In the latest version of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise Edition we put a lot of effort to make it easier to create initial configuration of the Cost Accounting module.
Take a look how simple it is!
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Check out the new simplified way to configure the Cost Accounting module
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What’s new in CU13 for WMS and TMS
Cumulative update 13 for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is now available for download on Lifecycle Services, PartnerSource and Customersource. In this blog post, we will give you an overview of the feature improvements for warehouse and transportation management. If you want more details about the release of CU13, see the Dynamics AX In-Market Engineering blog. The knowledge base article for Cumulative Update 13 is KB4032175.
- Packed goods can now be brought from the packing station to the staging area or loaded directly on a truck.
- Ability to move one item or the entire license plate (LP) although there is replenishment work behind.
- Transfer order receiving and returns are now enabled as part of Mixed pallet receiving.
- Guided partial cycle counting at a location has been enabled.
- Short picking - Inventory reallocation. Ability to pick items from another location in short picking scenarios.
- Use the demand replenishment method in the raw material picking process.
- Correct reservation status after re-marking of WHS items with the Storage dimension enabled.
- Timing of planned production orders when overlap jobs are enabled and the route operations use different calendars.
- Product confirmation requested by the system before a put is completed.
- Ability to report consumption of staged and order picked material.
- Plan purchase orders through TMS in an inbound process when using Change management.
- Pick (other) work order lines even if one of the order lines is blocked by demand replenishment.
- RAF\Transfer Order integration. Finished goods can be cross docked to bay door locations providing an alternative to the put-away process where finished goods from the production output would normally be put in the Finished goods put location.
- With a maximum weight or volume on the work template, the work split is now based on the directive unit and not on the lowest unit of measure.
| List of feature enhancements | Description of enhancements |
| Packed goods can now be brought from the packing station to the staging area or loaded directly on a truck. | The packing station experience has been improved to ensure that it will seamlessly integrate with the rest of the workflows in the warehouse.
This is a backporting of an enhancement added to a later version of the product.
|
| Ability to move one item or the entire license plate (LP) although there is replenishment work behind | If the Allow movement of inventory with associated work check box on the Work users page is enabled, you can now move part of or an entire license plate that is tied to replenishment work. |
| Transfer order receiving and returns are now enabled as part of Mixed pallet receiving | With this enhancement, it is also possible to scan the product and then update the quantity manually.
The traditional way of using the system is still supported. |
| Guided partial cycle counting at a location has been enabled. | The changes in the hotfix include adding support to do partial cycle counting. Work line breaks are added to the cycle counting work template and partial cycle counting work will be generated during cycle counting planning.
This is a backporting of an enhancement added to a later version of the product.
|
| Short picking - Inventory reallocation. Ability to pick items from another location in short picking scenarios. | Items in short picking scenarios can now be picked from another location which enables a process where goods can be shipped as fast as possible. Note that this feature requires kernel 6.3.1000.1928 (KB3048540) or higher.
For more informatin, see Set up short picking item reallocation. |
| Use the demand replenishment method in the raw material picking process. | A wave template can now be constructed for raw material picking and a demand replenishment method can be added for production orders and kanbans. The capabilities correspond to the capabilities for sales order picking and transfer order picking. |
| Correct reservation status after re-marking of WHS items with the Storage dimension enabled. | Warehouse items with the Storage inventory dimension enabled now get the correct reservation status after re-marking. |
| Timing of planned production orders when overlap jobs are enabled and the route operations use different calendars | Planned production orders were proposed too early when overlapping jobs were enabled and the route operations used different calendars. This issue has now been resolved so that in this situation, planned production orders are proposed duly. |
| Product confirmation requested by the system before a put is completed. | For cluster picking, piece-by-piece picking can now be enabled to have the system request a confirmation before a put is completed.
For more information, see: Product confirmation for cluster picking. |
| Ability to report consumption of staged and order picked material. | It is now possible to report consumption of material that is either reserved or picked. |
| Plan purchase orders through TMS in an inbound process when using Change management. | Purchase orders in an inbound process can now be updated from Transportation management when Change management is activated. Previously, this would require that the entire purchase order would have to be routed through the approval steps once again. |
| Pick (other) work order lines even if one of the order lines is blocked by demand replenishment. | The replenishment work blocking policy can now be set up to allow that users can pick (other) work order lines even if one of them is blocked by demand replenishment.
