynamics 365 was recognized as a leader in Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises. This month, we want to further substantiate our value proposition to customers by sharing the results of a recently commissioned Total Economic Impact (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft. The study examines the potential return on investment (ROI) that enterprises may realize by deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Methodology and purpose

TEI is a methodology developed by Forrester Research to assist companies with technology-related purchase decisions by helping technology vendors effectively communicate the value proposition of their solutions. The purpose of a TEI study is to provide business decision-makers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Forrester Consulting interviewed five organizations that used Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to conduct the TEI study. The characteristics of these businesses and the results of the interviews were then aggregated to develop a composite organization. The key findings of the study are based on the composite organization and are summarized below.

Key findings

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is a solution that is helping product-centric organizations to revamp their existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and it enables customers to considerably increase supply chain visibility. It also empowers users to plan better, improves organizational agility, and maximizes asset uptime, allowing companies to operate smoothly and profitably.

Forrester’s study revealed five quantifiable impact areas: increased production volume, reduced downtime, improved quality, reduced infrastructure cost, and increased developer productivity.

Let’s look at each of these areas in more detail to examine how Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management delivers value across enterprise supply chains.

Increased production volume

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management empowers users to improve demand planning by enriching demand forecasting with AI. It also allows companies to deliver production schedule visibility to the shop floor and to dynamically rebalance production schedules based on real-time material, labor, and equipment availability. These improvements translate into more responsive planning and scheduling, an improved synchronization of supply and demand, and the identification and minimization of production bottlenecks. The result for customers is increased production throughput that was worth $24.3 million over a three-year time horizon.

Reduced downtime

Our solution also enables users to create a connected factory and proactively manage the shop floor using a real-time view of production and inventory. This is one reason why customers surveyed by Forrester reported substantial increases in data collection from their supply chains. This data improves visibility into asset utilization and resource availability and provides a systematic means of identifying root causes of machine downtime.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management also provides the ability to rapidly respond to quality issues and parts obsolescence with engineering change management. The organizations in Forrester’s study leveraged these capabilities to reduce costly downtime of business-critical production equipment, which improved overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and ensured that production lines can run as scheduled 24x7x365. For an organization with 500 manufacturing machines, this reduction in downtime was valued at more than $1.5 million over three years.

Improved quality

Interviewees further noted that Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management allowed their organizations to uncover new pathways for improving product quality. In particular, real-time production data provided the means for understanding when variations in raw material quality or machine operating characteristics were impacting quality. And, because they were able to make immediate decisions, they could ensure that quality was maintained.

By taking actions to improve adverse conditions in real-time, scrap rates declined, and root causes were identified, allowing these organizations to avoid unnecessary losses while simultaneously improving production quality. Over three years, the improvements to product quality reduced costs by more than $6.8 million.

Reduced infrastructure cost

A critical improvement point for the organizations studied by Forrester were the gains realized by retiring multiple legacy applications that were often on-premises, highly-customized, disparate, and disconnected. By migrating systems and processes to a modern cloud-based solution, users were able to pay less for server maintenance and system administration as well as avoid the significantly higher cost that would have been incurred to scale their prior solutions. These infrastructure cost reductions totaled $11 million in three years.

Increased developer productivity

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management takes advantage of Microsoft Power Apps to reduce customization costs by utilizing low-code/no-code extensions. Plus, it delivers operational application services by running on the Microsoft Azure cloud, significantly reducing the need for developers and technical staff to focus on system administration. By freeing up these resources to deliver other, higher-value work, the financial impact of productivity improvements is projected to be approximately $0.7 million over three years.

Unquantified benefits

Study participants also reported other substantial organizational benefits that were unquantifiable in nature. These include increased flexibility to adapt, improved ability to deliver on-time, improved customer satisfaction, better forecasting capabilities for improved supplier collaboration and planning, and improvements to team members’ day-to-day work realized by breaking down siloes between teams and functions.

The big picture

As we have seen here, Forrester’s study uncovered five quantifiable impact areas as well as several unquantified benefits. When these are considered in combination, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management delivered a total economic impact of $44.33 million in financial savings over three years. At $23.27 million, the investment provided a ROI of 90 percent and took 22 months to pay back.

Read the full report: A Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

What’s next?

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is an agile and composable ERP solution. It enables manufacturers, retailers, and distributors to create a connected, resilient, and digital supply chain by enhancing operational visibility, improving planning agility, and maximizing asset uptime. In addition, it unifies data from almost any source in real-time and generates intelligence by leveraging AI and machine learning to proactively detect opportunities and develop a long-term competitive advantage.

