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 Is What-if Analysis? 

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: 

• Explore multiple approaches within the quote 

• Compare their outcomes side by side 

• Apply the most effective scenario when you’re ready 

All without modifying the actual quote until you choose to. 

It’s a more intuitive, controlled way to move from estimation to decision-making. 

Turn Everyday Questions into Clear Answers 

Every project quote involves key decisions: 

• Should work shift to a lower-cost delivery center? 

• What happens if billing rates increase for specific roles? 

• Can you stay competitive while protecting margin? 

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. 

How It Works 

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 This Means for You 

What-if Analysis transforms how you approach project quoting—bringing clarity, speed, and confidence into every decision. 

• Make decisions with confidence: Instantly understand how pricing and staffing changes impact revenue, cost, and margin—before committing to a quote 

• Optimize for both competitiveness and profitability: Evaluate trade-offs in real time and choose the approach that best aligns with your goals 

• Reduce reliance on spreadsheets and manual iteration: Keep simulation and decision-making within Project Operations 

• Drive faster, more aligned conversations: Use data-backed scenarios to align stakeholders and move decisions forward 

Instead of relying on assumptions, your team can now explore possibilities, evaluate outcomes, and finalize quotes with confidence—knowing the numbers support the decision. 

Availability and Prerequisites 

What-if Analysis is currently available as a preview feature in: 

• Project Operations Core (Lite deployment) 

• Project Operations integrated with ERP 

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: 

• Scenarios can only be created on quotes in Draft status that contain estimates 

• Activated or closed quotes are not eligible 

• If the underlying quote changes, scenarios will need to be recreated 

As with all preview features, we recommend evaluating this capability in a non-production environment. 

The Bottom Line 

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. 

Get Started 

Enable What-if Analysis in your environment today and start turning “what if?” into “we know.” 

Learn More 

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.

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.

Sachin Patel
Head of IT Operations,
Sage Homes

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.“

Read the Sage Homes Story

Lorenz Corradini
Head of Center of Competence for Low Code/No-Code (Coc LCNC)
SIAG – Südtiroler Informatik Ag – Informatica Alto Adige Spa

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.

Read the SIAG Story

Kamal Pandey
Lead Develop, Dynamics CRM
Sandvik Coromant

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.”

Read the Sandvik Coromant Story

Watch the Sandvik Coromant demo at Microsoft Ignite.

Rosa Lohman
Business Analyst
GVB

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.

Read the GVB Story

The post Meet the Contact Center Champions Driving the Future of Customer Experience appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

A new way to bring service workflows, insights, and actions directly into Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming the primary interface for how people get work done. As more teams rely on Microsoft 365 Copilot to retrieve information, reason over data, and take action, the need for domain‑specific intelligence, especially for customer service, has never been greater.

On March 9^th, we announced the frontier transformation, where we introduced a new type of business application integrated with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Today, we’re excited to introduce Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot: a purpose‑built agent that brings customer service context, insights, and actions directly into the Copilot experience employees already use every day.

Service Agent enables service teams to move faster, stay focused, and resolve issues with greater confidence, without switching tools or losing context.

What is Service Agent?

Service Agent is a declarative agent that runs inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, designed specifically for customer service scenarios.

It combines:

• The reach and familiarity of Microsoft 365 Copilot
• The depth of Dynamics 365 Customer Service data
• The power of agents that can reason, retrieve, and take action

With Service Agent, service professionals can interact with cases, knowledge, and service workflows using natural language—grounded in both Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 Customer Service system data—right from Copilot.

Why this matters for IT and service leaders

For years, service professionals have had to juggle multiple tools: CRM systems, knowledge bases, emails, internal chats, and reports, often switching context.

Service Agent changes that model by making Copilot the primary system of engagement for service work.

This approach delivers three key benefits:

1. One Copilot experience, across all applications including within Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Service Agent brings service workflows into the same Copilot surface used for everyday productivity, reducing friction, training overhead, and context switching.

