At the announcement of Microsoft Viva Sales, Paul Greenberg, Founder, Managing Principal, The 56 Group, LLC,often called the “Godfather of CRM” and has written a book, CRM at the Speed of Light, and I were chatting about the state of customer relationship management (CRM) market and the innovations in the last 20 years. One area we both agreed that has been underserved is the seller experience. CRM vendors have all focused on the system of recordthe CRM system but sellers continue to work in the system of productivityMicrosoft Office and Microsoft Teams with no connection between them.

In independent research conducted by Microsoft, we surveyed over 500 salespeople who live and work in North America and who use a CRM on a regular basis. The findings revealed that the tools in use today aren’t always helping, and, in some instances, they are even hindering a salesperson’s ability to do their job.¹ They love the CRM, but they hate manual data entry. This is one area where Microsoft wants to focus on with Viva Sales. With Viva Sales, we take the manual work of CRM away from the sellers and put technology to work on behalf of the sellers so they can cut the forms, connect the data, and crush the sale.

Today I’m pleased to share that Microsoft Viva Sales is now in preview.

The Viva Sales preview includes surfacing customer contact information from your CRM directly in Microsoft Outlook and Teams, connecting to the CRM of your choice, capturing rich contact information in Outlook, capturing notes and action items using AI, providing AI driven recommendations, and more.

Improve the seller experience with Microsoft Viva Sales

The past two years have had a profound impact on work. Employee expectations concerning how, where, and when they work have significantly changed and continue to evolve. While these work trends are pervasive across the workforce, they have especially reshaped the expectations of sales professionals who have had to adapt to an increasingly digital workplace all while using outdated sales tools. In fact, 74 percent of sellers described sales intelligence tools as critical or extremely critical in closing deals.¹ Prior to 2018, digital selling was already gaining popularity but the forced adoption of remote work, brought on by COVID-19, put a spotlight on the top pain points common across sales organizations by highlighting the gaps and limitations in the sales tools.

With Viva Sales we address these gaps to mitigate these top pain points:

• Manual data entry is time-consuming and frustrating and bogs down digital sellers.  
• Inability to capture customer engagement data in productivity applications where sellers do their work. According to Futurum research, 82 percent of salespeople shared that faulty data has led to an embarrassing mistake with a customer.²
• Lack of AI-based recommendations delivered to the point of action.
• Disconnected processes and tools that slow down productivity. Sellers spend two-thirds of their time on administrative tasks that do not directly generate revenue.

Viva Sales gives sellers more time to focus on selling by eliminating the administrative burden of manual data entry to provide an improved seller experience. Combining the power of Microsoft 365 applications and Teams, this new sales experience application captures, accesses, and registers data into any CRM. With Viva Sales, sellers can cut the forms, connect the data, and crush the sale.

The power of AI combined with enriched customer engagement data from Microsoft 365 applications and Teams provides easy access to sales intelligence in the applications sellers already use every day.

In the video, The future of sales enablement, Paul states “Because Viva Sales is 100% seller focused and all the sales manager stuff is taken care of by the more traditional CRM technologies. That’s pretty awesome. You’ve managed to create it in a way that doesn’t disrupt or destroy the traditional focus but actually enhances it but at the same time makes the seller’s experience much better for that seller, which is not something that has been around much.” 

Learn more

Read our in-depth blog about Viva Sales to learn more and find out how to try out Viva Sales today.

Sources

¹Microsoft Viva Sales: Supercharge your CRM, PDF.

²Futurum, 2022. Reimagining the Sales Process – Are You Ready?

The post Supercharge your CRM with Microsoft Viva Sales—Now in preview appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we are excited to announce the preview of our demand driven material requirements planning (DDMRP) feature for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The evolution of MRP

DDMRP is the next evolution of material requirements planning (MRP), which has a long and storied history in manufacturing. From its origins in the early 1960s as the first manufacturing information system, MRP’s first evolution was to MRP II during the 1980s. Then, in the 1990s, MRP II evolved further into sales and operations planning (S&OP). Most recently, MRP was extended to include major enterprise functions, forming the basis of modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. As such, it is fair to say that MRP’s staying power rests in the fact that it works.

Still, almost anyone involved in manufacturing planning can tell you that while MRP works, it is far from perfect. Organizations of every industry, size, and sophistication still have items that they chronically either have too much of or, conversely, never have enough. These items drive unplanned schedule changes, create inefficiencies, and increase costs in various ways. With the arrival of DDMRP, MRP continues to add to its storied history by incorporating new innovative thinking, such as strategically decoupling inventory from the sales forecast and introducing a new calculation for lead time, that delivers significant benefits to early adopters’ organizations.