This is a backporting of an enhancement added to a later version of the product. |
| RAF\Transfer Order integration. Finished goods can be cross docked to bay door locations providing an alternative to the put-away process where finished goods from the production output would normally be put in the Finished goods put location. | When reporting as finished, goods can now be cross docked to a bay door location based on a transfer order demand.
A transfer order that is released to warehouse will generate work of the type Transfer issue and this work can then be picked from the production output location and put to a location that is determined by the Transfer issue location directive for work. |
| With a maximum weight or volume on the work template, the work split is now based on the directive unit and not on the lowest unit of measure. | Previously, when you set up a maximum weight or volume on the work template, work would split on the lowest unit of measure (UOM). Now work splits on the directive unit. |
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Report the value of physical locations
Key concepts
Inventory dimension
An inventory dimension can have a Physical value and a Financial value. The setting of the Physical value controls whether a dimension is active for Inventory management and Warehouse management. The setting of the Financial value controls whether a dimension is active for Inventory accounting in Cost management.
Note: An inventory dimension can have an active Physical value but no Financial value. However, it can’t have an active Financial value but no Physical value.
Cost object
The term cost object was introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition. It represents a key concept that is used in the management of business costs. A cost object is an entity that costs and quantities accumulated for. For example, a cost object entity can be either a product or product variants, such as variants for style and color.
A cost object is derived from the item ID and the inventory dimensions that have an active Financial value.
There are three groups of inventory dimensions: product, storage, and tracking. Each inventory dimension can have a set of dimensions associated with it. For each dimension, you can set up the following inventory dimension values.
| Product dimension group | Storage dimension group | Tracking dimension group | |||
| Dimension | Value | Dimension | Value | Dimension | Value |
| Color | Financial by default | Site | Financial by default | Batch | Physical and or Financial |
| Size | Financial by default | Warehouse | Physical and or Financial | Serial | Physical and or Financial |
| Configuration | Financial by default | Location | Physical | Owner | Financial by default |
| Style | Financial by default | Inventory status | Physical | ||
| License plate | Physical | ||||
Example: Define a cost object
When an item is created, a set of inventory dimension groups can be assigned to it. The following table shows how you can define a cost object.
| Product dimension group | Storage dimension group | Tracking dimension group | |||
| Color | Financial by default | Site | Financial by default | ||
| Warehouse | Physical | ||||
In the following example, the cost objects are defined by Item + Color + Site.
Examples:
- Speaker + Black + Site 1
- Speaker + White + Site 1
- Speaker + Black + Site 2
The inventory objects can be used to report the physical quantity at any level in the warehouse that is defined by Item + Color + Site + Warehouse.
Examples:
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 11
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 12
- Speaker + White + Site 1 + WH12
It’s crucial that you understand the concepts. The configuration and implementation of these concepts have a significant impact on the whole system, especially in Inventory management and Cost management.
After the configuration is implemented, it’s almost irreversible. Any change will require significant resources and will affect system usage itself.
In the rest of the document, we will use the Speaker item as an example. The inventory valuation method is set to Moving average.
Cost object:
- Speaker + Black + Site 1
Inventory objects:
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 11
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 12
After a few transactions have been posted, the following inventory transaction entries are generated in the Inventory subledger.
| Color | Site | Warehouse | Financial date | Reference | Status | Quantity | Cost amount |
| Black | Site 1 | WH11 | 1/1/2017 | Purchase order 01 | Purchased | 1.00 | 10.00 |
| Black | Site 1 | WH12 | 2/1/2017 | Purchase order 02 | Purchased | 2.00 | 26.00 |
| Black | Site 1 | WH11 | 3/1/2017 | Sales order 01 | Sold | -1.00 | -12.00 |
The inventory close job was run as of January 31, 2017. Because the inventory valuation method was Moving average, no adjustments were posted.