2. Faster resolution through richer context

By grounding Copilot in both Microsoft 365 data (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint) and Dynamics 365 service data (such as cases, emails, knowledge, customer history), service professionals can build case understanding in seconds—not minutes.

3. Action, not just answers

Service Agent doesn’t stop at reading and synthesizing data. It can help service professionals prioritize cases, update records, draft responses to customers, and trigger workflows—all through natural language.

What Service Agent can do in Public Preview

In its initial release, Service Agent enables scenarios such as:

• Case understanding and summarization
  Quickly generate rich summaries of customer cases, including context from prior interactions and related knowledge.
• Case prioritization and workload awareness
  Ask Copilot what needs attention now, based on customer signals and service data.
• Service knowledge retrieval
  Get relevant answers grounded in Dataverse and SharePoint knowledge, directly within Copilot.
• Make data updates and initiate workflows
  Make updates to service records, add case notes and initiate workflows such as child case creation without leaving Copilot.
• Cross‑app continuity, shared history, shared memory
  Move seamlessly between applications such as Teams, Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service while maintaining shared memory and chat history.

Figure 1: Getting answers from Dataverse and SharePoint in Copilot Service Workspace

Figure 2: Customer interactions summaries across Dataverse, Teams and Outlook in Microsoft 365 Copilot app

Built for enterprise requirements

Service Agent is designed with enterprise IT needs in mind:

• Grounded in Microsoft 365 Copilot with enterprise‑grade security and compliance
• Aligned with existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service investments
• Extensible, Service Agent will extend to supporting additional skills, apps, and workflows over time
• Admin‑friendly, building on familiar Copilot and Dynamics management models

Service Agent acts as an intelligent layer on top of existing service systems, bringing the right information and actions to users, when and where they need them across the application ecosystem.

Getting started

Service Agent is now available in public preview, with several ongoing enhancements planned as we expand capabilities, performance, and extensibility.

To learn more:

• Turn on Service Agent using the public preview documentation
• Add the Microsoft 365 Copilot to Dynamics 365 Customer Service using the documentation
• Follow updates on Microsoft Learn and the ITPro Blog
• Engage with your Microsoft account team for preview guidance

Looking ahead

Service Agent is a significant step toward a future where Copilot is the primary way people engage with business systems—not just to ask questions, but to get work done.

We’re excited to partner with customers and IT leaders as we continue to evolve Service Agent and bring more service capabilities into Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Stay tuned for more.

The post Introducing Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Growth is exciting—but it introduces complexity. 

As small and midsize businesses scale, finance and operations become harder to manage. Transactions increase, reporting requirements expand, and disconnected systems start to strain visibility and margins. What once worked becomes a constraint. 

A newly published Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study helps quantify what many organizations are already experiencing: modernizing on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central delivers measurable financial impact.

Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the potential return on investment organizations may realize by deploying Business Central. Based on interviews with four business decision makers, which were aggregated to model a fictitious composite organization¹, the study projected that the composite organization could potentially realize: 

• More than 200% return on investment (ROI) over three years 

• An estimated $460K net present value (NPV) over three years 

• Potential payback in six months 

Across finance productivity, enterprise resource planning (ERP) consolidation, improved profitability, and reporting efficiency, the composite organization modeled by Forrester realized more than $680K in three‑year, risk‑adjusted present value benefits. 

These outcomes reflect the potential impact of modernizing finance and operations on a single, integrated cloud ERP platform—while also establishing the foundation for AI‑powered experiences like Microsoft 365 Copilot and intelligent agents. 

Where the value comes from 

The Forrester TEI study highlights several areas where organizations can potentially realize tangible, risk‑adjusted benefits when using Business Central. 

Support faster, more efficient finance operations 

Manual processes often slow growing organizations. Interviewed customers reported meaningful efficiency gains across accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR), billing, and financial close. 

By year three, the composite organization was projected to potentially achieve: 

• Up to 30% reduction in monthly close time 

• Up to 50% time savings for AP, AR, and billing activities 

These improvements translated to more than $210K in present value over three years in finance productivity alone for the composite organization—allowing teams to shift focus from reconciliation to higher‑value analysis. 