What is DDMRP?

As MRP continued to be useful, it eventually became a standard function of modern-day ERP. During this time, other significant manufacturing philosophies and methods were born. The least effective of these were fads that have faded from use, but a handful went on to transform manufacturing in their own right. These include distribution requirements planning (DRP), lean manufacturing, theory of constraints (TOC), and Six Sigma. Each of these methodologies added a tool to our belt of such significance that they remain with us and in broad use today. This brings us back to DDMRP, the newest iteration of MRP, and our latest feature available for preview. While DDMRP is a relatively new methodology, it borrows and combines elements from the tried-and-true manufacturing philosophies discussed earlier in this paragraph.

According to the Demand Driven Institute, demand driven material requirements planning (DDMRP) is “a multi-echelon planning and execution method to protect and promote the flow of relevant information through the establishment and management of strategically placed decoupling point stock buffers.”¹ It is important to note that the Demand Driven Institute is essentially a standards body for all DDMRP matters. They offer certification for software vendors to ensure that the principles of DDMRP are adequately embedded and utilized in a given application, and we are proud to share that Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is Demand Driven Institute compliant.

Learn more about our DDMRP feature and how to enable it within supply chain management (SCM).

Benefits of using DDMRP

Several of the benefits of using DDMRP include the following:

• Improve customer service to consistently reach 97 to 100 percent on-time order fulfillment rates.

• Compress lead times for typical reductions above 80 percent across several industry segments.

• Optimize inventory to unlock inventory reductions of 30 to 45 percent without impacting service levels.

• Lower total operating costs by eliminating the false signals and schedule break-ins that drive expensive expedite activities, such as fast freight, partial ships, and cross-ships.

• Improve planner productivity by providing visibility of priorities instead of constantly fighting the conflicting messages of MRP.

Create a predictive and resilient supply chain

According to a 2022 McKinsey & Company survey of dozens of supply chain executives, 90 percent expect to overhaul planning IT within the next five years.² The renewed focus on supply chain planning was born from a broad recognition formed during COVID-19: our modern, lean, just-in-time supply chains were amazingly efficient and cost-effective but far from resilient in the face of unprecedented and sustained global disruptions.

As businesses grappled with how to respond to the crisis, many identified opportunities to invest in their supply chain to become more predictive and resilient. It was no longer acceptable, as an example, for manufacturing production scheduling runs to last several hours or only run once per day. The new normal required systems to give planners near-real-time visibility and control and were capable of executing planning runs multiple times per day in the span of minutes. With our Planning Optimization Add-in, we were able to move master planning calculations outside of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, which reduced planning runtimes from hours to minutes. The Planning Optimization Add-in also introduced priority-based planning, which allows businesses to distinguish demand based on urgency, and introduced one of the five steps required as part of DDMRP.

Microservices, like the Planning Optimization Add-in, are one way to quickly realize value from an ERP migration to the cloud. They deliver benefits such as better performance by offloading workloads to the cloud and improving adaptability by allowing you to react to changing demand in real-time. Ultimately, these investments in planning-related improvement features are designed to reduce stockouts and lower the cost of on-hand inventory, all while ensuring that more customer orders are fulfilled on time and in full.

Learn more in our recent blog: Optimize your supply chain with priority-based planning.

Maximize operational efficiency with agile business applications

In this blog, we announced the preview of DDMRP, reviewed the evolution of MRP, and provided a basic understanding of what DDMRP is and its benefits. Then we touched on related microservice add-ins for Dynamics 365, such as Planning Optimization and priority-based planning, which are helping organizations create predictive and resilient supply chains.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is an agile and modern, composable business application. It enables manufacturers, retailers, and distributors to create a connected and resilient supply chain by enhancing visibility, advancing planning agility, and maximizing asset uptime to operate profitably during disruptions. And for companies planning to migrate their ERP to the cloud, the composable approach of Dynamics 365 makes it easy to start with a single workload and add additional solutions as the business evolves and needs mature. It also streamlines planning, production, inventory, warehouse, and transportation to maximize operational efficiency while also giving you access to groundbreaking innovations such as demand driven material requirements planning (DDMRP).

What’s next?

Want to learn more about how your organization can use Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to increase production volume while reducing infrastructure costs? Check out The Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management from Forrester Consulting.

