Planning on attending the upcoming Hannover Messe Digital Edition? If so, come discover how mixed reality business applications like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist are helping transform organizations like Schaeffler. The Hannover Messe industry (HMI) conference covers all core themes of the industrial value-adding chainfrom individual components to the complete smart factory. Join us at the “Transform Your Workforce” panel session to hear from Schaeffler on how they are using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to transform their manufacturing operations and boost productivity while saving cost. Also, learn how Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is helping create a more resilient and sustainable future through open standards and ecosystems. What manufacturers can do with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist The manufacturing industry has proven to be one of the earliest adopters of mixed reality technologies, successfully leveraging mixed reality business applications like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist across discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, automotive, and more. With Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, global manufacturing companies such as Ecolab, Musashi, and Saint-Gobain have been able to get real-time remote assistance from experts around the world anytime, anywhere while still being able to access and anchor critical work order details, schematics, and diagrams within their physical work environment. Additionally, many manufacturers today are also now using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to conduct remote audits and inspections with videos, screenshots, and 3D annotations, ultimately driving cost savings and efficiency, and avoiding travel costsall while minimizing their carbon footprint. According to the Microsoft-commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) report on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, studies conducted by Forrester showed that Dynamics 365 Remote Assist typically helped achieve the following impact in labor and travel costs savings for field technicians and experts, unlocked labor savings for manufacturing site technicians, and avoided lost income, labor, and direct costs stemming from common manufacturing issues: Customers resolve throughput-impacting issues five days earlier, saving approximately $20,052 per issue. Experts and technicians can now collaborate to solve costly issues days or weeks faster. With issues modeled to cause an estimated 5 percent drop in throughput for the composite organization, resolving issues five days faster helped prevent approximately four hours of lost production and costly downtime. Experts avoid 17 trips per year, saving $53,550 in travel costs and 384 hours valued at $39,744 per expert. Experts can now virtually see, annotate, and direct onsite users, avoiding trips for inspections and last-minute issue resolution. Each avoided trip saves $3,500 in travel costs and three to four days of labor. Field technicians avoid 55 trips per year, saving 188 hours valued at $4,230 plus $2,498 in travel costs per technician. Field technicians shift 50 percent of inspections to virtual, improve first-time fix (FTF) by 10 percent for tier 1 issues and by 40 percent for tier 2 issues, and can now self-resolve 75 percent of tier 3 issues with remote expert support. Manufacturing site technicians save 124 hours per year valued at $2,790 per technician. Using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist for collaboration with onsite technicians and office staff plus remote experts boosts inspection productivity by 25 percent, halves labor for tier 2 issues, and slashes tier 3 issue resolution labor by 75 percent. Additional benefits of Dynamics 365 Remote Assist include the ability to: Accelerate manufacturing with fewer throughput drops, improving customer experience Improve quality and accuracy of work with remote collaboration and guidance Speed up decision making as plant workers demonstrate proposed work in real-time, helping remote stakeholders quickly understand, align on, and approve the work Boost inspection frequency plus recording capture of work and inspections for auditing and compliance. Ensure critical business continuity, especially with evolving macroeconomic and geopolitical conditions Improve employee health and safety by avoiding travel and minimizing physical contact (especially with driving and pandemic-related risks), allowing onsite workers to complete tasks while still getting access to remote experts when needed Enhance employee experience by avoiding time-consuming, often last-minute work travel. These experts can also now avoid travel-related fatigue and jetlag. An improved work-life balance helps improve employee satisfaction, and enables the company to attract, hire, and retain talent. Improve knowledge acquisition, retention, and sharing with hands-on completion of task work with remote expert support enhanced with mixed reality 3D annotations, plus real-time or recorded observation for future training purposes. Achieve sustainability goals by reducing travel-related emissions and carbon footprint Learn more about Dynamics 365 Remote Assist in manufacturing Read the full Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist report Be sure to also check out the following customer evidence stories to discover how your organization can