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Despite living in a connected world, the way we use our apps can often feel distinctly disconnected. Today, we’re announcing a new way to help you stay focused with help from two Microsoft apps that many people use daily and consistently together—the classic Microsoft Outlook app on Windows and the Microsoft Edge web browser.
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With the new Global Inventory Accounting Add-in, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management now supports parallel cost accounting. The ability to perform inventory accounting using multiple costing ledgers enables organizations that do business internationally to easily comply with multiple accounting standards at the same time.
Global organizations face complex accounting challenges
International organizations face a complex accounting challenge when they produce and sell items across many countries. For each item they produce and sell, they must often calculate multiple representations of inventory costs to comply with local generally accepted accounting principles, statutory accounting principles like the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), and internal management accounting practices, even when these directly conflict with one another.
In addition, companies may need to account inventory costings using both a potentially fluctuating local currency and a solid second currency for statutory compliance. Finally, companies may need to use one cost valuation method internally, and a different one for their local country or region.
Parallel cost accounting made easier
A key feature of the Global Inventory Accounting Add-in is its ability to create a single document that applies multiple accounting rules simultaneously based on different currencies, input measurement bases, and cost flow assumptions. With the new multi-ledger functionality, organizations can define as many costing ledgers as they need. Inventory accounting in dual currencies and in dual valuations are both supported.
For example, a subsidiary in a country with a hyper-fluctuating local currency is required by the local government to account and manage inventory in the local currency. At the same time, to comply with IFRS, the subsidiary must also account and manage inventory in a stable currency like USD or EUR. With Global Inventory Accounting, the subsidiary can record and check values in multiple currencies by switching between various predefined ledgers for a specific sales order.
Because Global Inventory Accounting runs as a micro service, it provides inventory statements, valuations, and variance reporting in cloud-hosted environments such as Microsoft Dataverse.
Greater visibility into costs with Power BI reporting
Global Inventory Accounting also enables organizations to analyze their costs in greater detail. Organizations can retrieve informative Power BI reports for further analysis, and use the included templates to generate inventory overviews, inventory statements, and more for cost controllers and managers to analyze costs and make decisions about future changes.
Parallel cost accounting: Behind the scenes
Global Inventory Accounting performs inventory accounting in individual ledgers. Organizations can create as many costing ledgers for each of their legal entities as needed to ensure they can obtain multiple inventory representations. All documents (such as purchase orders, sales orders, transfer orders, and so on) that are posted in a legal entity are accounted in all the costing ledgers that are associated with the entity.
The following diagram shows the composition of a Global Inventory Accounting ledger.
Looking ahead
To empower organizations to achieve compliance while operating internationally, Global Inventory Accounting supports both standard cost and moving average for retail and distribution industries. Future enhancements will target manufacturing companies by adding support for standard cost, moving average, weighted average, first in first out (FIFO), and other calculation methods.
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Today, we’re announcing all of Yammer will become Microsoft Viva Engage. We’ll continue to enhance Viva Engage with new capabilities that encourage leadership engagement, authentic expression, and knowledge discovery, including new experiences rolling out today.
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Companies that operate in more than one channel or region must fulfill orders over networks of ever-increasing complexity. When supply shortages happenand they willhow do you make the best use of limited stock across your most important channels, customer groups, regions, and promotions? And once you decide that, how do you make sure the allocated stock is protected from any other use? With inventory allocation, a new capability of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Inventory Visibility service.
Inventory allocation allows you to virtually apportion your on-hand stock as part of the sales operational planning process before any actual sales are made. It has two purposes:
Inventory protection (ring fencing): Protecting the allocated inventory from other allocations, reservations, or sales demands.
Oversell control: Restricting allocated quantities so that the receiving party doesn’t over-consume them when the actual sales transaction takes place.
Incorporate inventory allocation into your sales planning
First, let’s define a few terms:
Allocation group: The group that owns the allocation, such as a sales channel or a customer group.
Allocation group value: The value of each allocation group. For example, “store” might be the value of the sales channel allocation group, and “VIP” might be the value of the customer allocation group.
Allocation hierarchy: A combination of allocation groups in a hierarchy that determines how inventory is allocated to each group.
Virtual common pool: The quantity of inventory that’s available to allocate.
Now let’s do a case study to see how a company might include inventory allocation in its sales planning process to optimize the distribution and fulfillment flow of limited stock.
Inventory allocation case study
Contoso sells laptops both online and in-store in several countries. Supply chain disruptions severely affected manufacturing capacity of a popular model. The company needs to balance its fulfillment capability between its online and in-store channels in Australia and New Zealand.
