It’s a simple truth of business: economic growth is cyclical. As companies across industries navigate a period of uncertainty, investments in people and technology should be strategic and decisive to help people do more with lessless time, less cost, and less complexity.

While reducing cost and complexity is often a primary factor when investing in business technology, doing more with less should be a step forward, not two steps backan opportunity to build a more resilient, agile business. 

In this first of a series of blog posts, we will explore how your teams can push forward in the headwinds of uncertainty and constant change. We’ll answer how doing more with less can empowerrather than restrictbusiness agility and growth.

How Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help shore up your business to do more with less

To get started, let’s explore a few ways that Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform can reduce costs and complexity while empowering everyone in the organization to focus on superior customer experiences and operational excellence.

Lower your total cost of ownership

In times of uncertainty, the path forward is continued and accelerated innovation, especially for companies that run operations on a patchwork of on-premises technology solutions and services that are often redundant, siloed, duplicative, and costly to maintain. The migration from legacy systems to the cloud is now imperative, especially in a business environment that depends on speed, innovation, and accelerated business outcomes. A 2020 study conducted by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Microsoft, revealed that a composite organization comprising interviewed customers realized an ROI of 109 percent over three years, fueled by savings on infrastructure refreshes, redundant enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, and consolidating support costs.¹

Our customers can realize significant operations efficiency and customer relationship management (CRM) savings with our unified platform, allowing them to do more with lessless time, cost, and complexity; while enabling more agility and innovation. In fact, organizations that adopt Dynamics 365 for CRM processes can save up to 50 percent relative to Salesforce.²With Microsoft Power Platform, organizations can further accelerate innovation and save up to 80 percent compared to other low-code development platforms.³

Reduce cost while improving efficiency on a unified business cloud

Dynamics 365 unifies customers and business data, relationships, and workflows in a single cohesive business cloud. This reduces complexity and brings new levels of efficiency, cross-functional engagement, and breakthrough customer experiences. Microsoft Power Platform works in tandem with Dynamics 365, or on its own, enabling everyone to build low-code solutions that contribute to the development process, multiplying their technical capacity and helping build amazing technical abilities across organizations.

A great example of these efficiencies in action is MVP Health Care. The nationally-recognized, regional not-for-profit health insurer replaced a makeshift CRM environment with Dynamics 365 to build a centralized member engagement platform, as well as adopted Microsoft Power Platform to optimize business processes, streamline workflows, and complete tasks. It expects to save USD6 million a year while standardizing processes, driving more member value, and promoting healthier communities.

Empower employees to drive agility and innovation

In challenging times, doing more with less doesn’t mean working harder or longer. It’s about having technology that amplifies what employees do best, so the organization can achieve more.

We’re integrating the digital tools people need to drive impact right within business applications for every function, from marketing, sales, and service to supply chain, finance, and operations. By connecting people, data, and streamlined business processes across the organization in the cloud, the workforce can truly do more with less.  

Unify data and use AI for proactive insights and automation 

We’ve invested heavily in AI to empower employees to be catalysts for impact, across every function, from marketing, sales, and service to supply chain, finance, and operations. Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform empower employees to perform with clarity and focus thanks to predictive insights and guided workflows that help them act decisivelyall fueled by centralized data, predictive analytics, and AI.

Microsoft Power BI delivers self-service analytics at enterprise scale, reducing the added cost complexity and security risks of multiple solutions.  

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales empowers sellers with sales intelligence that helps them deeply understand their customers for faster deal closure, including conversation intelligence that provides real-time selling guidance during sales calls. A recent Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that for a composite organization, using Dynamics 365 Sales boosted seller productivity by 15 percent, resulting in $13.3 million in savings over three years.⁴

Westpac New Zealandone of the country’s largest banks transitioned to Dynamics 365 to create an enhanced customer experience and unlock innovation. As a result, thousands of its Dynamics 365 users are saving as many as 3,850 hours per week in process automation. The migration also improved data quality across the organization, further increasing efficiency.

In addition, sales teams can reduce errors and time spent manually entering data into a CRM, which can lead to inaccuracies and reporting errors. Microsoft Viva Sales automates the capture of customer data into the CRM and then delivers insights from that data to help guide the next best actions.