similarly leverage Dynamics 365 Remote Assist for accelerated deployment, thorough inspections, and efficient break/fix resolution. Ecolab Watch the video with Ecolab’s David Goforth, Vice President Sales North America, and Rick Stokes, Area Technical Support Manager, as they speak with Rodney Clark, Vice President IoT and Mixed Reality Sales at Microsoft, about how Ecolab Food and Beverage is transforming business processes to better serve customers and employees in the face of emerging challenges. Musashi Musashi Seimitsu Industry is an automotive parts manufacturer with production and sales facilities in 14 countries and 35 hubs worldwide. The global brand slogan, Power to Value, has represented its innovative manufacturing style since 1938. This can-do spirit has protected corporate infrastructure amidst COVID-19. By merging the real and digital worlds with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens 2, the company launched a new production line in Mexico without a single engineer leaving Japan. Musashi Seimitsu is embracing the post COVID-19 new normal with its swift digital transformation. Saint-Gobain Saint-Gobain is a global leader in the manufacture of sustainable, high-performance building materials. The craftsmanship and innovation underlying the company’s technologically advanced products, particularly its specialized glass offerings, hinge on stellar production machine maintenance and in-depth training. Since the Saint-Gobain process experts who provide that deep expertise can’t be everywhere at once, the company turned to Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to deliver remote expert assistance in real-time. Now, maintenance and training are faster, more impactful, and with dramatically less travel required, helping Saint-Gobain be aligned with their sustainability goals. Dynamics 365 Remote Assist resources Learn more about Dynamics 365 Remote Assist. Register to attend upcoming Dynamics 365 Remote Assist Microsoft Reactor sessions. Complete the Dynamics 365 Remote Assist Learning Path. Read Dynamics 365 Remote Assist customer stories. See how mixed reality solutions on HoloLens 2 can help your business be more productive. Find information on Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners for manufacturing. Listen to the Dynamics 365 Connected and Ready podcast episode on mixed reality, “Ford goes from vehicles to ventilators, with Dr. Graham Hoare OBE.” Sources: The Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, June 2020

The post Transforming manufacturing operations with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Digital transformation is rapidly expanding, the workforce is aging, and organizations are looking for technology to upskill their workforce faster. Manufacturers, in particular, rely on a highly skilled workforce that must keep up with the pace of technology change. Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute estimate that up to 2.4 million United States manufacturing jobs could remain unfilled between 2018 and 2028 because of a lack of adequate skills.1 What’s needed to address the skills gap is a scalable solution to training and operations. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides, no custom coding is required, and employees get guidance right where the work happens with step-by-step holographic instructions. Move away from traditional training methods, gain insights into what is working, and reduce downtime and associated costs with guides that enable employees to be hands-free while learning. Ensure compliance with hands-free learning According to a Deloitte and MAPI survey2 of manufacturers, the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, further exacerbating the growing skills gap on the shop floor, and it’s also introducing new challenges for worker safety and production. With Dynamics 365 Guides, organizations get a scalable solution for on-the-job guidance with no coding required. Employees simply follow instructions they see right in front of them while they are hands-free for faster learning. Keeping employees safe is critical, and Dynamics 365 Guides gives employees confidence in taking care of their regular tasks and tackling unexpected challenges. Guide employees through procedures, whether it’s their first time or a recurring task, by using holographic step-by-step instructions where the work is done. Surface urgent information quickly using Dynamics 365 Guides to provide warnings and cautions to your users with needed details in view as they work. Maximize hands-free time by increasing efficiency and flexibility with improved voice commands that allow more hands-free time. Improve operations with employee insights According to the latest “Future of Jobs” report from the World Economic Forum, “94 percent of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job” but only 16 percent of those surveyed have made significant progress in improving knowledge gaps.3 Closing knowledge gaps isn’t just about training; it’s about optimizing operations across the workforce. But manufacturers need visibility into where the gaps are and what training is working. Dynamics 365 Guides empowers organizations to aggregate employee task performance data into real-time Microsoft Power BI dashboards, making it easier to identify where process improvements are needed. Gain data-driven insights over time with Dynamics 365 Guides to improve employee effectiveness. Quickly deploy skill-building initiatives