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From first draft to final polish, Copilot acts as a true collaborator, taking action while you stay in control.
The post Copilot’s agentic capabilities in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are generally available appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Manufacturing leaders today are under constant pressure: volatile demand, fragile supply networks, inventory risk, and zero tolerance for missed customer commitments. Plants must protect margins and maintain uptime while responding to disruption with incomplete or delayed information.
To lead in this environment, manufacturers need decision-making that surfaces risk earlier, absorb supply shocks faster, and replans quickly, so production stays aligned to demand and customer commitments.
Dynamics 365 gives manufacturers a connected foundation where signals from demand, supply, capacity, and cost can drive action. As part of the Microsoft platform, it brings together data, analytics, automation, and collaboration across the business.
Imagine a manufacturing stack where every part of the business is connected, where data isn’t fragmented across systems but unified into a shared understanding of operations, and where insights don’t sit in dashboards but show up in context, in the flow of work. Where your teams can build AI agents and adapt processes in real time rather than reengineering them months later. Where every person operates with the full context of the business, demand, supply, capacity, and commitments, every decision drives aligned action across the company. This is what it means to close the gap between knowing and doing.
At Hannover Messe 2026, Microsoft is showcasing how agentic ERP with Copilot, agents and Dynamics 365 supports these operational decisions amid constant change, helping manufacturers replan faster, make better production tradeoffs, and meet or exceed customer service SLAs.
From sensing demand shifts to mitigating supplier delays, production constraints, and equipment downtime, these signals must translate into real-time fulfillment and order promise decisions. Agentic ERP can connect planning, sourcing, production, fulfillment and service commerce to execute these decisions across the manufacturing value chain.
Demand planning can help you forecast demand, applying a structured phase in/phase out with external signals to account for market dynamics. Copilot accelerates this data analysis, scenario modeling, and incorporates market intelligence. For structured planning, Demand Planning in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides an agentic collaborative demand planning solution, powered by best-in-class forecasting algorithms and models, an immersive user experience with AI, intelligent segmentation and signal analysis, and analytics.
“Now, we can see the item-level details and the solution populates Dynamics 365 with that information for master planning. That’s a big step forward because now we essentially have a planned budget and we can easily produce the next production cycle’s budget without manually exporting the data.”
Patrick Keller, Head of ERP, Poloplast | Read more about how Poloplast modernizes manufacturing and streamlines forecasting and planning with Dynamics 365
A delayed component or supplier exception is not a paperwork problem. It is a production and operational risk. Today, Microsoft announced the Procurement Agent in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is available in public preview. The Procurement Agent helps teams respond faster to supply disruption by decoding supplier communications and identifying which production orders, inventory positions, and customer commitments are at risk, while keeping humans in control. Beyond triaging supplier communications, the Procurement Agent performs impact analysis so teams can assess downstream effects and act before a supplier issue turns into an on time, in full (OTIF) failure.
“Across the team, Dynamics 365 will save us a total of 20 hours weekly. The big benefit in time savings is that the agent has read the email, found the order, found the lines affected, decoded what the vendor is trying to say, and recommended actions.”
Sean Barrett, Inventory and Analytics Manager, Farmlands Cooperative | Read more about Farmlands Cooperative: Sowing the seeds of innovation with autonomous agents in Dynamics 365
For the shop floor, Copilot, connected to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management via Dynamics 365 MCP Server (Model Context Protocol), can provide AI-generated insights to schedules, inventory, and orders. Copilot can also surface quality-related alerts and can suggest targeted inspections to prevent recurring recalibration issues enabling supervisors to proactively mitigate resource constraints and shortages before they impact production schedules, triggering downstream inventory repositioning and order promise adjustments across fulfillment and customer commitments.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides near real-time visibility to the production floor; with agentic experiences, supervisors can spend less time gathering data and more time on proactive exception management. This translates to higher Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), fewer unplanned stops, and better on-time delivery to customers.
Equipment uptime and asset health are critical inputs to manufacturing performance. Unplanned downtime, delayed service, or poorly coordinated technician schedules can quickly cascade into constrained capacity and missed production targets. The Scheduling Operations Agent in Dynamics 365 Field Service can help maintain equipment availability for constrained production schedules by dynamically coordinating technician assignments based on geography, skills, certification requirements, capacity, travel time, and SLA commitments.
