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Disruptive echo effects, poor room acoustics, and choppy videos are some common issues that can detract from the effectiveness of online calls and meetings. Through AI and machine learning, which have become fundamental to our strategy for continual improvement, we’ve delivered innovative enhancements in Microsoft Teams to address audio and video challenges in ways that are both user-friendly and scalable across environments. Today, we’re excited to cover some common meeting scenarios and the AI and machine learning audio and video improvements enabled in Teams.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Knowing how your sales organization engages with your B2B customers can help you spot changes in communication patterns and understand the state of your accounts and how your organization interacts with them. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights brings together transactional, behavioral, and demographic data, Microsoft proprietary audience intelligence, and third-party resources to create enriched, multidimensional profiles for both individual consumers (B2C) and business accounts (B2B). Data enrichment using aggregated email and meeting insights from Microsoft 365 offers even more information to help you engage with your customers more effectively.
The value of data enrichment for engagement
There are endless ways to use customer engagement insights. For B2B environments, information about organizations or companies and their related contacts can be used on its own or combined with other business data previously ingested into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. For example, you can create a segment of accounts that have not had any meetings or emails with your organization in the last 60 days. Engage and reactivate those stale accounts using a customer journey orchestration platform like Dynamics 365 Marketing.
Here is another example, one of our favorites. You can create a measure defined as the ratio between the combined time your sales team spends in meetings with an account and the anticipated revenue from the account. Use that measure to easily identify accounts that have the largest mismatch between effort and revenue. With that insight, you can make informed choices about how much time your organization spends with those accounts.
How to enrich your account profiles with engagement data
Next, set up your enrichment options to use data from Microsoft Office 365:
Select the email addresses for which Office 365 data will be aggregated.
Review and consent to use your organization’s aggregated data in Customer Insights data enrichment.
Run the enrichment process, or let the system run the enrichment automatically as part of a scheduled refresh.
After the enrichment has finished, you can view the results, including the number of enriched customers and the number of processed emails and meetings:
All data is aggregated at the account level. A system-calculated engagement score of 0 to 100 is assigned to every account. The engagement score captures the engagement your organization has with this account relative to all your other accounts.
You can view account engagement, including the engagement score, on the individual customer cards. Also shown are the total number of emails and meetings over the past year, along with charts that show the email and meeting history. These views make it easy to spot any changes in communication patterns over time:
Data enrichment captures more than 15 data points, including the average duration of meetings, the number of people associated with the account who attended the meetings, and the number of days since the last email and the last meeting. Check out the documentation for the full list of aggregated data that account enrichment provides.
Next steps
Learn how your company can gain the most comprehensive view of your customers by visiting Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The Microsoft Finance and Operations (Dynamics 365) mobile app, the associated mobile platform, and related mobile workspaces are deprecated effective June 2022. Existing assets will be supported through October 2024. New mobile Finance and Operations experiences should be built in Power Apps, using virtual tables from Microsoft Power Platform to access finance and operations data.
What’s happening to the Finance and Operations (Dynamics 365) mobile workspaces?
Some of the existing mobile workspaces will be replaced. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Timesheet mobile app is already available as a replacement for the Project time entry mobile workspace.
Replacement experiences are planned to be released in 2023 for the following mobile workspaces:
Expense management
Inventory on-hand
Asset management
Invoice approval
Purchase order approval
Replacement experiences are not currently planned for the remaining mobile workspaces:
Note that the Warehouse Management mobile app, which is not built on the Finance and Operations (Dynamics 365) mobile app, is not impacted by this deprecation.
What’s next
Here are some additional things we encourage you to do now that the Finance and Operations (Dynamics 365) mobile app has been deprecated.
Stop building new mobile experiences in the Finance and Operations mobile app.
Begin planning for converting your existing mobile experiences to Power Apps. You have some time before the end-of-support date, but it’s never too early to start getting ready!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Although the pandemic exposed our supply chain fragilities, there are other factors that will continue to disrupt our supply chains for the foreseeable future. Geopolitical tensions between world superpowers are forcing companies to change how they trade, source, and manufacture goods, so redesigning your supply chain networks or setting up new supply chains to gain resilience is a common theme we will continue to see over the next few years. Global economies are inching towards recession partly due to the prolonged and ongoing pandemic which will increase cost pressures on businesses, and we all know gaining resilience while reducing costs is just extremely difficult. It will require us to improve our agility and pivot and adapt to changing customer and business needs.