that target specific gaps identified in Dynamics 365 Guides’ usage reports and create consistency across teams. Pull employee performance data into real-time Power BI dashboards, making it easier to improve processes and share analytics within your organization. Integrate with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions to do more We are continually integrating the rest of the Dynamics 365 suite of solutions with Dynamics 365 Guides to unlock new scenarios. Greater integration means more seamless workflows and more opportunities for use cases across industries. Incorporate Dynamics 365 Guides with existing workflows using powerful services like Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate to view and save data. Extend the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Guides when work orders are assigned to technicians with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service. The dedicated Dynamics 365 Field Service tab in the Microsoft HoloLens application launches any assigned guide. Integrate Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with Dynamics 365 Guides to create mixed-reality, step-by-step instructions for production processes such as assembly, service, operations, certification, regulations, and safety procedures. Kruger brings factory handbook to life with Dynamics 365 Guides Kruger, a North American paper products and energy specialist, is an established company that leads its industry in terms of innovation. With experienced operators retiring every year, Kruger knows how important it is to capture their expertise to share with the next generation. With Microsoft Hololens 2 and Dynamics 365 Guides, Kruger brings its factory handbook to life. Now Kruger employees have an intuitive yet powerful tool to exchange knowledge and practical experiences. Dynamics 365 Guides empowers Kruger operators to be agile in their training by providing an entirely new way of learning on the job. “In today’s manufacturing world things are moving so fast. People need to be agile and find ways to learn faster and it is our responsibility, as a company, to provide them the best tool that exists and make them more comfortable to perform their task.”Gino Levesque, Senior Vice President Containerboard Kruger Packaging Using the branching feature, operators can easily select different pathways within the same procedure, depending on their experience. The spatial trigger feature intuitively leads workers to perform the next step, making it seamless for employees to learn on the job and build muscle memory. This quick access to information, regardless of experience, boosts productivity and empowers employees to take on new challenges. Using Dynamics 365 Guides and HoloLens 2, Kruger meets its growing workforce demands while capturing the expertise of their experienced operators. Get started with Dynamics 365 Guides Want to learn more? Learn how MSR and Sheba Medical Center meet urgent staffing demands with HoloLens 2 and 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. Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing for a more resilient and sustainable future through open standards and ecosystems. See how mixed reality solutions on HoloLens 2 can help your business be more productive. Find information on Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners for manufacturing. 1Deloitte Insights and the Manufacturing Institute, 2018 Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute Skills Gap and Future of Work Study. 2A 2020 Deloitte and MAPI Study finds ecosystems can create a competitive edge for manufacturers facing ongoing disruption, Smart Manufacturing Ecosystems: A Catalyst for Digital Transformation? 3World Economic Forum, 2020 Future of Jobs Report

The post Navigating the skills gap with Dynamics 365 Guides appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2021 release wave 1 includes enhancements that give admins greater control over knowledge management configuration and help agents access the information they need to resolve customer queries more quickly. This release makes it easier for agents to filter and find the most relevant knowledge articles. Admins can set the knowledge article authoring language at the organizational level, while agents have the flexibility to set their preferred language. Filter knowledge articles and set filter preferences Administrators can configure standard or custom fields for agents to use as filters, allowing agents to narrow down search results to view only the articles they need to resolve a customer issue. Key capabilities of filter configuration allow admins to: Add or delete custom filters for their organization. Set the visibility of the filter values by choosing which values are shown to agents at runtime. Set multiple preselected filter values by defining multiple default values based on which search results are filtered. Activate or deactivate filters to support business scenarios. Configure whether personalization of filter values is enabled or disabled for agents. Agents can set their own preferred search filters. Key capabilities of filter personalization allow agents to: Change the preselected default filter values their administrators set for them. Activate or deactivate filters to support business scenarios. Multiselect filter values to increase their productivity. Configure and personalize language settings for authoring With the April release, admins can set the organization’s default language