This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Telemetry is a crucial tool in monitoring the performance of a system to generate actionable insights that can improve productivity and optimize users’ experience. New warehousing telemetry data in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps provide insight into the activities and general health of your Warehouse Management tenants and devices, so that you can diagnose problems and analyze operations that affect performance.
With Warehouse Management Application Insights telemetry, you’ll be able to answer questions like these:
What’s the state of the Warehouse Management mobile app and the devices it runs on? Are battery usage and network communication latency where you expect them to be, and if not, why not?
How are your warehouse processes performing, including the time it takes to release to the warehouse and process waves? What’s the location directive processing time? How many locations are being retrieved?
Answering these kinds of questions can help you make informed decisions about potential improvements in efficiency and automation. Does a process need to be reconfigured, or duplicate or obsolete configurations removed? Can a manual process be automated? Don’t guess; know, with Warehouse Management telemetry data.
Warehousing telemetry data is part of Application Insights
Telemetry data is collected and processed using Application Insights. Warehouse Management Application Insights telemetry is a diagnosis tool that’s available now in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
The 10.0.29 release of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management supports Application Insights telemetry for the Warehouse Management mobile app. The 10.0.31 release supports Supply Chain Management warehouse processes, including wave processing, work creation, and more.
Telemetry data is stored in Azure Monitor Logs in the customEvents table. View the collected data by writing Log queries in the Kusto Query Language (KQL).
Here’s a simple example:
In the Azure portal, open your Application Insights resource.
On the Monitoring menu, select Logs.
On the New Query tab, enter the following code to view the last 100 custom events: customEvents | take 100 | sort by timestamp desc
For more examples of how to work with KQL, answers to frequently asked questions, and tips for using Supply Chain Management telemetry data with Excel, Power Automate, Power BI, PowerShell, and more, check the Supply Chain Management telemetry repository on GitHub.
Transform the telemetry data? There’s an app for that
You can use an out-of-the-box Power Apps template to easily connect your Warehouse Management Application Insights telemetry data to your Power BI workspace.
Here’s just some of the data you’ll find in the template:
Mobile app processing time (rendering, latency, backend processing), by device, by day, by hour of day
Mobile app network latency, breakdown per 100 ms, 99th percentile, percent slower than 1 second, by location, by city, by day, by hour of day
Mobile device rendering speed, by device, by power source, by day, by hour of day
Mobile device battery usage, drain per hour, hours on battery, battery remaining when recharging, by device, by day, by hour of day
Backend next page preparation time, by work execute mode, by step, by day, by hour of day
Backend image preparation time, by image, by day, by hour of day
Location directive performance, location evaluated, by work order type, by work type, by day, by hour of day, demand per item
Wave processing, by wave, by day, by hour of day; filter by load, order, or shipment
Application Insights billing and alerts
Application Insights is billed based on the volume of telemetry data that your application sends (data ingestion) and the length of time that you want data to be available (data retention). See Azure Monitor pricing.
You can easily configure the system to send you an Azure Monitor alert if something occurs in your environment or application that requires immediate action.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Taking time to speak with customers remains one of the best ways to build relationships and close deals faster. However, in a digital world it is often difficult to secure that moment of interaction. So when that moment happens, it is critical to focus on the conversation. Capturing valuable insights and next steps is a distraction at this precious time. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales conversation intelligence continues to harness AI technology to assist salespeople with just that it’s there as your chief note taker. Master conversation follow ups by uncovering value from each call and gaining a deeper understanding of your customer interactions.
We’re excited to introduce two new features designed to save time and allow users to quickly access the most relevant and valuable insights from their calls:
Call categorization automatically categorize and tag short calls, making it easier to sift through large numbers of recordings and find valuable information.
Question detection track all questions asked during customer conversations. Thus allowing salespeople to understand their customers’ concerns, areas for follow up, and help managers identify trending questions and coaching opportunities.
Let’s dive into each one to learn more.
Call categorization
Call categorization introduces a revolutionary way to manage call recordings and learn more about leads, as well as assist managers with identifying coaching opportunities within their teams.