Today, Microsoft announced Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot is available in public preview within Dynamics 365 Field Service. With Microsoft 365 Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service, manufacturers can use Researcher to quickly view operational information across work orders, asset and service history, and parts availability. Researcher surfaces relevant context from Field Service data and Microsoft 365 signals to help teams understand situations as they arise.
“The field technicians understand that AI can be a benefit for them. It’s really about trying to improve their overall experience as well as the customer’s”
Matthew Hashenberger, Head of Service Excellence, Siemens Smart Infrastructure (U.S.) | Learn how Siemens elevates field service operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365
As finished goods hit the warehouse, intelligent inventory on-hand balancing in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management warehouse management updates slotting to align demand with pick zones. When inbound put-away happens, workers are directed to the best locations based on the intelligent inventory balancing, keeping the warehouse organized dynamically. On the outbound side, optimized pick routes shorten travel distance. The combined outcome is higher throughput with the same labor—faster fulfillment, lower picking cost.
With Dynamics 365, we trust the system. It’s easy to retrieve information and know it’s correct; people can just drive the forklift over. All the considerations we have for our picking, packing, and customer details, the system is doing it for us.
Niclas Strand, Warehouse Manager, KåKå, Orkla Food | Read more about why Orkla Food Ingredients’ Dynamics 365 transformation is a sweet upgrade
As manufacturers and industrial distributors modernize how they sell, serve, and scale, digital ordering is becoming a core capability of the ERP rather than a standalone channel. Dynamics 365 Commerce enables manufacturers to support complex buying and selling models including business-to-business (B2B), business-to-business-to-business (B2B2B), and multioutlet ordering across direct customers, distributors, and dealer networks.
Agentic B2B commerce can help automate routine ordering, replenishment, and quote-to-order processes while remaining tightly connected to pricing, inventory, warehousing, and production planning. This can allow manufacturers and distributors to accelerate order cycles, strengthen partner collaboration, and scale indirect growth with accuracy and control.
Frontier Manufacturing Firms can extend ERP embedded‑operational decisioning using Copilot and agents built with the Dynamics 365 ERP MCP Server. Microsoft’s partners are building agents to solve high friction manufacturing workflows, including engineering change impact analysis, product recalls, and configure-price‑quote‑ processes, enabling manufacturers to execute operational decisions across sourcing, production, and fulfillment within the systems they use to run their business.
“With the Experlogix CPQ MCP Server and Dynamics 365 ERP manufacturers can turn Copilot into a revenue agent that understands complex configurations, validates engineering rules and constraints, and generates accurate quotes instantly. This accelerates sales cycles, with many customers reducing time to quote by well over 90%.”
Louis-Philippe Perras, CTO, Experlogix
“Cegeka’s Quality Impact Recall Agent turns disruptive recall events into a controlled, orchestrated process for manufacturers reliant on end-to-end traceability. Running inside Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, companies handling batch- or serial-controlled products can identify affected materials across plants and distribution channels in minutes, trigger automated communication flows, and accelerate quality-investigation cycles. This approach supports manufacturers in maintaining continuity, reducing risk, and protecting both customers and brand reputation.”
Stijn Geeroms, VP Business Solutions, Cegeka
“The most expensive moment in manufacturing isn’t when something breaks. It’s when an engineering change gets approved without anyone understanding the impact. Manufacturers don’t need another disconnected AI tool to fix that. They need intelligence embedded where they already work. That’s why we built the Staedean ECM+ Impact Agent natively on Copilot inside Dynamics 365 – your rules, your data, your answer – without asking teams to leave the system they run their business in.”
Michiel Toppers, Chief Product Officer, Staedean
These agents extend ERP-embedded decision execution into engineering, quality, and configure-to-order workflows that directly impact production scheduling and customer commitments.
The manufacturers that lead this next era will be the ones who can respond to demand shifts, supplier delays, and equipment constraints by coordinating planning, production, fulfillment, and customer commitments across the value chain in real time.