for authoring new knowledge articles. In addition, authors can override the organization’s authoring language and set their own preferred language for writing new articles if desired. Key capabilities of language configuration for authoring knowledge articles are: Ability for admins to set the default language for authoring knowledge articles to match the language used for the organization’s user interface. Ability for agents to set a language of their choice as their preferred authoring language. Example screenshot for filters Enable the knowledge management feature Enable this feature on the Customer Service Hub > Service Management > Knowledge Base Management > Settings screen. Next steps Read more about knowledge management and other capabilities included in Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2021 release wave 1 or check out the documentation for Dynamics 365 Customer Service

The post Knowledge management enhancements increase agent efficiency appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Unified Service Desk for model-driven apps provides a configurable framework that allows you to build applications that give call center agents a unified view of customer data. Unified Service Desk version 4.2, available for public preview in April, enables you to host web applications using Microsoft Edge WebView2 Process based on the Chromium open-source framework, as well as delivering improved performance and other enhancements. The Microsoft Edge WebView2 control enables you to embed web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) in your native apps. Microsoft Edge WebView2 Process is based on CefSharp, which is an open-source framework in the Chromium core that powers many modern browsers. With support for Microsoft Edge WebView2, Unified Service Desk admins have these capabilities: Ability to select WebView2 Process as the hosting type for their organization. Ability to select WebView2 Process as the hosting type for web applications, along with Chrome Process. In addition, Microsoft Edge WebView2 Process delivers: Availability on supported versions of the Windows operating system. Easy configuration of host applications in Unified Service Desk. Ability to switch seamlessly from one browser to another for your entire organization. Enhanced performance and memory optimization. Next steps To learn more, check out the Unified Service Desk documentation or the Microsoft Edge WebView2 documentation. To test and validate the capabilities, download and install or update Unified Service Desk

The post Host web apps using Microsoft Edge WebView2 Process in Unified Service Desk (Preview) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we’re announcing new capabilities to help customer and field service teams deliver more consistent and engaging experiences, from the call center to on-site visits. The new features for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service provide the agility to adapt to changing customer needs, as well as streamline agent and technician workspaces, so they can resolve issues faster. Let’s look at what’s new in this release. Be sure to review the full release notes for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Field Service. Dynamics 365 Customer Service In our journey to help optimize support delivery and increase agent productivity, the following features are now generally available: Unified routing with modernized assignment capabilities leveraging custom rules and machine learning models to automate and scale work classification and assignment for large support organizations. Federated knowledge search to enable organizations to streamline and centralize the growth of their support knowledge base through other Dynamics 365 organizations, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Graph connectors. Embedded insights dashboards, which highlight important KPI insights for support summary KPIs, agent performance, support topic activity, and knowledge to alert supervisors to direct actions they can take to optimize support delivery every day. AI-powered suggestions to help agents resolve customer issues faster, and we’ve expanded these capabilities to support non-English languages. Streamlined, simplified set up for omnichannel through a new administrative experience. Intelligent work classification and assignment with unified routing Many people are involved in monitoring support queues to ensure incoming customer requests are properly classified in the right queues and assigned to available agents. This time-consuming activity can slow customer issue resolution and impact customer satisfaction. With unified routing, organizations can author custom rules, create and apply machine learning models to analyze incoming customer requests, and automatically classify the issue to better match the best available agent. Corresponding assignment rules can also be created with custom rules to analyze the classified issues and choose the best available agent to handle the issue based on the agent’s skills, spoken language, product expertise, or other attributes. Unified routing eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution. Agents can resolve issues faster when their strongest skills are being leveraged. This ensures customer issues are handled as quickly as possible by the best available agent resulting in increased customer satisfaction and customer retention. Expanding your knowledge base with federated knowledge search and