As part of the fiscal period–end process, an Inventory value report that shows the ending inventory balance in quantity and value is required. To meet this requirement, the inventory value report framework was introduced. The framework lets you create custom reports by including more data points that depend on the type of business. It also lets you define the level of aggregation for cost objects.
Note: The inventory value report is designed to print only the values per cost object or aggregations of cost objects.
You create an Inventory by cost object report, based on the configuration in the following table.
| FastTab group | Field group | Field | Setup value | Setup value |
| General | Range | Posting date | ||
| Columns | Financial position | Inventory | Yes | |
| Resource ID | View | Yes | ||
| Inventory dimensions | Color | View (Column) | Yes | |
| Inventory dimensions | Site | View (Column) | Yes | |
| Inventory dimensions | Warehouse | View (Column) | Yes | |
| Average unit cost | Calculate average unit cost | Yes | ||
| Rows | Resource type | Materials | Yes | |
| Detail level | Level | Totals |
The report will look like this.
| Resource | Color | Site | Warehouse | Quantity | Value | Avg. unit cost |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | 2.00 | 24.00 | 12.00 |
Note: The Warehouse column will remain blank, because the Speaker item doesn’t have any cost object that includes the Warehouse dimension. Inventory dimension Warehouse is only set to Physical.
View the inventory value by physical location Warehouse
Configure the storage dimension group
To meet the customer’s request, you could configure the storage dimension group differently. In this case, the Warehouse dimension is configured so that it has a Financial value.
| Product dimension group | Storage dimension group | Tracking dimension group | |||
| Color | Default Financial | Site | Default Financial | ||
| Warehouse | Financial | ||||
This configuration affects how the Speaker item is handled by the system. The cost object and inventory object now have the same level of granularity.
Cost objects:
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 11
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 12
Inventory objects:
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 11
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 12
The configuration also directly affects the inventory valuation. In this example, the FIFO, Weighted average, or Moving average inventory valuation method will be applied per cost object, and the overall result will differ.
| Color | Site | Warehouse | Financial date | Reference | Status | Quantity | Cost amount |
| Black | Site 1 | WH11 | 1/1/2017 | Purchase order 01 | Purchased | 1.00 | 10.00 |
| Black | Site 1 | WH11 | 3/1/2017 | Sales order 01 | Sold | -1.00 | -10.00 |
| Color | Site | Warehouse | Financial date | Reference | Status | Quantity | Cost amount |
| Black | Site 1 | WH12 | 2/1/2017 | Purchase order 02 | Purchased | 2.00 | 26.00 |
The result will also differ when the Inventory value report is run by using the same configuration that is described in the previous section.
| Resource | Color | Site | Warehouse | Quantity | Value | Avg. unit cost |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | WH12 | 2.00 | 26.00 | 13.00 |
The Warehouse column now has a value, and the inventory value is 26.00 instead of 24.00.
Note: When you activate the Financial value for the Warehouse inventory dimension, you might affect performance. All transfers between warehouses are now considered financial movements, and financial movements can cause cycles in the Inventory close job. If the Warehouse inventory dimension is used only to physically track inventory, these will be closed as non-financial transfers before the cost calculation begins and the changes of cycles reduced.
Create a custom report that looks at inventory transactions and settlements.
You can create a custom report that sums inventory transactions and settlements by InventDim ID.
The old Physical inventory by inventory dimension report was designed for that purpose. In the report dialog box, users could select any inventory dimensions, regardless of whether they were part of the defined cost objects.
This approach works, provided that the inventory dimensions that you select are part of the defined cost object. However, if you select an inventory dimension that isn’t part of the cost object, the report starts to print incorrect results.
The following table shows the result of printing balances per item and inventory dimensions.
| Resource | Color | Site | Warehouse | Quantity | Value | Avg. unit cost |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | WH11 | 0.00 | -2.00 | 0.00 |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | WH12 | 2.00 | 26.00 | 13.00 |
Note: The inventory cost is calculated at a level above the inventory dimension and warehouse. Therefore, the cost on issue transaction from warehouse WH11 explains why the inventory value per warehouse can become negative.
Report the value of physical locations
If the value of a physical location must be reported, a sum of transactions per location, as described in the previous section, isn’t the solution.
