We are thrilled that Gartner has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises for Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Dynamics 365 Finance offer businesses two standardized enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities on a composable ERP platform, functioning as stand-alone solutions or as a tightly integrated and extensible system. As product-centric enterprises look to renovate their existing ERP platform to improve systems and processes by moving them to the cloud, Dynamics 365 is enabling the transformation and improving IT agility to deliver business outcomes in the process.

For example, Bel Fuse recently selected Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to move away from a legacy version of Oracle that was highly customized and difficult to update. Bel Fuse was able to unify its data and can now more easily manage its supply chain operations and finance processes, gaining more agility to respond quickly to changes in the market.

Dynamics 365 also delivers an enterprise SaaS application capable of providing data, analytical insight, and operational application services by running on the Microsoft Azure cloud. The Azure cloud enables clients to use Microsoft Power Platform for analytics and Microsoft Power Apps for low-code/no-code extensions, allowing organizations to improve operations with real-time, AI-based predictive insights across a broader ERP strategy.

An excellent example of a company leveraging these capabilities is GN Group. GN Group recently adopted Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Dynamics 365 Finance to centralize all its ERP data in the cloud. With help from Microsoft Partner Network member SCALES Group, GN Group evolved its supply chain processes to be more agile and structured. It uses Dynamics 365 Finance to unify financial data and gain AI-based predictive insights in real-time. The company also adopted Microsoft Power Platform to extend its Dynamics 365 business applications. So far, GN Group uses Microsoft Power BI for reporting and analytics and Microsoft Power Apps to build a custom, vendor-managed inventory (VMI) solution that seamlessly connects to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

And we continue to invest and expand our capabilities. At the end of July, we acquired Suplari, a leading provider of supplier spend insights that enable companies to proactively manage supplier spend by transforming data from multiple sources, such as contracts, purchase orders, invoices, expenses, and supplier risk, into valuable insight. By bringing Suplari’s spend intelligence insights together with the existing Dynamics 365 capabilities, Microsoft is further helping organizations become insight-driven and enabling business leaders to take strategic action. In August, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management became generally available. It enables enterprises to optimize and automate fulfillment using real-time inventory, AI, and machine learning. Organizations can truly gain the agility they need to quickly adapt to changing business models, support the latest fulfillment methods, add new order intake channels by seamlessly integrating their existing ERP systems to manage the entire order lifecycle from intake to fulfillment.

Request a demo or take a guided tour of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Dynamics 365 Finance.

* This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, 24 August 2021, Tim Faith, Denis Torii, Paul Schenck, Dixie John, Abhishek Singh.

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For our customers using the client for Finance and Operations apps, we’re retiring the out-of-support WS-Federation authentication protocol, and replacing it with the industry standard OpenIdConnect OAuth security protocol. OpenIdConnect OAuth security protocol supports modern authentication, which includes multi-factor authentication and conditional access policy.

This upgrade, which will not result in any downtime or require customers to make changes to their system, was released in July 2021. It is available starting from in product version 10.0.20, platform version 7.0.6060.0 or later. The upgrade applies to all environment types except Dev Box, customer-hosted and IaaS environments.

For more information, see Authentication for Finance and Operations app upgraded to OWIN OpenIDConnect in the release plans.

Next steps

This feature is automatically enabled for customers who are on version 10.0.20 or later. If you aren’t on this version and want to upgrade, see the instructions to Self-service upgrade to the latest version.

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Businesses are moving away from rigid and monolithic solutions towards agile business applications that can be deployed quickly, integrated seamlessly with other existing systems, and can collect and unify extensive amounts of data from various touchpoints unlocking siloed data. According to Forrester, siloed data inhibits organizations from creating a comprehensive profile of customer needs, a challenge for 44 percent¹ of retail decision-makers.

To drive better personalization, organizations also need to create a single view of their orders across all engagement channels. Propelling this shift is the realization by business leaders that they can leverage best-of-breed applications to avoid costly and time-consuming rip and replace business processes while still achieving the same objectives.

Last month we announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, a solution that enables businesses to accelerate agility by leveraging easy-to-deploy out-of-the-box connectors within a low-code or no-code environment. This month, we are pleased to share several integrations and enhancements that further expand the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management.

Learn more: Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is now generally available

Rapidly scale with partner connectors

McKinsey² recently interviewed 60 senior supply-chain executives from across industries and geographies. 85 percent of respondents reported that they struggled with inefficient digital technologies to address logistic disruptions, shortages of parts and materials, and sudden swings in demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. designed to allow businesses to rapidly scale with out-of-box, pre-built partner connectors to e-commerce platforms, fulfillment services, delivery partners, and other back-office systems. Through our growing ecosystem of partners, we provide companies with new levels of agility by seamlessly integrating with other best-of-breed solutions.