knowledge insights Knowledge is something that most organizations have developed over time and it often resides in many different tools. This can make centralizing knowledge and making it easily accessible through a single interface costly and challenging. With federated knowledge search, organizations using Dynamics 365 Customer Service can enable agents to retrieve search results within multiple Microsoft Dataverse environments, SharePoint sites, and Microsoft Graph connectors through a single search interface in the agent productivity pane. Agents can deliver faster, more comprehensive service, knowing they have all the knowledge at their fingertips without having to browse disparate sets of information. Knowledge insights dashboards also help supervisors discover the topics agents are searching for most that lack sufficient knowledge article support. Supervisors can then take action to increase and improve the knowledge base for those topics. Optimizing service delivery with insights Analyzing support reports and deriving actionable insights can consume much of the supervisor’s time, reducing the amount of time to coach agents to support customers. With the latest insights dashboards, supervisors can quickly see what insights require action to drive improvement in customer sentiment, satisfaction, and speed of support delivery. The embedded summary dashboard surfaces key insights, showing supervisors what’s driving the trend in customer satisfaction, channel volumes, queue volumes, handle time, and other KPIs. Also surfaced are support topics to watch based on key KPIs that may require automation through virtual agents or additional knowledge articles to help agents indicate product-related issues. Agent dashboards provide deep agent analytics and important KPIs like active cases, resolved cases, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and customer sentiment. Supervisors can drill down to specific agents to determine what action is needed, such as reducing or increasing their capacity, adjusting their skills and queue assignments, providing additional training, or coaching them on soft skills to improve customer sentiment. Topic dashboards show how AI-generated support topics are impacting KPIs and provide the ability to drill into individual topics and acts, such as adding knowledge articles or automating the topic to a Microsoft Power Virtual Agents bot through a seamless authoring flow. And finally, conversation insights help supervisors monitor customer issues across channels in a single dashboard where they can optimize support delivery by tracking metrics, such as wait time, abandoned conversations, and time to resolution, either at the ecosystem view or by channel. Increasing agent productivity with improvements to smart assistance In traditional contact centers, agents spend time searching for similar cases and knowledge articles that are relevant to the current issue they are working on. This delays resolution time and can cause decreased customer satisfaction. AI-driven suggestions help agents share the best-suited information by using the current case or conversation context and scanning thousands of cases and articles to suggest those that are the most relevant. We’re expanding AI-powered suggestions to now support non-English languages such as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. Streamlining setup and configuration in omnichannel Our new administrator experience for omnichannel makes configuring channels, such as adding Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice surveys, and configuring unified routing streamlined and easy. You can also experiment with live chat through a demo and test out your own configuration changes without having to implement them in an environment. Check out what’s coming up Microsoft Teams continues to provide powerful collaboration capabilities for businesses across organizational boundaries. In June, we will be releasing Teams integrated into Customer Service Hub for agents to be able to seamlessly reach out to other colleagues and subject matter experts for advice and assistance while helping customers from the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Hub agent experience. Agents can easily associate chats to records and visually differentiate Teams chats for faster discoverability. In August, our first-party voice solution built on Azure Communication Services will be generally available. We are excited to offer a truly all-in-one experience with our first-party voice channel. Learn more about how the new voice channel streamlines omnichannel customer experiences. Dynamics 365 Field Service As we continue to enable customers to transform their service experience, the following features are now generally available: Technician tracking enables customers to more effectively plan around their service visits. Streamlined onboarding experience for faster time-to-value and ability to use Dynamics 365 Field Service in productive environments. Empowering technicians with knowledge management in Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile, capturing ad-hoc inspections, and inspections in multiple languages. Enabling dispatchers with enhanced scheduling experience, including a map, and weekly and monthly views. Plus, view appointments from other sources included in the scheduling experience. Technician tracking for greater appointment accuracy With the ability to view the technician’s location on a map, customers can