The correct approach is to calculate the value per location by using the following simple formula:
Value = Cost object, cost × physical object, quantity
Cost object:
- Speaker + Black + Site 1
| Resource | Color | Site | Quantity | Value | Avg. unit cost |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | 2.00 | 24.00 | 12.00 |
Inventory objects:
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 11
- Speaker + Black + Site 1 + WH 12
| Resource | Color | Site | Warehouse | Quantity | Formula | Value |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | WH11 | 0.00 | 12.00 × 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | WH12 | 2.00 | 12.00 × 2.00 | 24.00 |
In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3, a new report that is named Inventory aging was introduced. As the name of the report implies, this report does more than just report the value by physical location. It can also show the age of the current inventory in the user-defined buckets.
In the report dialog box, enter the following information.
| Field group | Field | Setup value |
| As of date | 31-01-2017 | |
| View | Item number | View |
| Color | View | |
| Site | View | |
| Warehouse | View | |
| Aging period | Unit of aging period | Days |
| Aging period 1 | 30 | |
| Aging period 2 | 60 | |
| Aging period 3 | 90 | |
| Aging period 4 | 120 |
The following table shows only the first section of the Inventory aging report, but the user-defined buckets have been omitted.
| Resource | Color | Site | Warehouse | On-hand Quantity | On-hand Value | Inventory value quantity | Inventory value | Avg. unit cost |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | WH11 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 2.00 | 24.00 | 12.00 |
| Speaker | Black | 1 | WH12 | 2.00 | 24.00 | 2.00 | 24.00 | 12.00 |
Conclusion
If your organization must provide inventory value by any physical location, you don’t have to update the current configuration of inventory dimension groups. This change can be very intrusive, and also affects the cost calculation and performance. We also don’t recommend that you build a custom report for this purpose.
The Inventory aging report is designed to calculate the cost per cost object and then can apply it to any physical level that is selected on the report. This report is designed to automatically detect the level that the cost object is defined at per item. It then applies the formula to calculate the value by physical location.
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Negative inventory in inventory accounting
Allowing physical negative inventory may have undesirable consequences in inventory accounting, especially if the inventory costing principle is Actual and the valuation method is either FIFO or Weighted average.
Most of the issues that are related to physical negative inventory can be mitigated by using the correct configuration and maintenance of data.
Example: Why is the cost out of sync?
The following table lists the required setup for the Item model groups.
| Item | Inventory model | Physical negative inventory | Latest cost price | Active planned cost |
| A | FIFO | Yes | Yes | No |
The purchase from the supplier always takes place at a unit cost of 7,500.00.
The following table lists the events as they occur, in chronological order.
| Financial date | Reference | Receipt | Issue | Quantity | Cost amount |
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 01 | Sold |
-3.00 |
||
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 01 | Purchased |
2.00 |
15,000.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 02 | Sold |
-3.00 |
-22,500.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 02 | Purchased |
1.00 |
7,500.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 03 | Sold |
-3.00 |
-22,500.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 03 | Purchased |
3.00 |
22,500.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 04 | Purchased |
2.00 |
15,000.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 05 | Purchased |
3.00 |
22,500.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 04 | Sold |
-1.00 |
-18,750.00 |
The system starts issuing from inventory at cost per unit of 18,750.00 even though the cost of purchase has not exceeded 7,500.00.
Why does this happen?
In order to explain this in better detail, let’s add a few more columns on the rightmost side, in green. These new columns represent the inventory balance after posting the specific transaction. The inventory balance is also known as InventSum.
| Financial date | Reference | Receipt | Issue | Quantity | Cost amount | Quantity | Value | Avg. unit cost |
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 01 | Sold |
-3.00 |
1) |
-3.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 01 | Purchased |
2.00 |
15,000.00 |
-1.00 |
$15,000.00 |
-$15,000.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 02 | Sold |
-3.00 |
-22,500.00 2) |
-4.00 |
-$7,500.00 |
$1,875.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 02 | Purchased |
1.00 |
7,500.00 |
-3.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 03 | Sold |
-3.00 |
-22,500.00 3) |
-6.00 |
-$22,500.00 |
$3,750.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 03 | Purchased |
3.00 |
22,500.00 |
-3.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 04 | Purchased |
2.00 |
15,000.00 |
-1.00 |
$15,000.00 |
-$15,000.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 05 | Purchased |
3.00 |
22,500.00 |
2.00 |
$37,500.00 |
$18,750.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 04 | Sold |
-1.00 |
-18,750.00 4) |
1.00 |
$18,750.00 |
$18,750.00 |
Notes:
- The Cost per unit is 0.00. When the balance is negative, the system looks for a fallback cost to apply.