Some of the order intake systems that Intelligent Order Management offers pre-built connectors are Orderful and BigCommerce. BigCommerce is a cloud-based e-commerce SaaS platform, and Orderful is a cloud-based electronic data interchange (EDI) platform that allows enterprises to integrate EDI transactions from Orderful’s network. These new order intake sources enable more nimble operations, allowing businesses to capitalize on new opportunities faster by accepting orders from anywhere.

Another integration that we are proud to announce is with ShipStation. ShipStation is a web-based e-commerce shipping platform that helps merchants quickly generate shipping labels for their online orders. By integrating ShipStation with the Intelligent Order Management platform, users can bring all their carriers and order sources together within one unified solution.

Finally, Intelligent Order Management users can now connect to Avalara, an automated tax compliance solution that determines order tax rates based on geolocation and product classification, and also Flexe, a cloud-based platform that unifies warehouse sourcing and streamlines material handling operations.

By adding these pre-built partner connectors to Intelligent Order Management, our solution provides a foundation for businesses to build agility and resiliency into their order management processes and free themselves from legacy and inefficient digital technologies.

Learn more: Intelligent Order Management partners with leading service providers to optimize order management

Accelerate time to market

Organizations can no longer afford to be rigid and reactive, and the push is for flexible, adaptable, and agile architecture. A survey conducted by McKinsey showed that highly successful agile transformations typically delivered around 30 percent gains in efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance, making the organization 5 to 10 times faster and turbocharging innovation.

Thanks to our partnership with ShipStation, Intelligent Order Management now saves users time with the capability to print shipping labels directly from its own application.

We are also making updates to system functionality such as adding internal to external ID transformation. With internal to external ID transformation, users can establish different mappings with different providers. For example, a user can map different names for the same product or SKU from an e-commerce system, such as BigCommerce, to Intelligent Order Management. This type of internal to external ID mapping is critical because Intelligent Order Management is used in complex order environments where data is communicated between many internal and external systems.

We have also added localized Business Event definitions and Provider definition metadata to localizations. The updates to localization also extended localization beyond English to the following languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

Additionally, users will now enjoy an enriched Power BI architecture including a set of dashboards embedded into the user interface that is based on Microsoft Power BI technology. The Power BI dashboards provide longer-range insights into the order and fulfillment data that is moving through the app.

Improve order accuracy with fulfillment insights

According to a recent “final mile” survey by Gartner, just 18 percent of organizations report fulfillment accuracy rates of 95 percent or better⁴. At Microsoft, we believe that digital solutions are a promising path to improving this key performance indicator, and our new Order insights dashboard can help companies do exactly that.

The order insights dashboard (shown above) provides in-depth visibility into aggregated order fulfillment activities flowing through Intelligent Order Management. From a single screen, users can quickly review key performance indicators such as Lines per order on average, Order count, Number of order lines, and Orders past due. Users can also see performance metrics of individual providers, and if there is an issue, they can drill down into the provider’s details to learn more.

Within the Insights menu, we have also introduced different dashboard views to provide users with the whole picture of what is happening with an order. For example, the Daily Events dashboard gives users an overview of any failed order orchestration steps, flagging them to help in the decision-making process.

Learn more in our recent webinar: Turn Order Fulfillment into a Competitive Advantage

What’s next?

As businesses continue to improve their ability to quickly adapt to changing demands, they must rely on flexible solutions like Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management that seamlessly integrate with other best-of-breed applications. By providing organizations with the ability to scale rapidly, go to market faster, and improve order accuracy with fulfillment insights, we are enabling businesses to increase organizational agility.

If you are interested in seeing how these features can work for your organization, you can get started today with a free Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management trial.

¹A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned by Microsoft. The Digital Commerce Imperative. January 2021.

² McKinsey, Resetting supply chains for the next normal. July 2020 | Article. By Knut Alicke, Richa Gupta, and Vera Trautwein.

³McKinsey, The impact of agility: How to shape your organization to compete. May 25, 2021 | Survey. By By Wouter Aghina, Christopher Handscomb, Olli Salo, and Shail Thaker.

⁴Gartner, Top Trends in Retail Digital Transformation and Innovation for 2021. 5 February 2021. By Kelsie Marian, Miriam Burt, Max Hammond, Hanna Karki, Robert Hetu, Sandeep Unni.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of the Gartner Inc., in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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