Within the supply chain, AI can monitor complex systems around-the-clock to help identify and predict issues across the supply chain before they create disruptions. Specialty coffee roaster and retailer, Peet’s Coffee, is one market leader benefiting from greater visibility across the supply chain. During the COVID-19 pandemic, sales rapidly shifted from retail stores to Peet’s online store. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management empowered the team at Peet’s Coffee with reliable, real-time data and insights enabling it to maintain a 98 percent fill rate on its growing e-commerce business.

A Forrester study identified several impact areas enabled by Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, including increased production volume, reduced downtime, improved quality, reduced infrastructure cost, and increased developer productivity. For example, a composite organization based on interviewed customers consolidated its footprint saving $11 million over a three-year time horizon. The organization also increased production throughput, resulting in $24.3 million in savings and reduced downtime of business-critical production equipmenta value of more than $1.5 million over the same time period.⁵

Boost collaboration to amplify business outcomes

As many workplaces become more decentralized, it’s both critical and more challenging to foster a culture of collaboration. The most recent Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report revealed that, since February 2020, the average Microsoft Teams user saw a 252 percent increase in their weekly meeting time and the number of weekly meetings has increased 153 percent.

Collaboration is seamlessly integrated with business workflows across Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft 365including Teamsso people can collaborate more effectively with anyone, on any business or customer record, within the tools used to manage workflows.

A sales team can close deals faster by understanding signals from the marketing department around demand generation. Service agents on complex cases can view a list of AI-matched experts and “swarm” this issue togetherrapidly troubleshooting the issue and compiling steps to resolve it.

Gibson Brands, the most iconic guitar brand, brought together cross-functional teams with Dynamics 365 and Teams, helping the company to simplify internal processes and create more immersive customer experiences across retail, direct sales, and dealer networks.

Democratize cloud-scale innovation

Finally, Microsoft Power Platform enables anyone, from pro to citizen developers, to create digital solutions to solve problems, reducing the cost and burden on IT teams to develop solutions. A Forrester Consulting study revealed that a composite organization based on surveyed Microsoft customers can realize an additional ROI of 140 percent over three years with Microsoft Power Platform’s premium capabilities.⁶

During the pandemic, the City of Ottawa streamlined the delivery of news and information to citizens by deploying a chatbot solution using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, hosted on the Ottawa Public Health (OPH) website. In just six months, the bot recorded more than 50,000 conversations, saving the call center an estimated 4,000 hours of phone time. The numbers translate to a savings of about CA$240,000, or the redeployment of 2.5 full-time city employees to more mission-critical tasks at OPH.

We’re committed to your success

Whether you’re planning to migrate, optimizing your current investments, or exploring ways to innovate with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, we’re here to help you.

In future installments of this blog series, we’ll dig deeper into opportunities to streamline across your four primary functional areas: customer experience (sales and marketing), service, finance, and supply chain.

Do more with less with Dynamics 365

Learn how you can reduce organizational costs and complexity.

Start today

End notes

¹Total Economic Impact™ of Migrating from Microsoft Dynamics AX to Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the Cloud (July 2020), a Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers. Examples shown are based on various customer outcomes and will vary depending on your specific scenario.

² Savings estimated based on US pricing for Salesforce and Microsoft offerings as published on their websites. Microsoft internal research, September 2022.

³ Savings estimated based on publicly available Power BI and Power Apps US pricing for 250 representative user licenses compared with major competitor offerings.

⁴The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales (March 2022), a Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.

⁵The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (August 2021), a Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.

⁶The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Power Platform Premium Capabilities (August 2022), a Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are over three years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.

The post Essential ways Dynamics 365 and Power Platform help you do more with less appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

For many years, companies have based their supply chain strategy on lowering costs and increasing efficiency. Often this resulted in relying on one supplier for important subcomponents, sometimes based offshore where labor is cheaper. During the pandemic, the world discovered that “lower costs and increase efficiency” is not a resilient strategy. A single supplier represents a single point of failure. On the other hand, having a lot of suppliers does not necessarily increase your supply resilience without a good business relationship and communication. The middle ground is to distribute the supply of critical components among a group of vendors, also known as multisourcing.

Of course, multisourcing comes with its own challenges. The new multisourcing functionality in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help you meet them.

Specify multisource policies for supply resilience

Two challenges of multisourcing are how to split the supply of an item across multiple vendors and how to allocate the vendor for a particular purchase order. Both are now easy thanks to the multisourcing features in Supply Chain Management.

First, you can now specify a multisource policy that identifies vendors and sets targeted percentages for each of them. For example, you might want 80% of your supply to come from your main vendor and 20% from a secondary one. Or you might want to distribute orders equally to three different vendors.

