You chose Dynamics 365 for your enterprise to improve visibility and to transform your business with insights. Is it a challenge to provide timely insights? Does it take too much effort to build and maintain complex data pipelines?

If your solution includes using a data lake, you can now simplify data pipelines to unlock the insights hidden in that data by connecting your Finance and Operations apps environment with a data lake. With general availability of the Export to Data Lake feature in Finance and Operations apps, data from your Dynamics 365 environment is readily available in Azure Data Lake.

Data lakes are optimized for big data analytics. With a replica of your Dynamics 365 data in the data lake, you can use Microsoft Power BI to create rich operational reports and analytics. Your data engineers can use Spark and other big data technologies to reshape data or to apply machine learning models. Or you can work with a data lake the same way that you work with data in a SQL database. Serverless SQL pool endpoints in Azure Synapse Analytics conveniently lets you query big data in the lake with Transact-SQL (T-SQL).

Why limit yourself to business data? You can ingest legacy data from previous systems as well as data from machines and sensors at a fraction of the cost incurred when storing data in a SQL data warehouse. You can easily mash-up business data with signals from sensors and machines using Azure Synapse Analytics. You can merge signals from the factory floor with production schedules, or you can merge web logs from e-commerce sites with invoices and inventory movement.

Can’t wait to try this feature? Here are the steps you need to follow.

Install the Export to Data Lake feature

The Export to Data Lake feature is an optional add-in included with your subscription to Dynamics 365. This feature is generally available in certain Azure regions: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, South East Asia, East Asia, Australia, India, and Japan. If your Finance and Operations apps environment is in any of those regions, you can enable this feature in your environment. If your environment isn’t in one of the listed regions, complete the survey and let us know. We will make this feature available in more regions in the future.

To begin to use this feature, your system administrator must first connect your Finance and Operations apps environment with an Azure Data Lake and provide consent to export and use the data.

To install the Export to Data Lake feature, first launch the Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services portal and select the specific environment where you want to enable this feature. When you choose the Export to Data Lake add-in, you also need to provide the location of your data lake. If you have not created a data lake, you can create one in your Azure subscription by following the steps in Install Export to Azure Data Lake add-in.

Choose data to export to a data lake

After the add-in installation is complete, you and your power users can launch the environment for a Finance and Operations app and choose data to be exported to a data lake. You can choose from standard or customized tables and entities. When you choose an entity, the system chooses all the underlying tables that make up the entity, so there is no need to choose tables one by one.

Once you choose data, the system makes an initial copy of the data in the lake. If you chose a large table, the initial copy might take a few minutes. You can see the progress on screen. After the initial full copy is done, the system shows that the table is in a running state. At this point, all the changes occurring in the Finance and Operations apps are updated in the lake.

That’s all there is to it. The system keeps the data fresh, and your users can consume data in the data lake. You can see the status of the exports, including the last refreshed time on the screen.

Work with data in the lake

You’ll find that the data is organized into a rich folder structure within the data lake. Data is sorted by the application area, and then by module. There’s a further breakdown by table type. This rich folder structure makes it easy to organize and secure your data in the lake.

Within each data folder are CSV files that contain the data. The files are updated in place as finance and operations data is modified. In addition, the folders contain metadata that is structured based on the Common Data Model metadata system. This makes it easy for the data to be consumed by Azure Synapse, Power BI, and third-party tools.

If you would like to use T-SQL to work with data in Azure Data Lake, as if you are reading data from a SQL database, you might want to use the CDMUtil tool, available from GitHub. This tool can create an Azure Synapse database. You can query the Synapse database using T-SQL, Spark, or Synapse pipelines as if you are reading from a SQL database.

You can make the data lake into your big data warehouse by bringing data from many different sources. You can use SQL or Spark to combine the data. You can also create pipelines with complex transforms. And then, you can create Power BI reports right within Azure Synapse. Simply choose the database and create a Power BI dataset in one step. Your users can open this dataset in Power BI and create rich reports.

Next steps

Read an Export to Azure Data Lake overview to learn more about the Export to Data Lake feature.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install the Export to Data Lake add-in,see Install Export to Data Lake add-in.