First, Contoso determines allocation groups and allocation hierarchies in accordance with the company’s distribution strategy. The allocation is virtual based on current stock numbers. It doesn’t necessarily entail moving physical inventory. Contoso does the initial segmentation and planning of allocation quantities in its planning system, but they could also do it manually based on historical experience. They decide to allocate first by regions (Australia, New Zealand) and then by sales channels (online, store).
Next, Contoso executes the allocation in the Inventory Visibility service to ring-fence each group’s allotted quantity. An allocation can’t be used by another group unless a reallocation adjustment is made. The Australia group is allotted 5,000 laptops and the New Zealand group gets 3,000, leaving 2,000 as contingency in the virtual common pool. Of Australia’s 5,000, 3,000 is allotted to its online sales channel group. No stock transfer is needed yet, since the actual sales transactions and fulfillment haven’t taken place.
Next, the company fills its regional and channel demands through physical or soft consumption, ensuring that orders from allocation groups use their allocation. A customer visits Contoso’s Australia website and purchases a laptop. The website checks the Inventory Visibility service, confirms that enough of the Australia allocation for the online sales channel is available to fill the order, and allows the order to be processed. The consumed quantity can either be a soft reservation, as in this case, which deducts from the available stock level without affecting physical inventory quantity; or a deduction from physical stock, as in a “cash and carry” transaction in which the store inventory is directly consumed.
Contoso processes and ships the customer’s order as usual.
You can easily incorporate inventory allocation into your order fulfillment process. You’ll have more control over and visibility into your distribution and fulfillment network so that you can make better use of your on-hand stock. Inventory allocation goes beyond planning right through to the execution phase, ensuring allocated stock is protected and helping you keep your promises to sales channels, customer groups, and business partners.
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With global volatility and inflation impacting organizations across all industries, business agility has never been more important. Leaders turn to finance teams to get real-time insight into business performance and recommendations on future initiatives that will help them thrive amid disruption. But finance teams are overwhelmed with manual tasks, cobbling together data, and disconnected teams. Achieving game-changing business agility begins with augmenting the human ingenuity of your people with intelligent process automation.
When it comes to reimagining processes with AI, automation, and analytics, many finance leaders don’t know where to start. This year, at the third annual Finance Reimagined digital event, we will delve into real-world best practices from Microsoft and industry leaders that will help you prioritize the right cost optimization, growth acceleration, and workforce transformation initiatives.
Finance Reimagined 2023
Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)
Finance Reimagined: Bringing the future of finance into focus
Finance Reimagined is a virtual event bringing together finance leaders from around the world. On February 28, 2023, from 9:00 AM to10:15 AM PT, you can unpack the latest trends shaping the future of finance including the strategic evolution of the role of CFO within organizations, maintaining commitments to multiple stakeholders and bottom lines against a challenging economic environment, and the opportunities to drive transformation through the partnership of human ingenuity and AI.
Discover what’s top of mind for CFOs and financial leaders
You’ll discover best practices, trends, and priorities that are top of mind for CFOs and finance leaders. We’ve lined up experts from Microsoft, IDC, Avanade, EY, HSO, KPMG, and PwC to deliver actionable insights on how to strike the right balance between the following:
Human and AI
Find harmony between automation and your organization’s most important assetyour people. We will tackle one of the top concerns for CFOs today: workforce optimization. The heart of productivity sits in employee well-beingor the organization’s ability to increase creativity, job satisfaction, and ultimately, happiness. Human ingenuity is now business’ greatest investment to drive long-term vision and needs to be incentivized. Automation changes the way we work, thus organizational structures, required competencies, and roles must change as well. Get tips at Finance Reimagined on how to prioritize automation initiatives and how to use them to augment your people resources.
Cost optimization and growth acceleration
Embrace a dual role of gatekeeper and innovator to bring more strategic value to your organization. You’ll hear from a panel of finance leaders at Microsoft as they respond to trends from a recent study of more than 500 senior finance leaders from across all industries. Learn how Microsoft is empowering our finance leaders to do more with less to guide teams through these uncertain times. We will discuss tactics to optimize cash flow, increase operational effectiveness, and reinvest to meet growth expectations.