It is common for sales teams and contact centers to conduct many calls which are not successfully connected. This can lead to an overload of irrelevant data in call recording tables and a lot of noise for a seller and manager to wade through when reviewing calls for follow-up or best practice sharing. To address this issue, Dynamics 365 Sales conversation intelligence is introducing the Call categorization feature that automatically categorizes and tags short calls with 4 categories:
Voicemail when a call reaches the customer’s voicemail.
Contact unavailable when the person the seller is trying to reach is not available at that time.
Reschedule request when the lead asks for a quick raincheck.
Unwanted call for those calls where the customers requested to not be contacted again.
Once the calls are tagged, it becomes easy for sellers, managers, and operations to identify and exclude irrelevant call data. Sales teams can save time by not having to hunt for calls. Instead, with call categorization, they can review relevant conversations to follow up on and share as best practice or learnings.
Figure 1: call categorization
Question detection
When in the flow of a conversation multiple questions could be asked but the seller may not tackle them all within the call. Dynamics 365 Sales conversation intelligence now tracks all questions raised by customers and sellers during customer conversations. These are readyfor review and follow up almost immediately after the call has ended.
The new feature includes a “Questions” section in each call/meeting summary. The section tracks all questions asked during the call and groups them by customer or seller. This allows sellers and sales managers to easily locate and quickly jump to listen to a specific question within the conversation. By doing so, they gain a more in-depth understanding of the interaction.
With this insight documented, sellers can quickly drill into customers’ objections and concerns. In addition, they can review those open items for action.
Figure 2: question detection
Next steps
With these productivity enhancements sellers can focus on engaging customers knowing their systems are working hard to remove complexity and optimize their sales conversation follow ups.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Resiliency for retailers might best be understood by thinking about the delight consumers feel when they order that specific, thoughtful gift online for the holidays or when they come across the perfect gift while shopping at a store. To be successful with consumers in these moments, retailers must have the right products in stock at the right time and deliver them quickly and cost-effectively. This is what resiliency for retailers looks like, but how do you build resiliency into your supply chain?
Microsoft Supply Chain Center
Reduce supply and demand mismatches by running simulations using AI and real-time, advanced analytics.
McKinsey & Company found that 75 percent of consumer packaged goods (CPG) supply chain leaders prioritize supply chain digitalization, suggesting that resiliency through digitalization is one strategy that retailers are exploring.1 At Microsoft, we believe the path to retail resiliency lies in three interconnected capabilities: connectivity, agility, and sustainability, which we showcase solutions around at this year’s National Retail Federation (NRF) exposition in New York City.
Connectivity
True end-to-end visibility requires a platform capable of connecting and harmonizing data from new and existing sources. According to research commissioned by Microsoft from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 97 percent of executives agree that having a resilient supply chain positively impacts a company’s bottom line.2 The same study found that most organizations’ digital infrastructure is composed of a mix of modern and legacy apps, with only 11 percent using a single integrated platform of modern, best-in-class applications.3 This makes any solutions’ connectivity a critical factor in building resilience and agility.
One merchant that is enjoying the benefits of connectivity and visibility is iFIT. iFIT is a leading health and fitness platform that markets several home exercise equipment brands. Recently, iFIT adopted the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform to bring together its systems and data. With this integrated, centralized view, iFIT can reduce the manual effort and guesswork involved in strategically placing inventory in its more than 40 forward-stocking locations. Utilizing built-in AI capabilities, iFIT increased efficiency from 30 to 75 percent on their forward stock inventory resulting in faster delivery timesreduced from a two-week window to two daysand increased customer delight.
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iFIT uses Microsoft Supply Chain Center to optimize inventory and delight customers with rapid delivery times.
Extensible systems increase connectivity, too, such as the ability to leverage highly functional micro-services like the Inventory Visibility Add-in for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Users can enable the Inventory Visibility service free of charge to gain a real-time, global view of on-hand inventory and tracking across all data sources and channels. Additionally, the Inventory Visibility service allows users to avoid overselling by making real-time soft reservations and using the allocation feature to ring-fence valuable on-hand stock for essential customers or channels.