We are excited to release this feature to general availability. You can also join the preview Yammer group to stay in touch with the product team as we continue to improve this feature.

The post Unlock hidden insights in your Finance and Operations data with data lake integration appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Any call center that uses unified routing to manage and assign incoming support requests is going to notice gains in efficiency. The core routing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service use skill matching and priority to help determine assignments. However, bringing intelligence to the challenge of efficient routing can move you closer to world-class service.

With the unified routing release in April of 2021, we introduced intelligent skill finder as the first capability related to intelligent work classification. It empowers organizations to identify which skills are required by the agent to address an incoming work item. AI models are trained to understand the skills required to address customer inquiries, and then a match is made to agent skills, helping to assign the calls to agents. In this new release, we’re adding two more capabilities to intelligent work classification: customer sentiment identification and effort estimation for routing. These capabilities will enable organizations to harness state-of-the-art AI to improve customer satisfaction and reduce resolution times.

Understanding customer needs with sentiment identification

Matching agents to calls based on skills is a basic capability in unified routing. What if you could also gauge customer sentiment based on keywords, and then route calls to agents best able to handle those various emotions?

Let’s better understand this with a scenario. Imagine Contoso Coffee is operating a support center and has implemented unified routing. They recently had a high volume of unhappy customers, and they brainstormed about how best to use their existing staff to address these concerns. Contoso Coffee realizes that customer sentiment could be used as a signal to influence call routing; some agents are better at managing unhappy customers. Contoso decides to adopt sentiment prediction in unified routing. They take a few simple steps:

1. Contoso’s admin opts into the feature and tries it out using the Dry Run tool, where the admin can test phrases specific to their organization and view the sentiment prediction.
2. The admin set up a skill for managing work items predicted to include low (unhappy) sentiment, and that skill is assigned to their agents who have the right training to handle it.
3. The admin configured a rule to predict sentiment, and it attaches the low sentiment management skill to work items when sentiment is low.
4. The dry run option is used to start testing out the rule, with work items assigned based on the score.
5. Now, once the rule is in production, new work items predicted to have low sentiment have a higher priority to be matched to agents with the appropriate management skillset.

As a result, Contoso Coffee was able to address the spike in unhappy customers, leveraging their agents to maintain customer satisfaction.

Learn more about using customer sentiment in classification in this short video introduction:

Read more in the documentation about using sentiment prediction-based model in work classification.

Estimate effort to increase assignment efficiency

A key contributor to an effective contact center is understanding how long it will take to address support requests. Organizations do not have a simple way to understand how much time it will take agents to address incoming work items. Effort estimation replaces manual processes with the use of AI. This intelligence interprets the issue and uses historical support data to generate a work estimate.

Highlights of this capability include:

• For training, a business admin can specify which work items to train on and define effort for their organization.
• Use the dry run experience to test out the model on customer data and view real effort estimations prior to integrating into the routing process.
• Add it to existing routing capabilities such as route to queue rules.
• Review diagnostics for insight into how the work item was routed using effort estimations.
• Train multiple custom models based on individual customer data.

Learn more about effort-based routing in this short video introduction:

Read more in the documentation about using the effort estimation model in unified routing.

Matching required skills to agents

In any contact center, each agent will have a different set of skills to offer, and organizations should use those skills appropriately to best address customer requests. To maximize agent potential, it is critical for any organization to understand the skills required to address a work item and identify the agent that is best suited to address it. Intelligent skill finder takes the guesswork out of this by using AI to predict the skills required to address an incoming work item, and then matching those required skills to corresponding agents.

Highlights of this capability include:

• For training, a business admin can specify which work items to train.
• Use it with skill-based routing.
• Models can improve over time based on the agent feedback loop.
• Review diagnostics for insight into how the work item was routed using skill predictions.
• Train multiple custom models based on individual customer data.

Next steps

Visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community Forum to share your thoughts.

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

The post Use intelligence to transform routing of service delivery requests appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Marketing professionals go to great lengths to understand customers. Detailed personas are written to identify the motivations, interests, and buying patterns of prospects and customers. But all too often, these personasand their resulting customer journeysare informed by data points important to the organization, not the customer. You cannot claim to be customer-centric, customer-first, or customer-obsessed if all the data you track is company-centric.