Increase resilience with a predictive supply chain.
Manufacture and operate sustainably with minimal waste.
Transform work with advanced warehousing and robotics.
Microsoft’s supply chain experts will also deliver the must-have insights, strategies, and frameworks for chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) and supply chain leaders to think big, make bold moves, and drive real impact within their organizations1 on June 6, 2022 at 4:00 PM Eastern Time in the Southern Hemisphere II auditorium.
We hope to catch up with you and your teams at the event. Register and attend our session (see details below) for cutting-edge thought leadership about supply chain technology solutions.
Microsoft: CSCO’s role in digitally transforming supply chains with a composable approach
With growing supply chain complexities, leaders need a clear digital transformation strategy that drives visibility across the entire value chain, improves flexibility to meet customer demands, and decreases operational costs. In this session, we will share a new approach to deploying transformative supply chain technologies bespoke to your business by adopting composable characteristics without having to replace your existing supply chain solutions. The composite architecture enables accelerated time-to-value through better interoperability and data harmonization to create a resilient supply chain.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of a composable enterprise.
Composability enables circular manufacturing to advance sustainability initiatives
It’s paramount for enterprises to operate more sustainably. Most organizations have a goal to reduce and offset carbon emissions, including Microsoft. One of the ways to operate sustainably is to drive circularity. Essentiallyinstead of throwing away goods at the end of their life, finding ways to reuse or recycle them to reduce carbon emissions. To achieve circularity, businesses can customize their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to orchestrate new business processes. A composable system allows you to use low code to customize them easily.
Our own Microsoft Circular Centers have a unique process to optimize warehouse routing and management system to process decommissioned servers from Microsoft datacenters. There were no reverse logistics solutions that were suitable for the circular centers out of the box. By leveraging the low code Microsoft Power Platform solutions, Dynamics 365 was extended to build a reverse logistics solution that helped reuse, resale, and recycle the decommissioned data center assets. This is one of the ways that puts Microsoft on the path to achieving its sustainability goals by 2030. The outcome of this program has exceeded expectations. Our pilot circular center has been able to reuse 83 percent of critical parts and has reduced carbon emissions by 145,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
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The future of business applications is composable. According to Gartner, “those that have adopted a composable approach will outpace their competition by 80 percent in the speed of new feature implementation.”2 A composable business consists of modular building blocks that can be rapidly connected and orchestratedallowing organizations to adapt operations and processes to changing market conditions, new business opportunities, and unpredictable disruptions. Composable ERP solutions are, among other things, cloud-based platforms that scale without limits, leverage a modern open system architecture to reduce implementation time, and usually incorporate low-code/no-code interfaces to improve usability and customization.
One of the companies reaping the benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Solutions is Tillamook. Tillamook County Creamery Association is a farmer-owned cooperative based in Tillamook, Oregon, founded in 1909 and owned by about 80 farming families. While best known for its cheese, it has introduced more new dairy products in the past five years than in the previous fifty. At the same time, Tillamook has expanded nationally, and its products can now be found across the United States.
To support its growth and expansion, Tillamook needed a modern solution to scale and enter new distribution and sales markets. This led them to migrate to Dynamics 365 apps for Finance and Supply Chain Management. Tillamook had just begun its ERP modernization journey when the global pandemic disrupted demand and supply almost instantly. Yet despite being live for only four months, once COVID-19 spiked demand for groceries as people ate more at home, Tillamook was able to leverage the flexibility of Dynamics 365 to adapt quickly to new business needs.
“There’s been this thing with ERP over the past few years where you avoid customizations to the software so that you can take upgrades. That’s a thing of the past with Dynamics 365. You can modify the system to meet your unique business processes, adjust the logic and configure, and it still takes the updates seamlessly. We have some unique processes here with our complex supply chain, and we’ve been able to modify the system and still take those upgrades.“Travis Pierce, Director of Information Technology, Tillamook.
Enhance visibility with digital supply chain solutions
Today, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers can use the right digital supply chain solutions to build or enhance the real-time visibility required to move from reactive decision-making to predictive and proactive decision-making. To maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability, they need to unify data across order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, warehousing, and transportation.
