Organizations face new challenges every day. Priorities change, markets shift, opportunities emergethe pace isn’t slowing down. As your competitors transform their business models and customer expectations evolve, your future depends on how well you can empower your teams to adapt, innovate, and make a positive impact every day. You need to be ready for disruption, to embrace constant change, and, most of all, be fast on your feet.

Building a more agile future

That’s why we’re excited to invite you to the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on April 6, 2022. Register now for your first look at hundreds of new features, enhancements, and innovations to transform your business into a more agile, customer-centric organization.

Catch all the latest advancements across Microsoft Dynamics 365 being unveiled, including:

• More collaborative content creation, improved authoring efficiency, and advanced personalization using Dynamics 365 Marketing.
• Ambient and actionable business data, a single workspace in Sales Hub, and AI-guided live feedback with Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Simplified setup with guided, task-based experiences and inbox enhancements for rapid issue resolution using Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
• Subscription billing and intelligent automation around invoicing, ledger settlements, and year-end close services in Dynamics 365 Finance.

And that’s just the start. You’ll also learn how new features across Microsoft business applications are already helping our customers navigate change and seize opportunities. You’ll hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platform, about how your business can innovate by modernizing processes and uncovering game-changing insights. Then listen in as senior Microsoft engineers and experts behind the technology guide you through the latest advancements in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 1 and how they’ll help you:

• Adapt quickly to change as new business priorities, market conditions, and customer opportunities emerge.
• Innovate everywhere by solving problems with solutions that ease collaboration and work seamlessly together.
• Deliver more value to your customers in less time by quickly adopting or enhancing solutions that accelerate results.
• Create more memorable customer experiences by modernizing your processes and uncovering insights into your supply chain.

Real-life innovation

Your inside look at business applications goes even more in-depth with demonstrations of real-life customer scenarios, led by the experts who know Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform inside and out. See new capabilities in actionand learn what’s possiblefor organizations big and small, across every industry. You’ll be the first to find out how new features are aligned with customer needs to help solve pain points across organizations, ease everyone’s workload, and take on today’s toughest business challenges.

Fresh insights

Innovation in AI, mixed reality, and industry solutions is enabling a new generation of agile organizations. Understand the why and how behind the trends with insights and best practices from industry leaders on how to accelerate results. Have questions for the experts? You’ll have a chance to ask them during the live Q&A chat. You don’t want to miss this digital launch event packed full of ways to help you adapt fast, collaborate with ease, innovate together, and make a positive impact. We hope to see you there. 

The post See what’s new for Dynamics 365 at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Traditional guidance or upskilling usually requires a trained trainer, a trainee, some mix of resources like work instructions, parts manuals, or checklists, and a real-world or simulated task to perform. In this scenario, a skilled worker (the trained trainer) guides the trainee through the job until they have mastered the process and can work alone. This process is called on-the-job guidance, and while it has been effective in supporting workforce development for decades, it has always been challenging from a resource and scale perspective.

Over the past decade, however, organizations across industries have engaged in digital transformation, leveraging advances in technology to reimagine business processes to make them more effective and efficient. This is what Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is all about, including its application in training and development to empower employees with step-by-step holographic instructions right where the work happens. This article highlights three ways to use Dynamics 365 Guides to improve the employee experience.

1. Empower self-guided learning

One of the key benefits of utilizing mixed reality applications is that it frees the trainer from the trainee. For example, a trainer can develop a digital process guide that any number of trainees can then utilize without requiring the trainer to be physically present. This empowers workers to embark on self-guided learning by equipping them with task instructions, essential data, and model visualizations directly in the flow of work. The result is increased efficiency from a resource perspective and improved productivity, quality, and safety from the worker’s perspective.

The idea of self-guided learning is nothing new; in mixed reality, though, self-guided learning is dramatically improved by delivering information where and when it is needed in the training process. For example, in the following video, we see how Dynamics 365 Guides allows for self-guided learning that keeps workers in the flow of work by moving with them, directing attention to the next step, and providing the information needed every step of the way.

Learn more in our overview of Dynamics 365 Guides.

Similar scenarios unfold thousands of times per day in manufacturing plants around the world. From the machinist securing a part in a multi-axis lathe who needs to check a read-out on a gauge to the repair technician working on a new piece of equipment, when workers can always access a virtual library of parts manuals and assembly instructions wherever they are, they can stay in the flow of work longer. This is one reason that Forrester found that mixed reality improved field task efficiency by 40 percent and reduced rework by 7 percent, saving $13,680 annually per field task worker.¹

2. Embrace mixed reality

As shown in the video below, Dynamics 365 Guides works by overlaying 3D visualizations and holograms alongside connected work instructions and reference materials in a real-world environment, all without sacrificing autonomy or range of movement. Plus, Dynamics 365 Guides also allows anyone to create new guides with low-code/no-code authoring so that your organization can respond quickly and efficiently to new training needs. In this short video clip, you can see how authoring steps taken on a PC, automatically align to a hologram placed in the work environment.

3. Enable hands-free triggers

In addition to providing frontline workers with immersive instructions, Dynamics 365 Guides also allows action-activated triggers to mimic real-world actions. For example, HoloLens 2 can track worker hand movements and automate guidance based on where a worker’s hands are located in the process. This is demonstrated in the video below. When the worker completes a task, such as tightening a bolt or screw, the worker is automatically shown a holographic prompt directing them to the next step in the process. This helps build muscle memory and improves the learning process.

Not only do hands-free triggers keep workers in the flow of work longer, but they are also more accurate than asking a coworker what to do next, which may or may not yield the correct answer, and more efficient than referring to traditional work instructions, which breaks the concentration on the task at hand. Moreover, enabling hands-free triggers, either with hand tracking or voice activation, improves process safety, particularly in industries like manufacturing, where significant amounts of rotating machinery are found.