We recently sat down with an analyst from Forrester to discuss the Total Economic Impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. You can view the discussion in our on-demand webinar: Build a resilient and sustainable supply chain. If you are ready to see what our modern, cloud-based supply chain management solution can do for your organization, we invite you to start today with a free Dynamics 365 trial.

Sources:

Forrester. The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. August 2021.

The post Total Economic Impact of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

A successful digital transformation requires weaving together technology, data, process, and operational change. If one of these domains fails to make the grade, your entire transformation may be in jeopardy.

These four domains have one thing in common and that is they rely on people and what they bring to the table. It’s the people that matter mostfrom formulating a vision to crafting the plan and adjusting it on the fly to calculating every detail many times over.   

When the stars align and each person on the team contributes to the best of their ability, success is exhilarating. Inter-related domains can be blended into one methodical sea of changeinvigorating not just the transformation team, but enveloping the entire organization with a sense of deep pride. The accomplishment is worn like a badge of honor as every employee is positively touched by the success of the transformation.

And there is no better example than G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers’.

G&J Pepsi is the largest family-owned and operated Pepsi franchise bottler, employing more than 1,600 people at 13 locations in Ohio and Kentucky, with production facilities in Lexington and Winchester, Kentucky, and in Columbus and Portsmouth, Ohio.

The key to the success of this 10-time Pepsi corporate customer service award winner is G&J Pepsi’s continuous dedication to innovation. They set out to further elevate service delivery by focusing on account acquisition, customer service, and field service core processes. In short, G&J looked to unlock new and existing revenue opportunities by empowering workers and optimizing operations. As a result, G&J Pepsi is now converting more leads to satisfied customers, delivering even better customer service, and increasing field service technicians’ first-time fix rates.

1. Technology

G&J Pepsi needed a digital thread to connect business functions and leaned on Microsoft Dynamics 365 due to its hassle-free integration, allowing for application portfolio simplification and basically, it just played well to G&J Pepsi’s IT strengths.

One of the biggest new business opportunities for G&J Pepsi was its field service workforce to service beverage and non-beverage equipment beyond its current sales territory. Increasing first-time-fix service would allow G&J Pepsi to expand beyond their current market. Leveraging Dynamics 365 Field Service and Dynamics 365 Sales would remove the boundaries that limited G&J Pepsi.

To realize revenue, frontline workers, including sales and field service needed to unify in the customer journey. G&J Pepsi also knew a huge opportunity existed to accelerate its end-to-end customer process. This included steps such as lead generation, new customer account creation, payment establishment, equipment preparation, installation scheduling, equipment installation, equipment servicing, equipment recovery, and every accompanying process. 

2. Data

What was key to creating a unified, optimized customer journey? Centralizing real-time data with a scalable solution. 

G&J Pepsi created a Customer Engagement Management (CEM) platform with Dynamics 365 Field Service and Dynamics 365 Sales. The customer is central to everything the company does; however, its processes and supporting technology said otherwise.

Before CEM, a business development representative (BDR) would scan paper and digital notes, in SharePoint, Power BI, and other apps. There was no view into interactions that had taken place with the BDR, field service technician, or customer service rep. There was no single source of truth, no way to transfer knowledge, and no infrastructure for tracking leads. These inefficiencies cost G&J Pepsi $180,000 in revenue per month from lost sales.   

Data is now centralized in real-time, up-to-the-minute. Dynamics has streamlined communications and provided complete visibility and in doing so it has empowered G&J Pepsi to focus on new business. Previously, sales, field service, and leadership learned what was happening with customers in indirect, incomplete, time-lagging pathways. Now information is up-to-date and accessible by all who impact customers. 

3. Processes

Now that data is up-to-date, processes can be streamlined. The team has mapped out 150 processes and eliminated 200 problems prior to digitizing. How? By working directly with the eventual customers of the systemsales, field service, and frontline workers. One such effort eliminated 170,000 manual touchpoints annually. 

As an example, if a delivery team exchanged a piece of equipment mislabeled on a work order, the technician would have to return to the office to receive a corrected work order. Now, the equipment manager can look up the asset on the desktop, correct the mistake, and seconds later the delivery team has the correct information to complete the job.

Technicians are empowered to arrive at the right time (receive operating hours and suggested installation time from the BDR), on the right schedule (schedulers can review the technician’s other work to optimally schedule), the right way (integrated mapping functionality), and with the right equipment (obtained from the work order supplemented with account history.)

From the mobile app, technicians have all their pertinent information at their fingertipsservice tasks, customer details, product needs, and more. The result? Higher first-time-fix rates, opening the door to utilize field technicians’ time and expertise to create new revenue streams.