Supply chain leaders know that the earlier potential disruptions and constraints are identified, the more successful the measures to adapt and overcome them can be. Modern improvements in technology, such as applying AI and machine learning to complex data sets, are giving businesses the insight and agility to deploy processes and systems that generate and proactively shape customer demand. These solutions also allow companies to sync and balance supply to demand by continuously optimizing production operations and distribution networks. With real-time, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, organizations can sense, predict, and adapt to constraints and disruptions at the earliest possible opportunity.
Take the Supply Chain Visibility Guided Tour to see how a retailer can enhance supply chain visibility using Dynamics 365. The composable architecture of Dynamics 365 enables businesses to incrementally add functional capabilities that will make their supply chains more resilient without having to replace their legacy systems.
See you at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium XPOTM 2022
Supply chains continue to evolve through the current post-pandemic shift. As they do, Microsoft is committed to empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. We hope you will join us at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium XPOTM 2022 by either catching our session or engaging with one of our supply chain experts. If you are unable to attend this year but are interested in learning how to start optimizing your supply chain, you can get started with a demo today or check out our webinar Create Agile and Digital Supply Chains with Dynamics 365.
GARTNER and SUPPLY CHAIN SYMPOSIUM/XPO are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This June 6 to 7, 2022, we are excited to attend and exhibit in person at the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference. The conference provides a forum where leading finance professionals gather to network, share best practices, and prepare their teams for an autonomous future. Today’s chief financial officers (CFOs) allocate 80 percent of new investment dollars for digital growth.1 Clearly, despite the challenges of the past two years, organizations continue to invest heavily in digital transformation.
Changing market and environmental conditions, varying from recession threats to technology innovations like the digital twin, impact finance professionals and the organizations they lead. To remain competitive and successful post-pandemic, CFOs need exposure to fresh thinking and timely insights in order to digitally elevate their platforms and drive the finance function forward to an increasingly autonomous future. This year, a central aim is to help CFOs leapfrog ahead on their digital journey by understanding what successful teams are and are not building, buying, and borrowing in the market.1
At the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference, Microsoft will showcase how Dynamics 365 Finance helps organizations bring the future of finance into focus. We will cover how to:
Adapt faster by designing a digital roadmap that stays ahead of evolving business models.
Work smarter by balancing maximum profitability with accelerated growth.
Perform better at your business innovation and transformation initiatives.
To see how successful organizations are using digital platforms to innovate and grow, register to attend our June 6, 2022 session from 11:45 AM to 12:15 PM Eastern Time (details below).
Microsoft: The CFOs role in balancing business model innovation with growth acceleration
With global market volatility threatening profitability, CFOs must drive growth and innovation initiatives while accelerating margin improvement. Successful CFOs are continuing to push the limits of business model innovation across the entire operations experiencefinancial (the way you capture value), operational (the way you deliver value to your customers), and organizational (the way you align people to impact). Join us at our event session to hear how top business model innovation trends and technology can help you embrace disruption while keeping the focus on financial excellence.
The strategies we cover will also require solutions that reinforce decision-making with real-time data, predictive analytics, and additional AI capabilities, all of which help:
Future proof your business.
Innovate across the entire operations experience.
Facilitate and propel new business model trends.
Predict and gain insights through AI-driven analytics.
One way that Microsoft is helping organizations leverage AI to improve business insights for finance leaders is through our recent acquisition of Suplari. Suplari’s AI capabilities allow companies to:
Make comprehensive enterprise spend data and insights available to all.
Unlock new financial insights to help with strategic procurement decisions.
Get up and running with predictive insights in weeks, not months.
You can speak with Microsoft executives at our booth to discuss how Dynamics 365 drives digital growth and initiatives while accelerating margin improvement. Also, scan your badge at the kiosk to participate in the Microsoft Surface Headphones giveaway.
See you at the Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference
We hope to see you and your team at the conference and that you check out our session and visit our booth.
If you are unable to make it this year but are still interested in learning strategies that help you realize new product and service-based revenue streams, check out our comprehensive e-book, The Futurist CFO’s Guide to Business Model Innovation.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The “changing technology landscape” has become a common trope when discussing the cloud. I understand whyit helps contextualize the disruption and advancement we’re experiencing. But you know as well as I do, this “change” has happened. The on-premises solutions and infrastructure you built your business on, though once state-of-the-art, are now less adaptable, less useful, and less secure by the day.