- First, the system looks for an active cost. This fails.
- Second, the system looks for cost set up in the Cost price field in the item master record. The cost is equal to 00.
- The Cost per unit is 7,500.00. The balance is still negative. The system looks for a fallback cost to apply.
- The system looks for an active cost. This succeeds.
- The latest cost price was set to Yes on the item record. The prior Purchase order unit cost of 7,500.00 has now become the active cost.
- The same condition applies as in number 2.
- The Cost per unit is 18,750.00. If the balance is positive at the time of posting the issue transaction, the system applies the average cost of the balance.
- Average cost is calculated as: 37,500.00 / 2.00 = 18,750.00
The issue is that the inventory balance of 1 piece at 18,750.00 is overvalued because the item has never been purchased at a cost higher than 7,500.00. The reason for this overvaluation is that the first issue transaction leaves inventory at a cost per unit of 0.00. The wrong cost estimation will continue to ripple through the following transactions.
The only way to get the inventory balance back in sync is to run either the Recalculation or Inventory close jobs.
| Financial date | Reference | Receipt | Issue | Quantity | Cost amount | Qty | Value | Avg. Unit cost |
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 01 | Sold |
-3.00 |
-3.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
||
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 01 | Purchased |
2.00 |
15,000.00 |
-1.00 |
$15,000.00 |
-$15,000.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 02 | Sold |
-3.00 |
-22,500.00 |
-4.00 |
-$7,500.00 |
$1,875.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 02 | Purchased |
1.00 |
7,500.00 |
-3.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 03 | Sold |
-3.00 |
-22,500.00 |
-6.00 |
-$22,500.00 |
$3,750.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 03 | Purchased |
3.00 |
22,500.00 |
-3.00 |
$0.00 |
$0.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 04 | Purchased |
2.00 |
15,000.00 |
-1.00 |
$15,000.00 |
-$15,000.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Purchase order 05 | Purchased |
3.00 |
22,500.00 |
2.00 |
$37,500.00 |
$18,750.00 |
|
| 10/6/2017 | Sales order 04 | Sold |
-1.00 |
-18,750.00 |
1.00 |
$18,750.00 |
$18,750.00 |
|
| 30/6/2017 | Sales order 01 |
-22,500.00 |
||||||
| 30/6/2017 | Sales order 04 |
11,250.00 |
||||||
|
1.00 |
7,500.00 |
The Inventory close will apply the selected Inventory model, in which case is FIFO, and then adjust the cost on the issue transactions accordingly.
Note: If the inventory balance is negative when executing the inventory close, the balance will not be adjusted. A full adjustment can only occur when the balance is positive, and enough receipts exist that can adjust the issues.
Conclusion
By default, all items should have an active cost. If you plan to allow temporary physical negative inventory, which is a valid scenario in certain business, it’s essential to apply an active cost before creating any transactions on the item.
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WMSI/WMS2 item migration
Introduction
This blog describes the new capabilities that allow you to migrate existing items with open inventory transactions so they can use the new storage dimensions. This can be needed when you upgrade from older versions of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations that supported the pallet dimension or if you want to use the Warehouse management functionality for existing items that were previously using WMS1 processes.
Typical migration scenarios:
- You have existing items with the location dimensions enabled.
- You have existing items with the location dimensions enabled and the pallet dimensions active.
- You have existing items with the location enabled which are catch-weight items.
The goal when migrating items to use warehouse management enabled processes
The following setup is required to use an item in warehouse management processes:
- The item must use a storage dimension group that is set up to use warehouse management processes which means that the Inventory status dimension, the location and the license plate must be active.