plan around the visit and be ready when the technician arrives. This can decrease overall service delivery time and eliminate trips that might otherwise be canceled, and increase customer satisfaction with the efficient use of their time. Streamlining setup for Dynamics 365 Field Service administrators To ensure field service app administrators can quickly get started with Dynamics 365 Field Service, we’re introducing a simplified experience. From this improved getting started experience, you can provision your frontline workers, service accounts, and create and schedule work orders. Additionally, we provide inline access to our Dynamics 365 Field Service documentation, release plans, community, and ideas forum in the event you want to learn more, view upcoming feature work, or submit product ideas. Empowering technicians with enhanced knowledge and inspections Knowledge management is now embedded in the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app to better service assets and resolve issues even without the internet. By embedding knowledge management into field service processes in the mobile app, technicians can more reliably resolve work orders and install assets the first time, reducing costs by avoiding follow-up visits. Technicians can also author and link knowledge articles to work orders, enabling knowledge sharing to help other technicians with the same issue on future visits. Capturing inspections while on the job is essential for many field service technician scenarios. In some situations, the inspection is required when the work order is created. However, in other situations, technicians need the option to do an “ad-hoc” inspection for a customer which was not specified in the work order. Technicians can now select and complete an inspection from the list of inspections relating to a customer asset, regardless of whether it is specified on a work order. In addition, inspections are now available to be viewed and completed based on the preferred language of the technician. Enabling dispatchers with a rich scheduling experience Having a single view with all relevant information is key for dispatchers to safeguard that customer commitments are being met while ensuring technicians are scheduled effectively. The new scheduling experience (introduced during last year’s release wave 2) has been enhanced to now include a map view that shows work and technicians by location. The experience now also includes multi-day scheduling for work which spans across multiple days. Another challenge for dispatchers is having visibility into other appointments, such as those on a technician’s Microsoft Outlook calendar, which needs to be considered when determining availability. In addition to typical bookings, the scheduling experience now provides visibility into appointments from other calendars. These enhancements enable the dispatcher to have a comprehensive scheduling view and ensure optimal scheduling in a single experience. Check out what’s in preview and what’s coming up Be sure to enable “preview” on your organization and check out the portal for customers to manage appointment scheduling. When organizations are solely responsible for scheduling field service visits, customers often must wait for contact centers to reach out to schedule and update them on their field service appointments. This process can cause frustration, decrease customer satisfaction, and increase back-office overhead. To empower customers with flexibility and transparency to schedule, adjust, and monitor their field service visits, we’re introducing a self-service portal. Through the portal, customers can schedule their service appointments, view upcoming appointments, receive reminders, and track their technician’s location while en route to the visit. Giving customers the ability to manage their service appointments can help reduce scheduling errors and rescheduling of appointments. This has the added benefit of reducing your organization’s back-office costs by decreasing scheduling call volume and freeing up team members to focus on delivering quality service. In June, we’ll launch the preview of embedded Teams collaboration, which allows users to collaborate within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 workspace and link conversations to work orders. With this embedded functionality, all stakeholders involved in the service process can collaborate through Teams with full context. Dispatchers, asset managers, and other field service stakeholders can link existing Teams conversations or initiate new conversations, such as informing the scheduled technician of added information about the service. If your organization allows for Teams collaboration with customers, they can collaborate on work orders, too. We are honored to continue supporting you on your journey to deliver amazing service and earn customers for life. We look forward to continued engagement and your feedback on these new features and continuing to deliver the capabilities you need to enable great service delivery in your organization. Learn more Read more about the April 2021 release wave 1, and how Dynamics 365 Customer Service transforms the contact center and the new Dynamics 365 Field Service customer empowering features. Review the October 2020 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Field Service

The post Introducing new capabilities to transform customer service and field service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.