Microsoft is committed to helping manufacturers make that transition, combining a connected Dynamics 365 foundation with Copilot and agents embedded in everyday workflows plus a partner ecosystem that brings manufacturing expertise to the front line. Join us and become Frontier.
Join us in person at Hannover Messe 2026:
Register to watch a series of executive conversations recorded at Hannover Messe 2026: Executive Insights: Unlock the Future of Industrial Intelligence
The post Becoming a Frontier Manufacturing Firm: Agentic decisions across the manufacturing value chain appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft 365 Copilot can now bring your go-to apps directly into the conversation, which closes the gap between AI-powered insight and real, in-app action.
The post Bring your everyday business apps into the flow of work with agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Make smarter, faster, and more confident quote decisions—right where you work.
Project quoting has always required a careful balance—aligning profitability with competitiveness, staffing strategies with delivery costs, and customer expectations with business outcomes.
But evaluating these trade-offs hasn’t always been easy. It often means jumping between tools, manually recalculating numbers, and relying on assumptions to guide critical decisions.
That’s where What-if Analysis (Preview) in Dynamics 365 Project Operations comes in.
This new capability brings real-time simulation directly into your quoting workflow—so you can explore options, compare outcomes, and make decisions with clarity before finalizing a quote.
What-if Analysis introduces a dedicated simulation workspace within a project quote, allowing you to model changes to quantities and pricing and instantly see their financial impact.
Instead of working through “what if” scenarios offline, you can now:
All without modifying the actual quote until you choose to.
It’s a more intuitive, controlled way to move from estimation to decision-making.
Every project quote involves key decisions:
With What-if Analysis, these are no longer hypothetical questions.
As you adjust quantities and pricing, the system instantly recalculates key financial metrics—including revenue, cost, gross margin, and budget variance—so you can clearly see the impact of every change.
This real-time feedback helps you move quickly from exploration to confident, data-backed decisions.
Getting started is simple. From the What-if Analysis tab on a Draft quote, you can create a scenario based on the quote’s existing data. Each scenario is isolated, allowing you to experiment freely without affecting the live quote.
Within the simulation workspace, you can adjust quantities and pricing across dimensions such as resourcing unit, role, or any custom pricing dimension configured in your environment. Whether you’re making high-level adjustments or refining details at the quote line level, the experience is designed to be flexible and intuitive.
You can create multiple scenarios—each representing a different approach—and compare them side by side. Built-in comparison views highlight differences in financial outcomes, making trade-offs easier to evaluate.
When you’ve identified the best approach, applying the scenario updates the Draft quote in place—so you can move forward with confidence, without creating a new revision.
What-if Analysis transforms how you approach project quoting—bringing clarity, speed, and confidence into every decision.
Instead of relying on assumptions, your team can now explore possibilities, evaluate outcomes, and finalize quotes with confidence—knowing the numbers support the decision.
What-if Analysis is currently available as a preview feature in:
To get started, enable the What-if Analysis feature flag in your environment. The What-if Analysis tab will then be available on qualifying Draft quotes.
A few things to keep in mind:
As with all preview features, we recommend evaluating this capability in a non-production environment.
Every project quote is a critical business decision. What-if Analysis gives you the tools to approach that decision with clarity—replacing guesswork with real-time insight and manual effort with seamless simulation.
The result is not just better quotes, but better decisions—ones that are competitive, financially sound, and aligned with your business goals.
Enable What-if Analysis in your environment today and start turning “what if?” into “we know.”
We are making constant enhancements to our features. To learn more about What-Analysis in Project Quotations, visit Quote What-if Analysis
The post Take the Guesswork Out of Project Quoting with What-if Analysis in Dynamics 365 Project Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Learn what’s new in Copilot Studio: Multi-agent systems are now generally available, plus recent updates to the Prompt Editor and governance controls.
The post New and improved: Multi-agent orchestration, connected experiences, and faster prompt iteration appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Behind every modern contact center transformation is a group of passionate practitioners: people who don’t just adopt technology but shape how it’s used, challenged, and improved.
The Contact Center Champions Community brings together these practitioners from around the world. As customer advocates, they are deeply hands‑on with Dynamics 365 Contact Center. They actively influence product direction and share real‑world insights with peers and Microsoft engineering teams.