You may be thinking your organization is ahead of the customer journey curve here. After all, you’re already tracking customer-centric metrics such as net promoter score, customer satisfaction score, and customer effort score. But take a second look. These key performance indicators (KPIs) still ultimately measure benchmarks important to the organization, not the customer.

Go beyond KPIs with customer performance indicators

Nobody is arguing that an organization shouldn’t have a robust set of KPIs focused on measuring the fulfillment of important company objectives. But your toolbox of performance indicators doesn’t have to end thereand neither do the possibilities for the customer journey. Rather, take things to a whole new level by also measuring the fulfillment of customers’ objectives and optimizing the journey with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Customer performance indicators (CPIs) quantify and measure outcomes that are desired by customers. These outcomes could include time savings, cost savings, convenience, flexibility, a sense of security, or any number of other outcomes customers deem valuable in the context of your product or service. There’s no cookie-cutter set of CPIs; they will vary widely across industries, organizations, products, and regions.

Consider the scenario of a retailer whose shoppers especially value speed. Acknowledging their shoppers’ priorities along with the need to balance services with expectations, the retailer tracks customers’ wait-time for curbside pick-up. They discover that wait times occasionally go beyond customer expectations. In response, the retailer implements a new feature that sends a flash promotional offer to high-value customers, when they are on their way during busy periods, for a complimentary drink redeemable from the in-store bar when they switch to in-store pickup. It’s a personalized gesture that acknowledges the retailer fell short of expectations but is trying to do its best to make it up to the customer. By optimizing the metrics that reflect what is important to the customer, the retailer can positively impact a whole host of KPIs, from customer satisfaction and customer loyalty to sales revenueand more.

Where KPIs end and customer performance indicators begin

There is a strong correlation between CPIs and KPIs. As illustrated by our retailer example, meeting the objective of a CPI is likely to boost associated KPIs. In fact, CPIs have been identified as powerful predictors of growth. Similarly, declining CPIs are likely to drag down associated KPIs.

CPIs also uncover insights about KPIs. Take customer satisfaction as an example. A high customer satisfaction score (a common KPI) indicates that an organization is doing something well. And while that’s critical information, this KPI on its own may not be able to provide visibility into what that something is. Or whether that something is even important to the customer. But a set of CPIs designed to measure desired customer outcomes such as personalized touches or chat availability can identify where the strongest correlations lie between what is important to the customer and what is important to the company.

CPIs and KPIs have a lot in common. They both measure performance, they both demonstrate progress toward an intended result, and they both impact the bottom line. For this reason, they can be difficult to distinguish from one another.

In the following table, we identify a few common KPIs. Alongside each KPI, we list one or more CPIs that could be used to enhance the understanding or performance of the associated KPI.

Find your customer performance indicators

What outcomes do your customers value? When you have the answer to that question, you can focus on delivering those outcomes. Every CPI identified, quantified, and measured brings new discoveries, new opportunities, and new levers to pull. Every CPI optimized is one more personalization you can bring to the customer journey, from brand voice and quote delivery to product bundling and customer service availability.

In short, it’s not enough to measure what’s important to your organizationnot if you want to optimize the customer journey and exceed customer expectations. You must also measure what’s important to your customers.

Learn how Dynamics 365 Marketing helps your organization optimize the CPIs that lead to elevated experiences.

The post The most important customer experience metrics (that you’re not tracking yet) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today’s organizations have seen tremendous value in using mixed reality, as it rapidly changes how employees learn, work, and understand the world around them. With the unique value of mixed reality solutions, such as Microsoft HoloLens 2, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, organizations can drive workforce transformation with on-the-job guidance, hands-on training, and collaboration that is seamless, intuitive, and embedded into everyday workflows.