- A reservation hierarchy must be assigned.
- A unit sequence group must be assigned.
The goal of the migration is to enable the items to meet the above criteria and ensure that all related data is consistent with the items’ new settings allowing business processes to proceed after the migration.
High-level overview of the process
The upgrade process – blocking items
If you upgrade from a version that supported pallets the upgrade will identify the items that had the pallet dimension active and create a record in a new table called InventUpdateBlockedItem. This is done to block the items from all inventory processes because the item is configured using unsupported settings.
Items that are blocked must be migrated. The blocked items can be viewed in the Items blocked for inventory updates form.
The migration cockpit Change storage dimension group for items
The migration cockpit is simple. It allows you to enter the item ID of the items you want to be migrated and the new storage dimension group. If the item is to be downgraded from a group with the pallet dimension active, this is all you need.
If the item should be converted to use warehouse management enabled processes, you need to assign a reservation hierarchy and a unit sequence group.
The illustration below is a screenshot of the form.
Using entities to populate the data
You can use both OData which allows you to use Excel directly and data management to import and export the data.
OData
You can use the OData approach by clicking the Open in Microsoft Office icon and export the data to Excel. Once the information has been entered, the changes can be synchronized back.
Data management
For larger datasets, data management is the most effective. The entity is called Item storage dimension group change request and follows normal data management patterns.
Validation
Before the migration is started, the validation should be performed to ensure that the data is ready for migration. Several conditions are validated:
- A default inventory status value must be defined
- Inventory on-hand on pallets must not exist on non-license-plate-tracked locations
- Inventory on-hand without pallets must not exists on license-plate-tracked locations
- That the combination of the selected storage dimension group and reservation hierarchy is valid
- If migrating to use warehouse management processes, the item cannot be enabled with catch weight
The list is not exhaustive, but it covers the most important validation points.
Starting the migration
The migration is started by clicking the Process changes button.
The migration supports parallel processing for parts of the process. The batch framework is used and the different steps will be handled by different batch tasks.
The recommendation is to set the Recommended number of parallel tasks field to two times the number of cores that are available. It is recommended to have a dedicated batch server for the migration since the migration is a heavy process due to the updates to the inventory dimensions.
Un-supported scenarios
Catch weight enabled items: Catch weight enabled items are not supported in the new WHS. If such items exist, and they have the pallet dimension active, they will need to be downgraded to a dimensions group where only the location is active., Otherwise an ISV solution should be used.
Reserve Ordered transactions: Because of the way reservations work for warehouse management enabled items there are certain constraints on the state of the inventory transactions. If there are Reserved ordered transactions with a “hole” in the dimensions, the item cannot be converted.
A “hole” could exist for an item that has the batch dimension active and has the batch placed below the location in the reservation hierarchy. If a reservation exists on site, warehouse, batch, then the location is missing, which is what we refer to as a “hole”. This is not supported.
The mitigation is to either assign the missing dimensions or clear the dimensions so the “hole” is removed.
Customization that involves inventory dimensions
If you have customizations related to inventory dimensions that fall in one of these two categories:
- New inventory dimensions field on existing table
- New table with and inventory dimensions
You need to do something before you can use the migration process. Otherwise you will get an error like the one below:
Since a new inventory dimensions field exists, the system needs to know what actions should be taken for the dimensions in the table. This is done by implementing an event handler.