What’s next?

This article shows that embracing mixed reality, empowering self-guided learning, and enabling hands-free triggers are three ways to transform on-the-job guidance. We’ve also published videos that explore how intuitive placing and working with holograms can be, features for hands-free work, and a look at the level of detail you can accomplish with Dynamics 365 Guides. If you are ready to start empowering your frontline workers today, we invite you to get started with a free 60-day trial of Dynamics 365 Guides. Or to learn more, check out our learning path, Work with Dynamics 365 Guides.

¹Forrester, 2021. The Total Economic Impact Of Mixed Reality Using Microsoft HoloLens 2.

The post Watch how to improve on-the-job guidance with mixed reality appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed “order management” from the backend of logistics operations to the spotlight of supply chain and commerce strategies. Retailers, consumer package goods (CPG) companies, and distributors rushed to adapt their business models to fulfill the explosive growth of online orders through different digital channels. End-customers and organizations buy through various channels such as marketplaces, in-store, mobile apps, and even social media. They expect faster and more convenient ways for pickups and returns, such as pickup in-store, at a partner’s location, and for returns, drop off at the nearest location, QR codes, and even at-home pickup.

As the number of order sources and fulfillment options grow exponentially, organizations need the right order management solution to keep up with the evolving digital commerce landscape. This blog looks at three key aspects to consider when selecting an order management solution and how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management can help you.

1. Open and modern platform

The adoption of online shopping, and the addition of more consumers and businesses online for all types of transactions with the pandemic, have created a demand for convenience and personalization in digital commerce. As the number of online marketplaces grows, retailers, CPG, distributors, and manufacturers with business-to-business (B2B) and direct-to-consumer (D2C) business models require to accept orders from an ever-growing external ecosystem. Receiving orders from multiple sources increases order management and supply chain complexity. Therefore, these organizations need an order management solution that helps them accept orders from anywhere to keep pace with the continuing evolution of e-commerce.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management has an open and modern platform that seamlessly integrates with organizations’ existing tech stack. Its architecture reduces implementation time through out-of-the-box pre-built connectors to the best-of-breed ecosystem of partners for order source, delivery, tax compliance, price calculation, and logistics services such as Adobe Commerce, J.B. Hunt, Krber, Uber Freight, Avalara, Vertex, Flexe, Big Commerce, Far Eye, Commerce Tools, Flintfox, Ship Station, and Orderful. Moreover, this platform architecture is composable and flexible to allow supply chain professionals to build in an incremental way through a modular and API-first approach and a supply chain control tower, which ultimate goal is supply chain visibility.

Learn about more extended capabilities in our blog: FedEx and Dynamics 365 reimagine commerce experiences.

2. Real-time visibility and intelligent fulfillment optimization

The 2021 Gartner supply chain risk and resilience survey shows that for 83 percent of large organizations, better supply chain ecosystem visibility is a top priority.¹ And another Gartner research shows that 60 percent of chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) are expected to make faster, more accurate, and consistent decisions in real-time.² The cycle-time of business processes continues to accelerate, particularly in order management processes that serve consumers who expect faster and more convenient shipping to the location of their choice. To succeed in these conditions, companies need a solution that simplifies omnichannel order fulfillment by providing real-time visibility and AI-infused real-time data.

With Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, supply chain and commerce professionals can model and automate responses to order constraints by using a journey orchestration designer and assigning rules in a low-code/no-code friendly user interface with drag and drop actions instead of coding. Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management uses an intelligent fulfillment optimization service to infuse AI into order fulfillment within your supply chain network. The intelligent optimization engine works to ensure the right products are delivered from the right source in the right quantities so that you always maximize profits, minimize costs, and satisfy service-level requirements.

3. Faster deployment times

Accepting orders from anywhere carries an additional challenge: implementation. Businesses need an order management solution that allows them to get up and running quickly. Not only do they need to be able to accept orders from anywhere, but many organizations also have existing systems that they would like to augment, not replace. If you are in the process of updating your order management system and fall into this category, then understanding what is involved in the implementation process is critically important. Will custom coding be required to integrate with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and warehouse management system (WMS)? How about your customer relationship management (CRM) or transportation management system (TMS)? For most, the best solution is a cloud-based integrated-service-as-a-software (iSaaS) that uses RESTful APIs and can be easily configured using a low-code/no-code user interface.

Applications that take this approach enable supply chain and commerce professionals to continue to use and benefit from legacy applications, while also providing the agility to easily connect and integrate with modern web-based solutions. This is the approach that we have taken with Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management because it delivers these benefits and accelerates the digital transformation process regardless of where a company is in its digital transformation journey.

You can learn more in our infographic: Top five reasons to update your order management solution.

What’s next?

It is essential to look for an order management solution that will give you out-of-the-box pre-built connectors to an ecosystem of partners, provide real-time order visibility, intelligent fulfillment optimization, and get up you running quickly with seamless integration with your existing tech stacks, such as ERP and CRM systems. Traditional, on-premises order management systems can lack the flexibility required to keep pace with the rapidly evolving world of e-commerce.

With Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, you can leverage our modern cloud technology, integrate with your existing platforms, and quickly implement new capabilities that enable AI, automation, order flow orchestration, and on-demand scalability. Get started today with Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management free trial and turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage.

Sources:

1- Gartner, Infographic: Supply Chain Visibility Is Fundamental to Resilience in Supply Ecosystems, February 10^th, 2022.

2- Gartner, Reinventing Supply Chain for the Future, Learn four key innovations, 2021.

GARTNER is the registered trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc., and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and has been used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post 3 key considerations when choosing an order management system appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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.