You can also specify the period in which the policy applies. Then just assign the policy to a product or set of products.

When Planning Optimization creates a planned order, it chooses the vendor so that the targeted percentages are met over time. In other words, the entire supply is allocated to a vendor, but over time orders are balanced between the vendors in the group.

Some vendors require a minimum order. With the multisourcing feature in Supply Chain Management, you can set minimum order quantities for each vendor and Planning Optimization will respect them.

You can also review the actual percentages kept versus the targeted percentage in the policy to monitor your supply resilience.

Choose the products you should multisource first

The new supply risk assessment workspace makes it easier to find products that are planned to be purchased from a single supplier. These may be good candidates for multisourcing to start increasing your supply resiliency.

The following recommendations can help you achieve higher supply resiliency:

1. Multisource products: Split the supply of components among a group of vendors. If you are starting to build this strategy, start with your most critical components.
2. Diversifyyour supply in geography and size: Have both local suppliers with shorter lead times and offshore suppliers with higher lead times.
3. Maintain good supplier relationships: Have a good business relationship and communication with your suppliers. When you are able to handle and adapt to disruptions together, you are more agile in fulfilling your customer needs.
4. Build long-term partnerships: Your relationship with your suppliers must be sustainable over time and based on trust to be able to handle disruptions over the longer term. High supplier turnover is not beneficial in the long run.
5. Assess your supply risk: Evaluate the performance of your suppliers using metrics such as purchase order deliveries as requested, on-time in-full deliveries, on-time deliveries, and in-full deliveries. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management makes this easier using the new supply risk assessment workspace.

Learn more

To get started sourcing products and components from multiple vendors, read the documentation: Source products and materials from multiple vendors – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

To learn how to find products with low vendor resilience, read the product documentation: Supply risk assessment overview – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

And check out our blog post: Assess supply chain risk more easily in new workspace – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog

Not yet a Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customer? Take a tour and request a demo.

The post Increase your supply resilience with multisourcing in Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management now streamlines warehouse configuration, reducing the time it takes to set up, validate, maintain, and troubleshoot your warehouse management processes. Let’s take a closer look at these and other improvements that help prevent wrong configurations and improve your users’ experience.

Location directive scope simplifies Warehouse management configuration

The new location directive scope feature eliminates the need to configure different location directives for multiple SKUs. You can now configure one location directive for a work unit that consists of single or multiple items, saving time, reducing maintenance and troubleshooting, and maximizing efficiency. Scope options give you more freedom when you design location directives and help reduce redundant configurations.

Location directive scope also allows you to edit the query that defines when a directive should be applied for a single order with multiple items.

We strongly recommend using this feature, especially if complexity and number of records make your location directive configuration difficult to manage.

Save time configuring Warehouse management with guided setup

Configuring Warehouse management is a time-consuming task if done manually. New step-by-step wizards in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management make configuring the Warehouse management module easier than ever before.

• The Warehouse management initiation wizard provides detailed, step-by-step guidance for configuring basic settings from scratch, such as when you’re adding a legal entity.
• The Warehouse initiation wizard provides detailed, step-by-step guidance for setting up an individual warehouse.

The Warehouse implementation tasks workspace helps you track your progress through a pre-configured list of tasks required to implement Warehouse management from scratch.

New troubleshooting tools find common mistakes in Warehouse management configuration

Errors in your Warehouse management configuration can lead to disaster. Additional validations and a new set of self-healing rules in the optimization advisor make it easier to identify and correct the most common configuration errors. We strongly recommend running the optimization advisor after you configure the Warehouse management module to detect any missing or incorrect configurations.

A new Preview query results feature helps you determine why a location directive isn’t working as intended, allows you to confirm the desired outcome of your queries, and helps you quickly identify issues with your query configurations.

Acceptance tests speed up validation of location directive configurations

In the past, Warehouse management customers would set up location directives, create test data, execute the process, and see whether the system worked. If it didn’t, they were back to square one, changing the setup, recreating test data, wasting time and money. Testing location directives was a laborious manual process that could take a lot of time.

The Warehouse management module now includes a powerful framework called acceptance tests. Its purpose is simple: to facilitate faster validation of location directive configuration. Here’s how the acceptance tests feature can be so powerful:

• Test it before you embrace it: After you set up a location directive, you can test to validate the outcome of the directive without having to create test data. You can also use smart on-hand simulation to validate your configuration.
• Visualize the location directive flow: The coverage view uses colored highlighting to indicate which location directives, lines, and actions were used in determining the result of a selected test.
• Simplify maintenance: Turn on Run tests after change to automatically run all tests any time you change a location directive.