Three situations where an inventory dimension field is added:
- You do not want the data updated
- You want the data updated and the table has the itemId on it
- You want the data updated but the table does not have the itemId on it
In the below examples we will assume that we have added a table looking like this:
Handling situation 1 and 2
The below eventhandler illustrates how an eventhandler for situation 1 and 2 can be implemented. Here we want to update the dimensions related to the InventDimIdAllDimensions but not the dimensions in InventDimIdOnlyProductDimensions
[SubscribesTo(classStr(InventItemInventoryDimensionConversionTaskInitiator), delegateStr(InventItemInventoryDimensionConversionTaskInitiator, tableWithInventDimIdDiscoveredDelegate))]
public static void tableWithInventDimIdDiscoveredStorageConversionDelegateHandler(
TableId _updateTableTableId,
FieldId _inventDimIdFieldId,
InventItemInventoryDimensionConversionType _conversionType,
EventHandlerResult _result)
{
if (_updateTableTableId == tableNum(MyOwnTableWithInventDimId)) {
if (_inventDimIdFieldId == fieldNum(MyOwnTableWithInventDimId, InventDimIdAllDimensions))
{
InventItemInventoryDimensionConversionTaskCreator creator = InventItemInventoryDimensionConversionTaskCreator::newStorageConversion();
creator.createTasksForTableWithItemId(
_updateTableTableId, //tableId of the table that should be updated
_inventDimIdFieldId, //fieldId of the inventDimId field that should be updated
fieldNum(MyOwnTableWithInventDimId, ItemId), //fieldId of ItemId field
fieldNum(MyOwnTableWithInventDimId, DataAreaId)); //field id of DataAreaId
_result.booleanResult(true); //we need to update
}
else if (_inventDimIdFieldId == fieldNum(MyOwnTableWithInventDimId, InventDimIdOnlyProductDimensions))
{
_result.booleanResult(false); //no update needed
}
}
Handling situation 3
Situation 3 is different since the itemId is on a different table. Here we need to write code specifically to the datamodel for the involved tables. The best approach is to follow the existing examples in the code. The InventBatchJournalResult table is a good example. This table is more complex because it has an InventDimId, but the itemId is on the inventBatchJournal table. The code below shows how this scenario is handled.
public class InventItemInventDimConversionInventBatchJournalLinePopulationTaskProcessor implements InventItemInventoryDimensionConversionITaskProcessor
{
public boolean process(InventItemInventoryDimensionConversionTask _conversionTask)
{
var queryBuilder = InventItemInventoryDimensionChangePopulatorItemIdTableJoinedQueryBuilder::newFromParameters(
_conversionTask.UpdateTableName,
_conversionTask.InventDimIdFieldId,
_conversionTask.DataAreaIdFieldId,
tableStr(InventBatchJournal),
fieldNum(InventBatchJournal, ItemId));
InventItemInventoryDimensionChangePopulator::newFromQueryBuilder(queryBuilder).populateDimensionChanges();
return true;
}
}
Additional information
You can find more information as part of the product documentation:
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Customizing the warehouse mobile app: multi-scan pages
Introduction
This is another blog post in the series about warehouse mobile devices in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. In the last blog post, the difference between customizing for WMDP and the warehouse mobile app was discussed. This blog post will be walking you through a new control scheme that was recently released, explaining how it unlocks new potential for partial offline processing in the warehouse mobile app. This new functionality is called “multi-scan” and it enables a user to perform a series of offline scanning operations and then return them all to the server in one round trip operation. The goal for this control scheme is to allow for very quick scanning operations (many scans per second as an example) in high transactional warehouses where the standard model of a server round trip after each scan will not scale. Especially in sequential operations where the user does not need to look and verify on the device after each scan, but rather just need to register all scans in one go.
Multi-scan Functionality
If you download the latest version of the warehouse mobile app, you will have some new capabilities in the demo-mode which shows how this new control pattern works. Once you have enabled the demo mode you should see the following menu:
Cycle counting is the flow we have enabled in the demo with multi-scanning to demonstrate the new capabilities. It is designed to simulate a user performing a spot cycle count at a location in a warehouse or retail store where there are many items to scan. Currently this in only available in demo mode of the app, there is no support for this functionality when connected to a Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations environment.
The first screen that is displayed is a location scanning screen – you can enter (or scan) anything in the demo mode here to move to the next screen.
Once you have scanned the location, the app enters the multi-scanning mode. This is the new control that is being introduced in this release, so let’s go through the different UI elements that have been introduced to support this new flow.
This is the initial screen – you can tell it is the multi-scanning interface because of the new list icon in the bottom left corner; clicking the list icon will show you the list of items you have scanned so far. The checkbox icon in the bottom right is used to report to the app that you are done scanning and it is the only time the processing returns to Dynamics 365 – everything else will take place within the app locally on the device.