Intel technicians using HoloLens 2, Dynamics 365 Guides, and Remote Assist to resolve complex issues

Today, we’ll look at how Intel manufacturing facilities are using mixed reality solutions such as HoloLens 2, Dynamics 365 Guides, and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist globally. In some of the world’s most advanced manufacturing facilities, technicians are responsible for building, maintaining, and troubleshooting some of the most complex manufacturing products made by humans. Working at some of the smallest known geometries, every piece of maintenance must be performed precisely by continuously improving processes to ensure the production of smarter, faster, and more energy-efficient computer chips. With six wafer fabrication sites and four assembly test manufacturing locations worldwide, Intel must maintain a global, virtual network.

In Intel’s Israel manufacturing facility, HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Guides have become integral to its manufacturing processes, playing a key role in the following scenarios:

• Maintenance and repair tasks: Intel employees “learn by doing” with step-by-step instructions for conducting inspections and audits, deploying new equipment, fixing machine breaks, addressing issues faster, and increasing efficiency. Additionally, Dynamics 365 Guides allows Intel to proactively manage their assets to avoid costly downtime due to unpredicted failure. This includes conducting preventative maintenance, defining new intelligent workflows, and thoroughly completing maintenance tasks using checklists in Dynamics 365 Guides.
• Troubleshooting: Dynamics 365 Guides brings critical information into view to help Intel technicians troubleshoot, audit, or support difficult and delicate procedures, improving first-time fix rate for urgent repairs with guidance.
• Remote communication: Dynamics 365 Remote Assist seamlessly connects Intel experts and technicians through the calling feature to collaborate and solve problems without disrupting the flow of work. Dynamics 365 Remote Assist has also helped maintain the new normal to everyday routinewith advanced collaboration features, Intel has made it easy for their expert engineers to work from home to perform remote inspections that share video, screenshots, and annotations across devices. By avoiding unnecessary travel, Intel has helped increase safety and wellbeing during COVID-19 on a global scale.

• Preparing interactive training materials: Intel employees can train from home, at their desk, or on the shop floor. Dynamics 365 Guides enables authors to build digital, interactive trainings that can be viewed from anywhere and easily scale any updates to keep up with real-time changes. These trainings can be produced by anyone on a PC or HoloLens device with simple 2D and 3D creation in the real-world environment.
• Facility tour: With the power of HoloLens 2, employees can provide hands-free, digital facility tours to virtually show the inner workings of Intel’s cutting-edge facilities.

We are thrilled to see what the future holds and how mixed reality will continue to innovate manufacturing processes at Intel. To learn more, watch the video below to discover how Intel Israel is using Dynamics 365 Guides, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and HoloLens 2 today.

Get started with Dynamics 365 Guides

• Ready to empower your frontline employees? Read more about Dynamics 365 Guides capabilities and get your questions answered using our Dynamics 365 Guides documentation.
• Take the next step by trying a 30-day free trial of Dynamics 365 Guides.
• See how mixed reality solutions on HoloLens 2 can help your business be more productive.
• Find information on Dynamics 365 partners for manufacturing.

The post Exploring the Intel manufacturing environment through mixed reality appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The concept of the global control tower first appeared on the radar of supply chain leaders around 15 years ago. As more and more companies pursued end-to-end visibility for increasingly globalized supply chains, the idea quickly gained momentum. IndustryWeek noted global control towers as one of the hottest supply chain buzzwords of 2008.¹ Still, for an idea that has been buzzing for over a decade, many companies have been challenged to move from concept to reality.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping companies overcome these challenges by equipping them with the tools necessary to create digital supply chains that are highly collaborative, coordinated, agile, and demand-driven. With these new supply chain solutions in place, businesses can achieve real-time, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, breathing new life into concepts like supply chain control towers in the process.

Supply chain control towers

It has quickly become essential for businesses to invest in technology that can help them sense and predict supply chain constraints and disruptions and spikes and troughs in demand. From using advanced forecasting techniques to real-time collaboration between trading partners and commercial teams, business processes are increasingly geared to generate and proactively shape customer demand. Companies must also integrate the agility to continuously optimize supply and production plans in real-time, as forecast and predictions shift into actual customer order receipts. Supply chains control towers help in these efforts by building both agility and resiliency into the supply chain by delivering end-to-end operational visibility, all the way from planning to delivery and back.