4. Operational changes

Now G&J Pepsi has automated some routine tasks, unburdening the employee from tedious operational tasks. Completing certain actions within Dynamics 365 triggers a Power Automate flow to kick off another process. For example, a piece of equipment is requested by a BDR for a new customer. Once the BDR puts in the request for equipment for a new customer, the creation of a new work order is triggered, which moves through equipment prep to scheduling a field technician for installation.  

The little things that used to cause big delays are now gone. The scheduling team utilizes capabilities to assign best resources to a work order and can now look across service locations instead of only selecting from a smaller subset of available technicians. Field service technicians use the mobile app’s built-in map and routing features to optimize travel time and status flags to indicate if they are on-site or traveling. With minimal development effort, G&J extended the mobile app to provide technicians the ability to generate service reports while at a customer site and instantly email.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Field Service

The positive results have impacted everyone who touches the customer. Improvements are across a wide range of sales, service, and overall company key measures. G&J Pepsi attributes this success to frontline workers and the team, who have made everyone’s ability to serve the customer exponentially better.

And the commitment to innovation continues. Team members are excited to explore Dynamics 365 Remote Assist’s mixed-reality capabilities to both grow their service business as well as build knowledge across existing and newer agents. G&J Pepsi’s first-time-fix use case explores technician access to real-time virtual visual expertise and the ability to increase on-site resolution.  

Read the complete G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers’ story.

Read more about Dynamics 365 Field Service.

The post 4 key elements to a successful field service transformation appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In telecommunications, avoiding downtime is Job One. Planning, scheduling, and tracking maintenance operations that can reduce or avoid outages is critical. Plant operators need to have a quick, accurate picture of maintenance while maximizing efficiency.

Version 2.0 of Dynamics 365 telecommunications accelerator includes an extended data model and new sample applications to help you meet customer needs and realize time-to-value more quickly.

The first release of Dynamics 365 telecommunications accelerator provided place management and telecommunication sales capabilities for network and mobile operators, internet service providers, and others in telecommunications:

• The ability to tie services, products, and deployed plant and network resources to specific geocoded physical locations such as buildings or a campus
• Enhanced lead management with built-in service availability, qualification checks, and lookups for network resources, network mapping, and addresses
• A telecommunications extension for the Common Data Model, with telco-specific data entities and attributes for fast application development

Partners who work with the Microsoft Power Platform can extend the data model or sample applications.

Add support for maintenance types, plans, network resources, and zones

Version 2.0 of the Dynamics 365 telecommunications accelerator enhances the extended data model and adds sample applications. Plant operators can define maintenance types and plans, starting with supplied sample data for warranty, contractual, and compliance.

Operators can also define types of network resources, such as optical network units, antennas, and switches. They can also define network zones and service areas, tracking where they’re deployed, the accounts they serve, and the manufacturer. It’s all fully customizable and configurable out of the box with Dynamics 365.

Schedule maintenance plans and repeatable tasks

In the latest version of telecommunications accelerator, plant operators can easily schedule repeatable maintenance tasks. This not only streamlines operations, it also helps operators respond to audit and liability questions by tracking maintenance activities.

What our partners are saying

Rhyan J. Neble, Vice President of Product Innovation at ETI Software: 

Microsoft’s telecommunications accelerator not only makes it possible for ETI to introduce new features to our customers faster, it empowers our team to innovate and extend our solution. For example, the maintenance scheduling features will enable our digital twin solution to identify customers and service areas impacted by planned and unplanned plant maintenance. This will allow proactive notifications to both the customer service teams and the subscribers. By integrating version 2.0 of the telecommunications accelerator into ETI’s Service Management Platform, we are able to immediately provide critical functionality to our customers and reduce costs at the same time.

Joe McDermott, COO of Carma: 

Carma is continually impressed with the collaborative investments Microsoft is making in the Dynamics platform and we’re enthusiastically supporting development of the telecommunications accelerator. The version 2.0 release of the telecom accelerator delivers new functionality that we’ve integrated into Carma’s Network and Digital Infrastructure Platform for our existing and future customers. Planning and documenting preventative and other recurring maintenance is a key activity for datacenter and network operators striving for 100% uptime. With telecommunications accelerator’s plant maintenance features, Carma enables them to manage these activities with ease and visibility across the whole organization.

Next steps

• Get started right away with a test drive of version 2.0 of the Dynamics 365 telecommunications accelerator on Microsoft AppSource. The data model, solutions, sample applications and data, Power BI reports, and UX controls that come with the telecommunications accelerator are available to any Microsoft Power Platform developer.
• For supporting documentation and configuration information, visit the telecommunications accelerator overview documentation.