Sources

¹Demand Driven Institute. What is DDMRP?

²McKinsey & Company, 2022. To improve your supply chain, modernize your supply-chain IT.

The post Strike a strategic inventory balance in your supply chain with demand driven material requirements planning (DDMRP) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Data protection and privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States, give individuals the right to govern how an organization uses their personal data. These regulations allow people to opt in or out of having their personal data collected, processed, or shared, and require organizations to implement reasonable procedures and practices to obtain and respect their customers’ data use consent.

What is consent?

What do we mean when we talk about “consent” in the context of data protection and privacy? Simply put, it’s an individual’s decision about whether and how data about them is collected and used. Easy to define, but extraordinarily complex in practice.

Organizations have multiple types of information about their customers, including transactional data (such as membership renewals), behavioral data (such as URLs visited), and observational data (such as time spent on specific webpages). Additionally, customers can have multiple types of contact points (such as email addresses, phone numbers, and social media handles). Adding to an already complex challenge, the purposes for using customer data can vary across an organization’s lines of business and can number in the dozens.

Consider the example of an online sports franchise that has two different lines of business: football merchandise and memberships. The organization will need to capture the following information to use a customer’s data with their consent:

• Organization: Contoso Football Franchise
• Line of business: Football merchandise
• Contact point: someone@example.com 
• Purpose for using data: Email communications with promotional offers for football merchandise
• Consent preference: Opt-in/opt-out

A customer’s consent to collect and use their data must be obtained for each data source, contact point, and use or purpose.

The challenge: Obtain consent for multiple types of personal data and contact points

Every industry around the globe is affected by privacy legislation and related requirements, from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the healthcare industry, to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in online services, to legal frameworks such as the GDPR, to state-specific acts such as the CCPA. Requesting and respecting your customer’s consent for each contact point, type of data, and the purposes to which the data is putwhich must comply with all applicable data protection and privacy regulationsquickly becomes a monumental task.

The solution: Include consent in your customer data platform

One way to be sure you’ve captured granular levels of consent preferences is to ingest customer data from various sourcestransactional, behavioral, and observationalinto a customer data platform (CDP). A CDP like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps you build a complete picture of individual customers that includes their consent for specific uses of their data.

Unified customer profiles in Customer Insights provide 360-degree views of your customers, including the consent they’ve granted for using their data. Customer Insights enables companies to add their captured consent data as a primary attribute, ensuring that you can honor your customers’ preferences for the collection, processing, and use of their data. Capturing consent preferences can help you power personalized experiences for customers while at the same time respecting their right to privacy.

Respecting customers’ preferences for specific data use purposes is key to building trust relationships. Dynamics 365 Marketing automatically applies consent preferences through subscription centers to support compliance with the GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and other data protection and privacy regulations.

Why include consent in a unified customer profile?

Here are three common scenarios that illustrate the significant advantages to having consent data as part of a single, unified customer profile.

Consent data is specific to lines of business and, hence, is often fragmented.
Consider our earlier example of the online sports franchise with two different lines of business, football merchandise and memberships. This organization is likely to have separate consent data captured by each line of business for the same customer. It makes a lot of sense to unify these consent data sources into a single profile to enforce organization-wide privacy policies.

The customer can revoke consent at any time and expects the business to honor the change with immediate effect. For instance, when a customer who is browsing a website revokes consent for tracking, it must stop immediately. Otherwise, the business risks losing the customer’s trust and could be in violation of regulatory requirements.

When customer consent data isn’t stored with the unified profile, there can be significant delays in syncing data between the marketing application and the consent data source. As part of a unified profile, however, consent data can be updated automatically and the updated profiles can be used to refresh segments, ensuring that customers who have revoked consent are excluded from the segments in a timely manner.

Personal data is anonymized or pseudonymized. Anonymized or pseudonymized customer data is often used for machine learning and AI processing, for instance. If customers’ consent to use their data for this purpose is recorded in separate anonymized or pseudonymized user profiles, it becomes much harder to map a given customer profile across different data sources. When the consent data is stored in a unified profile, however, the organization can continue to get the benefit of data from combined customer interactions when the user identity is anonymized or pseudonymized.

Learn more

Check out the following resources to learn more about customer consent, unified profiles in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, the GDPR, and the CCPA.

• Use customer consent
• Create a unified customer profile in Dynamics 365 Customer insights
• EU data protection rules
• California Consumer Privacy Act

The post Honor customer data use consent with unified profiles in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.