Another dimension of connectivity is collaboration. Dynamics 365 and Supply Chain Center include Microsoft Teams built-in, unleashing the power of collaborative applications for users, making all your business processes and applications multiplayer. With collaborative applications, team members can connect in real time, surface and act on insights from unified data, and swarm around supply chain issues to mitigate disruptions before they impact customers.
Connected systems and data create the visibility supply chains need to sense risks and illuminate opportunitiesthe necessary precursors to agility, which we look at next.
Agility
To enable agility, supply chain software needs to increase visibility across data sources, predict and mitigate disruptions, streamline collaboration, and fulfill orderssustainably and securely. In short, companies need to understand the entire supply chain network. By connecting disparate systems and harmonizing data across the supply chain, companies gain a more comprehensive understanding of supply and demand. With Supply Chain Center, retailers can connect and harmonize data and generate supply and demand insights using AI to uncover patterns and projections based on historical and real-time inventory and order volumes.
One company using Supply Chain Center to build a more agile supply chain is Northern Tool + Equipment, a manufacturing and omnichannel retailer with 130 stores across the United States. Northern Tool + Equipment’s fragmented supply chain technology infrastructure had pushed lead times for the 100,000 items in its product catalog to four to seven days. In addition, many of the company’s products are very large, like generators and air compressors. The sheer size of these items brings further complexity to the challenge of optimizing shipping routes for cost and sustainability. Similarly, Northern Tool + Equipment struggled to provide firm delivery dates for online and in-store product orders. For a business that serves people who do tough jobs and rely on their tools for their livelihood, being competitive means offering delivery in one to three days and providing accurate delivery times.
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Northern Tool + Equipment partnered with Microsoft to overcome these challenges with an end-to-end supply chain solution. The selection of Supply Chain Center meant that Northern Tool + Equipment could immediately begin to rationalize and connect every node of its supply chain with a solution designed to create a more resilient and sustainable supply chain through an open, flexible, collaborative, and secured platform. The result? Northern Tool + Equipment can provide customers with a committed delivery date and shipping costs while also ensuring one-day to two-day delivery within a specific proximity of its stores.
A significant factor in Northern Tool + Equipment’s lead time improvement is its use of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management capabilities, which allows organizations to connect and orchestrate order fulfillment across different platforms and apps. But Supply Chain Center has an assortment of capabilities to serve other retailers on the agility journey.
One such capability is the Supply Chain Center news module, which gathers information about world events and presents articles relevant to your business and supply chain. How can this feature be a functional building block of agility?
Let’s consider an example of a retailer selling portable air conditioners. Using the news module, the retailer could receive a news alert that a specific geography is forecasted to have the hottest summer on record. This would likely increase the expected seasonal demand for the product in the affected region. The retailer could capitalize on this intelligence by increasing their forecast during the planning process so that they can be prepared to quickly shift inventory to ensure coverage.
In addition, Supply Chain Center connects with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, which gives retailers access to advanced warehouse management functionality, such as warehouse automation by integrating with partners like inVia Robotics. It also gives retailers the ability to set up pop-up warehouses in a matter of days in six easy steps. Continuing the example above, our portable air conditioner retailer might utilize the supply chain planning functionality and learn that they have insufficient warehouse capacity to meet the seasonal demand increases. In this case, they could use Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to open a new warehouse in a matter of days by utilizing wizards and templates and quickly deploying the mobile app. Similarly, the retailer could then improve warehouse productivity with InVia Robotics by leveraging robots to do the heavy lifting and traveling across the warehouse, freeing up workers to do the more complex task of sorting and packing. The value of these systems is getting the attention of organizations and analyst firms.
Sustainability, circular economies
In a recent survey, 46 percent of individuals who purchased products online said the most important thing they want brands to do is be socially responsible.4 This fact helps explain why 53 percent of organizations plan to increase their focus on sustainable sourcing in 2023.5 While there are several dimensions of social responsibility, sustainability is the most relevant to retail supply chain leadership. For retail supply chains, this can be challenging.