The post Streamline maintenance tasks with Dynamics 365 telecommunications accelerator appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

With briefcases and suitcases in tow, business-to-business (B2B) sellers have always traveled the distance to meet buyers wherever they are. Buyers are going digital in a big way, so sellers can put away their bags (at least part of the time) and step into digital or hybrid selling. This dramatic shift in B2B buyingmore digital, more self-servicehas led to a steady decrease in the amount of time buyers spend with sellers. To adapt to this new omnichannel reality, sales teams are reinventing their go-to-market strategies.

B2B selling has truly changed much faster and more dramatically than anyone could have imagined. Buyers now use routinely use up to 10 different channelsup from just five in 2016.¹ A “rule of thirds” has emerged: buyers employ a roughly even mix of remote (e.g. videoconferencing and phone conversations), self-service (e.g. e-commerce and digital portals), and traditional sales (e.g. in-person meetings, trade-shows, conferences) at each stage of the sales process.¹ The rule of thirds is universal. It describes responses from B2B decision makers across all major industries, at all company sizes, in every country.

Although digital interactions, both remote and self-serve, are here to stay, in-person selling still plays an important role. Buyers aren’t ready to give up face-to-face visits entirely. Buyers view in-person interactions as a sign of how much a supplier values a relationship and can play an especially pivotal part in establishing or re-establishing a relationship. Today’s B2B organizations require a new set of digital-first solutions to navigate the complex and unfamiliar terrain. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can help.

Omnichannel presents new challenges

Increased opportunities to engage involve increased complexity. First, data ends up scattered across many different systems like customer relationship management (CRM), partner relationship management (PRM), e-commerce, web analytics, trials and demos, online chat, mobile, email, event management, and social networking. Assembling those pieces into a complete picture of a buyer or account is a complicated task that few B2B organizations and their existing systems can handle. Second, customer experiences are becoming increasingly fragmented as organizations struggle to maintain consistency from one touchpoint to the next. This issue is particularly acute for sellers when they don’t have critical context like previous interactions conducted on other channels such as content viewed, product trials initiated, online transactions, and product issues. Giving sellers visibility to the data is a start, but that would still require sellers to digest huge amounts of data to make sense of it all, hampering swift action.

But there are new possibilities

To deliver seamless omnichannel experiences, B2B organizations need a customer data platform (CDP) like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that’s designed to maintain a persistent and unified view of the buyer across channels. The enterprise-grade CDP creates an adaptive profile of each buyer and account, so organizations can rapidly orchestrate cohesive experiences throughout the journey. Leading B2B organizations rely on unified data as a single source of truth as well as to unlock actionable insights that increase sales alignment and conversion, including account targeting, opportunity scoring, recommended products, dynamic pricing, and churn prevention. For example, sales teams can proactively prioritize accounts based on predictive scoring that takes into account firmographics and all past transactional data as well as behavioral insights like trial usage across all contacts at the account. Or a seller knows it’s the right time to engage since a buyer has just signaled high intent through website activities like viewing multiple pieces of content. Insights like these widen the gap between omnichannel sales leaders and the rest of the field.

The profiles and resulting analytics from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can be leveraged across every function and systemsincluding sales force automation (SFA), account-based management (ABM), and e-commerce platforms, so that every person and system that the buyer engages with has the context to provide proactive and personalized experiences at precisely the right moment. This flexible design enables sales organizations to stay agile and future-proof their data foundation even when new sales tools are inevitably added to the mix.

Importantly, sales organizations can ensure that consent is core to every engagement. Privacy and compliance are crucial when it comes to customer data. In this new privacy-first world, consent funnels are as important as purchase funnels. It’s no longer only about collecting and unifying data. When companies build targeted and personalized experiences, customer consent must be infused across all workflows that use customer data. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is designed from the ground up to be consent-enabled, allowing sales organizations to automatically honor customer consent and privacy, and build trust, across the entire journey.

A next-gen customer data platform can help

The next normal for B2B sales is here, and there’s no looking back. The buyer’s move to omnichannel isn’t as simple as shifting all transactions online. Omnichannel with e-commerce, videoconference, and face-to-face are all a necessary part of the buyer’s journey. What B2B buyers want is nuanced, and so are their views about the most effective way to engage. B2B organizations must continue to adapt to meet this new omnichannel reality. To learn how a CDP can help delight your customers while helping your sales team navigate omnichannel selling to lower the cost of selling, extend reach, and improve sales effectiveness, visit Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Sources:

1- “B2B sales: Omnichannel everywhere, every time”, McKinsey & Company, December 15, 2021.

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