Below, we’re spotlighting those champions whose journeys reflect diversity, ambition, and impact. Bookmark this page to stay updated on new champion stories.
Please visit Customer Success Stories | Microsoft for more curated organizational stories.
As Head of IT Operations at Sage Homes, Sachin Patel leads the organization’s end‑to‑end journey with Microsoft Dynamics 365, supporting a rapidly growing social housing portfolio of nearly 22,000 properties across England. As Sage Homes brought tenant services fully in‑house, the contact center became a critical hub—requiring a platform that could handle high volumes, protect sensitive interactions, and give agents immediate context across customers and properties. Dynamics 365 Contact Center provided the foundation to unify voice, case management, and data into a single operational experience.
Rather than rushing adoption, Sachin’s team focused on building trust in the system, simplifying routing, designing experience‑based skill handling for agents, and reducing friction through a true 360‑degree view of tenants and properties. With Copilot‑powered summaries now embedded into daily workflows, agents can quickly understand long and complex interaction histories. Meanwhile, AI‑assisted chat handles high‑volume inquiries, reducing escalations to human agents by around 30%. Strong governance, reporting, and access controls ensure the platform scales responsibly as Sage Homes expands its use of AI and digital channels. Sachin’s approach reflects what it means to be a Contact Center Champion. He leads with pragmatic adoption, measurable outcomes, and AI deployed only where it delivers real operational value.
“We recently built a new contact center and we’re expecting to get 10,000 virtual customers overnight. We could not have met that demand without the omnichannel capabilities we have in Dynamics 365 Contact Center.“
Lorenz Corradini is leading a major transformation in how public services are delivered in South Tyrol, Italy. As the in‑house IT provider for regional public administration, SIAG supports more than 350 services across 23 domains. It serves citizens through healthcare, education, housing, and digital administration.
Facing over 40 siloed legacy systems and a looming workforce shortage, the team at SIAG adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center to create a unified, data‑driven citizen engagement platform. Early results include 30% AI‑assisted resolution within weeks, faster service delivery, and rapid development of new digital services using Power Platform. Lorenz and team are laying the foundation for a more accessible, multilingual, and scalable model of public service delivery.
“We used to lose valuable citizen data across dozens of disconnected systems. That’s over. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Power Platform, every interaction is captured, connected, and actionable. The citizen is finally at the center, and we use that data to get better every single day.
Kamal Pandey plays a key role in scaling a global, B2B contact center supporting manufacturing customers across industries such as automotive, aerospace, mining, and heavy engineering. Based in Sweden, Kamal leads CRM and contact center development for an organization with 3,000+ Dynamics users. In addition, it has four global customer service hubs spanning Europe, the Americas, India, and China.
Sandvik’s contact center runs fully on Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, handling chat, voice, and email in a multilingual environment. The majority of capabilities are delivered through out‑of‑the‑box configurations. Kamal’s team is actively adopting AI‑driven features—such as quality evaluation agents for scalable coaching. It also takes a thoughtful, trust‑first approach to Copilot adoption. His focus on maintainability, scale, and agent experience shapes Contact Center adoption in complex enterprise B2B environments.
“At a global scale, customer operations demand systems that stay reliable under pressure, and complexity is the default. With Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, we’ve created a sustainable architecture that supports thousands of users while using AI to enhance, never replace the human touch. For me, great customer experience starts with solid architecture and ends with people empowered to do their best work.”
Rosa Lohman supports customer service operations for Amsterdam’s public transport network, including trams, buses, metros, and ferries across the city. Working with a lean team, Rosa oversees how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center are used to manage voice, email, and web‑based inquiries for approximately 30 customer service agents.
Her team embraced Copilot‑powered call summaries and transcriptions to reduce manual effort and improve efficiency. They are exploring AI‑driven knowledge and case management agents to further optimize service delivery. With a strong focus on insight‑driven improvements, such as identifying automation opportunities for low‑value cases and evaluating digital channels like WhatsApp, Rosa brings a practical, user‑centered perspective to modernizing customer service in the public transportation sector.
The post Meet the Contact Center Champions Driving the Future of Customer Experience appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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