Standardizing data and workflows in Business Central also creates the conditions necessary for AI‑enabled automation. While AI benefits were not independently quantified in this study, interviewees noted that unified processes accelerate the adoption of Copilot‑supported approvals, variance analysis, and exception handling. 

Lower total cost of ownership through ERP consolidation 

Interviewees reported operating aging on‑premises ERP systems alongside spreadsheets and disconnected point solutions. Consolidating onto Business Central reduced infrastructure complexity and IT overhead. 

The study projected the following potential benefits for the composite organization over three years: 

• More than 10% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) 

• More than $170K in present value savings from retired systems and reduced maintenance 

Beyond direct savings, simplification can reduce operational risk and improved scalability—allowing organizations to grow without layering on new systems to compensate for gaps. 

Enable improved profitability through better visibility 

Unified, real‑time visibility across finance and operations enables faster, more informed decisions. 

By year three, the composite organization was modeled to potentially experience: 

• Up to 3% improvement in net profit margins 

• More than $240K in present value from improved profitability 

Better insight into costs, projects, and performance enables earlier course correction. AI‑powered experiences such as Copilot can further assist by surfacing cost variances, project overruns, or unbilled work sooner. While AI alone does not drive margin improvement, modern ERP data and standardized processes strengthen an organization’s ability to act with precision. 

Fast reporting and audit readiness 

Business Central’s integrated data model and native Microsoft Power BI capabilities streamlined reporting and audit preparation. 

Based on modeling by Forrester, by year three, the composite organization was projected to potentially reduce: 

• Audit preparation time by up to 30% 

• Time spent creating internal and executive reports 

These projected improvements were valued at nearly $50K in present value, while also enabling increased confidence in data accuracy and consistency. 

Beyond the numbers: Building an AI-ready foundation

In addition to quantified financial outcomes, interviewees highlighted broader operational improvements, including enhanced customer experience, reduced days sales outstanding (DSO), better warehouse management, and a more intuitive user experience. 

Just as importantly, Business Central provides an AI‑ready ERP foundation. 

By unifying finance and operations data and aligning processes to best practices, organizations are better positioned to leverage Copilot, Power BI, and intelligent agents to: 

• Help reduce time-to-insight—not just report creation
• Surface anomalies and trends quickly 
• Enable more proactive, data‑driven decision‑making 

While AI‑driven outcomes were not directly measured in this TEI, the study reinforces a critical principle: realizing AI value at scale depends on clean data, integrated systems, and standardized processes. Business Central delivers that foundation. 

Read the full study 

For SMB‑focused organizations and partners evaluating ERP modernization, the full Forrester TEI study provides a detailed financial framework to help quantify potential projected value—grounded in customer interviews and risk‑adjusted modeling. 

Join us at Directions North America 2026 

The Forrester TEI study highlights the potential value organizations may realize with Business Central—from faster financial processes to improved profitability and lower total cost of ownership. 

We’ll continue these conversations at Directions North America 2026, where partners, Microsoft engineering, and product leaders come together to discuss what’s next for the Business Central ecosystem and the future of AI-powered ERP. 

Join me for the keynote, where I’ll explore how Business Central is evolving into an AI-powered system of action with Copilot and intelligent agents. 

Attendees will: 

• Gain insight into the Business Central roadmap 
• Prepare for upcoming AI-powered capabilities 
• Connect directly with Microsoft engineering and product experts 
• Engage with partners across the Business Central community 

1. Composite organization assumption: Results are based on a Forrester modeled composite organization derived from customer interviews, with $50M in annual revenue, 300 employees, 15 core finance and accounting users, and 100 light users, using Dynamics 365 Business Central in a cloud deployment. All quantified benefits represent the three-year, risk-adjusted present value for the composite organization.

The post Enable accelerated growth with confidence: A Forrester TEI study projects more than 200% ROI over three years and six-month payback using Dynamics 365 Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.