For retailers to lead not just the industry but to exceed consumers’ expectations for social responsibility, another challenge beckonsthe utilization of circular economies. Even leaders in the EU, who successfully decreased material use by 9 percent and increased products derived from recycled waste by 50 percent,6 understand that while their progress is impressive, growth of circular economies is still limited compared to their actual material footprint. Still, the incentive for retailers, beyond the value of doing the right thing, is significant. One survey by Statista expects worldwide revenue of circular economy transactions to more than double from 2022 to 2026, growing from $338 billion to $712 billion.7
One way that Microsoft is helping brands meet the challenge is with built-in sustainability features for suppliers. One example is the FedEx integration with Intelligent Order Managementwhich is included in Supply Chain Center. The FedEx integration allows users to offer boxless returns to their customers by leveraging environmentally friendly QR codes to return items at more than 60,000 retail FedEx locations. Plus, retailers can utilize the self-service return functionality of the FedEx integration to easily manage all returns with complete visibility of every step in an item’s return to the warehouse.
As we have seen here, the path to retail resilience in today’s competitive environment revolves around connectivity, agility, and sustainability. Brands should address disruptions and challenges with solutions that can exceed customer expectations, drive profitability, and improve sustainability.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As marketing leaders, one could say that your potential for success is only as good as the data you possess. But is that possession enough? To develop targeted, thoughtful, and inclusive customer experiences, acknowledging that today’s data lacks representation, diversity, and reach is important. That’s true whether you consider gender, race, age, cultural experiences, accessibility, and more.
In today’s data-driven business landscape, it’s important to reflect on the fact that the traditional data sets you’ve come to rely upon only provide part of the answer. To get to the heart of your customers’ decision-making, you need to not only consider data that’s inclusive and representative of the customers you are trying to reach, but also take a fresh look at how you measure this data.
The industry is at an inflection point. Inclusive analytics are where the opportunity for marketing leaders lienot only in terms of building a better, higher-performing business, but also in contributing to building trust and advocacy with your customers.
Marketing with Purpose
Purpose is as important now as ever for how brands engage with people.
Customers are more likely to trust, buy from, and champion companies that have or embrace a strong purpose. And we’re not talking just any purpose, but an action-driven one that helps define the business.
That’s largely because the emotional connection and association a person feels toward a brand is informed by their perception of that brand’s reputation, values, responsible business practices, and inclusivity.
“Corporate reputation management hinges on not only a brand’s emotional appeal, but also how it lives, breathes, and behaves in the market. When we add diversity into the equation, we see a heightened need for understanding and integrating the unique wants, needs, and perspectives of differing and evolving audiences.”
Walter Geer, Chief Experience Design Officer, VMLY&R
The “aha” moment, of course, comes down to how inclusivity is defined and an inclusive customer decision journey. We’re talking about a journey that is personalized to the point of being able to make people feel welcomed and included, where they say, “You get me; you’re a brand for someone like me.”1
Take, for example, one dimension of diversitygenderand a story shared by a Microsoft engineer who was in the room as this example unfolded. Several years ago, a new program manager joined the product team. During a planning meeting with several engineers, she brought up the idea that a welcome screen that the team was designing wasn’t particularly welcoming and felt cold and impersonal. As an alternative, she proposed a white background with a colorful, creative flair.
Chewy Chong, Principal of Co-Innovation at Microsoft, said, “Why don’t we test it?” And they did, conducting a small test of the prototype on 500 users. The topline data showed 40 percent increased engagement by women, but men had a 39 percent decrease in engagement. When viewed as an aggregate, these two groups zeroed each other out. Women preferred the designed version, while men equally preferred the blue version.
Moving past bias
The insight prompted curiosity and self-reflection by the team but ultimately, they chose not to make a change given the preference of the primary audience. This introduced bias into the sampling or testing by valuing one cohort over others. Businesses often optimize design for the primary audience, which leaves out the opportunity for inclusion of the needs of other customers.
What’s even more interesting is that in the welcome screen test, the team found that the user research panel was overweight in one main demographic. This speaks to the need to really understand the makeup of data sources and research panels, and how a business may be affected by bias potential, preventing that business from leaning into a more inclusive customer decision journeyand preventing the business from growing.