Resiliency in this context is about driving business continuity. This can take the form of digitizing production in factories, automating operations on the shop floor, and providing unparallel transparency, in real-time, to leadership. By utilizing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights^preview to create a digital representation of the physical supply chain, whether called a control tower, digital twin, or supply chain nerve center, businesses can reach new levels of agility and gain the ability to sense and proactively mitigate disruptions before they occur. And to respond faster when the inevitable happens, such as an unpredictable or unforeseen event.

McKinsey & Company estimates that a $10 billion business with a high-performing supply chain can reduce cost by as much as $50 million annually through digital initiatives such as supply chain nerve centers.² This is because control towers enable supply chain organizations to blur the lines between planning and execution, allowing businesses to uncover and exploit improvement opportunities faster than ever before.

Building blocks

Visibility

Starting with the end in mind, regardless of the mixture of people, processes, data, organization, and technology used to erect a control tower, it must deliver end-to-end visibility across all supply chain nodes to be successful. This visibility should penetrate beyond tier 1 and tier 2 partners.

Agility

While visibility is the starting point, visibility by itself is not sufficient. Supply chain solutions must also deliver improvements to agility so companies can more effectively respond to changing customer demands. In practice, this means going beyond the ability to immediately grasp what is happening (system-wide visibility) and on to making predictions of what is likely to happen next. This way, business leaders can adapt and overcome challenges as they are identified in real-time.

Unified data

The value that a construct such as a supply chain control tower can deliver is proportional to the organizations’ ability to unify data from disparate sources. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, legacy business applications, supplier systems of records, siloed hard drives, PLCs, and even IoT data streams all must be incorporated and unified.

Automation

Businesses also need supply chain solutions that incorporate rules-based orchestration to model and automate responses to fulfillment constraints. By leveraging automation in this manner, organizations can proactively address issues with actionable, data-driven insights, allowing them to adapt faster to disruptions and constraints.

Vision

At Microsoft, we see supply chain control towers as a shared service process that can be brought together from a mix of supply chain solutions. For example, a control tower can be assembled using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights^preview together with Microsoft Power Platform, and our rapidly growing ecosystem of digital supply chain applications.

A supply chain control tower enabled by Dynamics 365 in this fashion positions organizations to respond faster and more intelligently to disruptions and opportunities. With seamless integration to many market-leading API-enabled applications using our configurable pre-built partner connectors, businesses can convert the action signals from what-if analysis into directives sent to the applications that guide day-to-day operational execution.

Organizational benefits

When organizations use Dynamics 365 to create a supply chain control tower, they can realize the benefits of a single platform. One version of truth brings together internal and external stakeholders to visualize constraints and disruptions at any point in the value stream. Then, affected agents and authorities can work together to analyze the upstream or downstream impacts, collaborate in near real-time to formulate and enact optimal responsesall from one location and one pane of glass.

In this way, a supply chain control tower created with Dynamics 365 enables organizations to adapt quickly to demand shifts by deliberately blurring the lines between planning and execution and effectively creating a continuous digital feedback loop across entities and distinct business processes.

Let’s now look at how a customer, Breville Group, is creating a resilient supply chain of the future with Dynamics 365.

Looking forward

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides manufacturers, distributors, and retailers with the real-time visibility and intelligence they need to move from reactive to proactive. It unifies data and uses predictive insightsacross order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, warehousing, and transportationto maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability. And, with innovative technologies, such as AI and machine learning integrated into the solution, it helps organizations accelerate performance even further.

Learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights ^preview enable companies to strengthen and expand the Four Pillars of the Digital Supply Chain. To learn more, check out our recent webinar Create Agile and Digital Supply Chains with Dynamics 365, and join a panel of Microsoft Experts in the live Ask the Expert session scheduled for December 7, 2021, at 10AM Pacific Time.

1- IndustryWeek, A Guide to the Hottest Supply Chain Buzzwords of 2008, January 2008

2- McKinsey & Company, Building a digital bridge across the supply chain with nerve centers, January 2021

The post Enhance visibility with Dynamics 365 digital supply chain solutions appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.