The speed of business and risk mitigation
Organizational health has become increasingly dependent on data and tools to facilitate agile, data-driven decision making. Finance teams are doubling down on their efforts to keep up with our world’s increasingly volatile and interconnected markets that demand more fluid operating models, extending beyond the walls of an organization. This means that the role of the finance leader has evolved from being an economic guardian inside the walls of an enterprise to designing new business models that focus on delivering customer value outside of an enterprise. This evolution is only possible through a tight partnership between the CFO and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure data security while activating insights at every level of the organization. Join us for a discussion with the CFO and CTO at Robert Walters, a global recruitment and talent management company with a team of experts spanning 31 countries and serving more than 4,300 clients, to hear how they partnered to speed the time to insight within their organization.
Register today to attend Finance Reimagined for your look ahead at the emerging trends and essential insights defining how tomorrow’s businesses will thrive. We hope to see you there.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Service leaders face continual challenges in evolving the service organization to meet customer expectations, putting their brand value and customer loyalty at riskas a recent study shows, 96 percent of customers will leave a business after a bad customer experience.1 They feel either lost with disruptive changes in the contact center and customer service marketplace, or helpless on where to start, or confused on what to adopt and what to disregard, or fear being all over the map while making investments aligned with the business goals.
Service sophistication model
Assess and improve the effectiveness of your organization’s current service experiences.
Evolve service organizations to meet customer expectations
The business goals differ across service organizations, as some are managed as a siloed cost-center, some are intent on matching up with industry peers on competitive metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), some have embraced digital transformation to the extent that it enables data visibility and automation across the organization, and a few view them as profit centers, ready for the future with AI-powered experiences.
Regardless of where they are in this spectrum, service leaders always want to know:
What is happening in the customer service and contact center market today, and how does it matter to us as a service organization?
How can I assess where our service level is positioned, and how can we prepare for the future?
What service solutions are available to help us?
We had a chance to discuss this topic with a leading analyst. Watch our guest Kate Leggett of Forrester discuss the state of service and how to elevate and deliver more sophisticated customer service:
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Deliver the best customer service experience with consolidated solutions
As they say, change is the only constant, and it aptly applies to the different categories that define the contact center and customer service market today. Broadly speaking, the lines are no longer distinct between unified communications as a service (UCaaS), contact center, and the customer relationship management (CRM) market categories. They are all transitioning to cloud, and the capabilities are overlapping to the extent possible. They are powered by contact center AI (CCAI) and carrier voice technology innovations that drive the efficiency and experience of customer service interactions. This also shifts the preference from best-of-breed solutions which have a side effect of fragmentation, to the possibility of consolidated solutions that can deliver the best experience.
Given the myriad capabilities from the technology innovations and market categories, and the fact that service organizations are across the spectrum, what service leaders need is a convenient way to map them to different service levels of sophistication. Essentially, a service maturity model that groups major capabilities and maps them to appropriate levels in the spectrum. This allows service leaders to visualize where they are relative to the market and determine at what level they’d like to be based on their business goals, investment, and timeline. In addition, they can decide practically and prioritize on the capabilities that matter to themacross voice and digital channels, self-service, agent productivity, and service operations.
Receive a customized service level guidance report
We are with you on this evolution. Microsoft is pleased to provide the service sophistication model to help service leaders chart their course. It is a simple web-experience that should take less than five minutes. The model groups capabilities into personalized customer engagement, including omnichannel access and routing, scale, and automation with self-service, empowering agents with productivity tools and AI-powered and analytics-driven service processes and workflows. And the service leader would look at four different levels of service in each group and pick the option that best describes their organization. As an example, do they have just a call center, or do they include some self-service capabilities, or do they already deploy a contact center with digital channels, or are they ahead with AI-powered personalized experiences? Once they answer a few questions, they will receive a customized guidance report on where they are and where they can go incrementally to the next level.
Transform your customer service journeys with the leading capabilities
Sometimes, evolution is about leaping ahead rather than taking incremental steps. What if you want your organization to transition to an altogether new experience? We also offer you the full picture on the possibilitiesjust take a moment to register and download the service sophistication model whitepaper. It’s worth the read to understand comprehensively the spectrum of service levels and capabilities, the pain points and metrics that matter, where the industry is going, and where service leaders can take their organizations.
Personalize the customer service journey with Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Microsoft is in a unique position to bring together the service solution that addresses the different categories and the spectrum of capabilitieswith Microsoft Teams for unified communications and collaboration, omnichannel and CRM capabilities with Microsoft Dynamics 365, and CCAI with Nuance, along with Azure cloud.
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Evolve at your pace with an architecture that fits your service experience
The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform brings these products together, along with partner innovations, as an open, flexible, and collaborative platform that allows service organizations to keep their existing contact center infrastructure, and create the best experience for their customers.
On a final note, our guidance is not just about service levels of sophisticationwe also have an array of reference architectures to fit different customer scenarios.
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