Adjust query criteria quickly with Edit query preview

The ability to reuse queries across warehousing configurations provides a great deal of flexibility. The new Edit query preview allows you to quickly review and adjust criteria when needed in the Related information panel, without having to open Edit query.

New Move up and Move down buttons in the Work templates page allow you to quickly change the sequence of work templates.

Copy configurations

Now you can roll out location directives to new warehouses without mistakes by copying location directive configurations across warehouses.

Next steps

• Watch our tech talk: What’s New in Supply Chain Management – Wave 2 2022 Edition | October 18-19, 2022 – Microsoft Dynamics Blog
• Learn more about testing location directives: Test location directives with acceptance tests – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
• Learn about the new guided setup experience: Get started with setting up the Warehouse management module – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
• Not yet a Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customer? Take a guided tour.

The post Configuring Warehouse management is now simpler, easier, and more accurate appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Marketers are often asked to do more with lessand do it yesterday. Every day, they need to quickly create compelling, unique email content that grabs the customer’s attention in a sea of competing messages. Designing marketing email content can be incredibly challengingand often the toughest part is getting started. It’s hard to be creative under pressure. Wouldn’t it be ideal if you could just focus on the key points you want to convey and let artificial intelligence generate your email copy? With AI-powered Content ideas in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can.

Kickstart creativity with Content ideas

The new Content ideas feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing helps you kickstart the creation of marketing emails and discover new ways to express your thoughts. AI generates custom suggestions that you can review and edit, much like brainstorming with a teammate. With Content ideas, you can find inspiration in seconds to create engaging event registration emails or convincing reminders to return and complete a purchase.

Imagine that you work as a marketer for a clothing retailer. The new winter collection hits the market in a few days, and you need to create a promotional email to sell out the fall collection. All you need to get started are a few thoughts about what you want your email to say. Content ideas will use them to generate text suggestions for you.

You type:

• The end of the year is in sight
• Winter is coming, but the only thing that’s freezing are our prices
• Use code HAPPYDANCE

And, in just seconds, AI supplies the inspiration for engaging emails.

Content ideas will generate up to 20 text suggestions for your key points. Select the content you like best and use it as-is or customize it. No more writer’s block.

With Content ideas, you can easily produce new and original marketing email content on demand, without having to struggle or search the web for hours for an original idea.

Content ideas is a game changer for marketers

In our example, Content ideas helped you craft your fall promotion email campaign in minutes. You gained precious time and created engaging email content that was perfectly adapted to your brand’s essence. Your email campaign is a remarkable success. Customers snapped up the remaining clothes from last fall. The store is ready for winter, and so are you with fresh content ideas!

There’s no doubt that generative AI is on the rise. It’s a game changer for marketers, and with good reason. The possibilities are infinite. Microsoft is at the forefront of incorporating this exciting innovative technology in our products. Through Content ideas, Dynamics 365 Marketing capitalizes on AI to make marketers more productive and their jobs easier. By providing custom solutions that make each business unique, Content ideas helps marketers reimagine their email campaigns to deliver more with less.

Try it today, and level up your email campaigns with unique content in seconds!

Next steps

To find out more about Content ideas in Dynamics 365 Marketing, read the release notes and check out the product documentation: Preview: Use AI to kickstart email creation with Content ideas (Dynamics 365 Marketing) | Microsoft Learn

Not yet using Dynamics 365 Marketing? Take a tour and start a free trial.

Notes

• Content ideas is available in preview in English-language environments in the North America region only. We will expand availability to more regions if there is high customer demand.
• Content ideas uses the most advanced generative AI language model in the world, GPT-3. GPT-3 has been trained on a vast number of text samples from the Internet to generate text in English that looks and sounds like it was written by a human. Microsoft runs on trust. Trust must be earned in the short term as well as the long term. In Dynamics 365 Marketing, we see the responsible use of AI as an opportunity to demonstrate trustworthiness as well as a path for innovationa way to minimize harm and expand our capacity to provide useful and delightful experiences for our customers and their customers. Read how Dynamics 365 Marketing approaches responsible AI with intention.
• Product visuals are for illustrative purposes only and might not reflect the general availability feature.

The post Engage your customers faster with AI-powered marketing email content appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.