Elasticity, scalability, and accessibility have never been more important, especially as new disruptions continue to test organizations, solutions, and processes alike. Moving to the cloud should be a business priority. Like any large project, it should not happen overnight. Build a plan, prepare your organization, and take manageable steps.
Start by understanding the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Power of the Cloud and the benefits it offers. Challenge the legacy thinking and misconceptions within your organization on whether your on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) can deliver on future needs and expectations. Don’t let nostalgia hold you back.
1. Good enough is no longer good enough
The first, and most common thing some business leaders say is, “What we have works just fine.” This can be especially true of customers in the finance and operations spaces, those utilizing Dynamics AX or other on-premises ERP solutions.
The idea of change or adopting something new can trigger this “good enough” reaction. The problem, of course, is that “good enough” masks complacencybecause it maintains the familiar. Within business, complacency is often the death of innovation and growth. Though some leaders still insist their on-premises solution is getting the job done, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the competition is using the cloud to accelerate growth.
Dynamics 365 customers are taking advantage of data integrations, out-of-the-box functionality, plus advanced machine learning and predictive analytic capabilities to optimize legacy processes in real time, outpacing, outmaneuvering, and out-earning their on-premises peers.
2. Your needs are not as unique as you think
Another barrier to migration is the idea that your organizational needs are unique. This claim is common among on-premises organizations whose solutions have been heavily customized over the years, often addressing specific, point-in-time business needs.
Migration can enable an organization to eliminate cumbersome customization and their underlying expenses, infrastructure, and processes. Often what a customer views as a “unique” situation is less about the specialized needs of a given IT environment and more about what is perceived to be proprietary and a limited understanding of what is possible in the cloud.
Moreover, Microsoft works hard to advance our cloud solutions and ensure agility and adaptability to meet modern business requirements. Moving to the cloud is no small decisionthese are large technology projects that take planning and resources. While customizations do add complexity, these modifications should not preclude you from moving to the cloud. Out-of-the-box functionality; low-code, no-code; code-extensions; and ISV applications often eliminate the need for your legacy customizations.
Dynamics 365 offers flexibility and scalability designed to grow with customers’ businesses, allowing them to manage their organizations with unified data in real time.
3. Siloed doesn’t ensure security or compliance
Data preservation is a concern for most organizations. Vulnerabilities within your IT infrastructure and processes can leave systems susceptible to external threats and exploitation. Due to media mentions, many organizations believe the cloud is not safe.
The impenetrable solution is a myth, driven by the misconception that most attacks originate from outside an organization. No doubt traditional on-premises data solutions have been the stalwart cornerstone of many businesses’ IT operations. This firewall thinking served us well for a time. Not anymore. The threats have changed. On-premises solutions are reliant on existing policies, technology, and softwarewhich may or may not be up to datealong with their IT staff ensuring that the latest security processes and protocols are being maintained.
Within a modern cloud based solution, customers are able to take advantage of a Zero-Trust security framework. Zero Trust assumes potential threats have already “breached the gates.” Microsoft is proactive in verifying and reverifying credentials and authentications to minimize risks and threats.
Consider that cloud-based systems have millions of programs designed to check and update customers’ systems, creating backups and adjusting to current conditions, while on-premises solutions are reliant on IT staff to do those things individually. When measured against the increasing sophistication, speed, adaptability, and sheer criminal organization of cyber-attacks, it is nearly impossible for any company to protect itself in a siloed, non-cloud environment. Microsoft Cloud solutions regularly provide localized compliance, security, and governance updates. This translates into greater institutional and organizational efficiency and cost savings, allowing your teams and IT staff to focus on other projects and strategic priorities aligning to growth, leaving the security “burden” on Microsoft.
Your business resiliency may depend on when and how you adopt cloud functionality
Migrating to the cloud makes sense for efficiency and growth62 percent of companies that have migrated to the cloud reported an increase in customer satisfaction. Migrating to the cloud makes sense for customization and adaptabilitycompanies that have transitioned to cloud solutions reported a 44 percent increase in the speed of new product launches due to utility and specialized tools available to them. Migrating to the cloud makes sense for security and reliabilitycompanies that have transitioned to the cloud reported a 60 percent reduction in security incidents compared to their on-premises solutions.
Bear in mind that the benefits of the cloud can only fully be realized through successful migration, and Microsoft has developed the tools, resources, and expert support to help companies make the move in a quick, efficient, and cost-effective way.
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