Source: Chewy Chong, Principal of Co-Innovation, Microsoft
The impact of this reaches beyond just excluding an audience. Overrepresentation of one group and underrepresentation of another can also impact how a company chooses to design and evolve its product(s) and marketing strategy. This is especially true in the technology vertical, where the need and stakes are higher in creating a more equitable future. Some, like Nadia Masri, Founder and CEO of Persky, a next-generation consumer insights platform, view it as not just a need, but an obligation.
“I think every startup and every technology company has an obligation to figure out ways to make a more just and equitable future that is driven by technology. If we’re leading innovation, we have to make sure that that innovation results in fairness and equality for all peopleall genders, all colors, all abilities, etc., so that everyone can be included in the future that we are building.”
Nadia Masri, Founder and CEO, Persky
Looking at exclusion to find inclusion
When you think about inclusion, companies must do more than “talk the talk” without actually learning anything. This comes from trying to optimize for the average customer but resonating with no one. The real opportunity here is to start looking at the customer not accounted for. That means diving into how that customer base is excluded, then solving that issue to grow it and create a more emotional connection.
When you have proximity with the vast diversity of human experience, proximity leads to empathy and empathy leads to insight, which allows you to close the gap between customers who are included and the people who are excluded. When you capture the heart and intention of an audience and build an authentic relationship on shared values and an understanding of their lived experience, it’s much easier to deliver on the conversion-related conversations, such as price and financing.
Take, for example, the decision journey for a new car. At Microsoft Advertising, we used our automotive analytics insights team to help understand how people decide what brand to select, type of car, price, and so on. Historically, it’s well understood that people start their buying process 26 weeks before they make a purchase decision. So, we started looking at the data at that point and then parsed the query path, analyzing more than 500,000 people’s searches over that time.
We initially looked again at gender as a dimension of diversity, discovering what women value versus men. As expected, we saw differences in what women valued during the customer decision journey compared to men at each stage in the process.
But we also did something unexpected. The team realized we had 52 weeks of data we could explore, well beyond the established 26 weeks. What we found were keywords about accessibility. People with disabilities were looking for brands that had great technology and were investing in the best type of robotics and other key attributes related to adaptive cars. Ultimately, we discovered that this audience made a brand decision 52 weeks out before disappearing from the direct query path, likely heading down a query path on financials and returning at 26 weeks.
We found these insights by being open-minded and striving to root out bias toward a long-established “fact” that the automotive customer journey starts at 26 weeks before purchase. A more inclusive customer journey is one that considers all audiences and seeks to understand their journeys from their points of view. By looking at the data 52 weeks out, we discovered that we needed to reexamine our assumptions about how we treat prepurchase data to identify new human intent signals.
Nothing about us, without us
Creating more diversity in customer experience and evaluation of the data that informs it starts from within. The meaning of “nothing about us, without us” is simple yet powerful. If you’re designing for people with disabilities, why not try designing with people with disabilities? It becomes a two-dimensional consideration.
First, ensuring more inclusive customer decision journeys requires including the diverse customer base you are trying to reach. It’s about understanding their purchase journey through their experience. That means conducting more qualitative than quantitative research to:
Learn everything from the terminology the customer uses to the way to show and describe your product and how to integrate that into your advertising.
Participate in ongoing conversations with your diverse customer base and explore every facet of their purchase journey, like how they find out about your product and packaging experiences, which is critical to ensure you serve all the needs of your diverse audience and not leave any aspect out.
Second, a diverse workforce is also essential in helping create more diversity of thought that reflects your customers’ wants and needs. A plurality of perspectives that includes diversity in gender, age, race, work experience, abilities, cultural background, and more is critical.
A diverse internal team is more likely to have the information needed to provide an empathetic, authentic, and inclusive customer experience. In other words, diverse talent can translate into improved understanding, new markets, and expanded customer bases.
The desire for teams with diversity should extend across the company at large through a supported inclusive environment.
Your company’s potential for innovation, growth, and development ties directly to your employees’ knowledge base. And clearly, a more informed, authentic, and inclusive knowledge basebased on inclusive analytics and lived experience by the breadth of the humanityis what is needed for the best collective future.
Next steps
Learn more about leveraging data across your organization to create more personalized and relevant customer experiences.
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