Once a worker starts to scan barcodes (or enter data manually into the app) the UI will change slightly. Every item scanned will be added to an internal buffer and the number of items scanned will be displayed in the main UI. For example – after a few scans the UI will now display the scanned count of three:
At any time, the user can click the list icon in the lower left, which will then display the list of items that have been scanned (in this example perhaps product barcodes in the location). The UI for this looks like the following:
This lists the barcodes that have been scanned as well as a count of the times they have been scanned by the user. This is very useful in the counting scenario, as a user can simply scan each product’s barcode to generate a count of items at that location.
You might note that there are two disabled buttons at the bottom of the screen. These become active when a row is selected by the user in the list – as you can see below:
The edit icon on the left allows you to manually change the number of scans for the selected row. The icon on the right with the “X” deletes the selected row in case something was scanned accidentally.
The edit icon will open a new screen with the numeric stepper UI allowing the user to quickly increment or decrement the number of scans or click on the value to open the numeric keyboard:
When clicking on the value, the numeric keyboard will open. As the number of barcodes cannot be negative, or integers, buttons that aren’t relevant for this use case has been disabled:
Returning to the main screen (by clicking the back button in the upper left corner) we are ready to submit the scanned list of items and their counts to the server. We do this by clicking the checkbox button in the bottom right – this is when we finally make the round-trip to the server and communicate with Dynamics 365. Later in the blog post the API will be explained and how to consume the scanned items and their quantities in X++ code.
In the demo flow, the next screen that is displayed is the following list of items which are not present in the location:
This is the second control pattern that we have introduced as part of this release – it allows a workflow to display a list of items (for example barcodes or product UPCs) and then allow the user to “scan to remove” from the list. In this demo example we are displaying the items that were found in the cycle count but are not currently registered as on-hand for this location; the intention is that the warehouse worker would double check this list and scan any items that were indeed found as an extra validation check. Scanning “T0001” in the above screen would then remove this from the list – and remember that this is all done client-side at this point. It is also possible to click on any value in the list and remove it. Then when the user clicks that checkbox/submit button the new list of items would be submitted to the server for processing through a X++ workflow.
Custom Workflow
Hopefully that walkthrough gives you some idea of the capabilities we have added with these two new client-side control screens. It is important to know that we have not currently added any multi-scan capabilities to the core product yet – the above cycle counting workflow is just a demo inside the app. The goal of introducing these new control screens is to enable partners and customers to build new workflow-based solutions in the mobile app that support client-side driven scanning operations. As such let’s walk through a simple customization example to show how the new control screens can be utilized in a real workflow.
Page Patterns
The way to enable the multi-scan screen is through a Page Pattern. This might not be something you are aware of in the mobile app, as most of the time this is handled for you by the standard framework. The Page Pattern is what tells the mobile app what type of UI to display on the device itself. If you look at the WHSMobileAppPagePattern Enum you can see the different options available:
- Default
- This is the page pattern used for 90% of the screens in the app. It displays a primary scanning UI and a set of controls in the secondary tab – of which a few can be promoted to the first screen. An enter and cancel button and an optional set of additional buttons in the menu are supported.
- Custom
- This Page Pattern is not used in many places in the core mobile flows – it is designed to allow partners to convert their old WMDP pages into the new model. Using this pattern will render the controls as it was done in WMDP – each control simply vertically stacked in a single screen.
- Login
- This is used for the initial login page.
- Menu
- The Menu screens are rendered with this Page Pattern.
- Inquiry
- This Page Pattern support the workflows that allow the user to search for something and then see the results – such as LP or Item lookup screens.
- InquiryWithNavigation
- This is the Page Pattern that supports the Worklist view in the app. It is similar to the Inquiry pattern, except that includes some sorting options as well as the tiles are navigable.
- MultiScan
- This is the new pattern that has been added which will display the multi-scan UI shown in the demo above.
- < MultiScanResult>
- Note that as of the 8.1.1 release there is one missing and will be added in an upcoming release. If you want to enable a workflow to use the second screen described above – the “result list” of items, you would need to add a new Enum and return the value MultiScanResult.
The actual job of returning the Page Pattern to the app is done through a class which derives from WHSMobileAppServiceXMLDecorator. This abstract class has a “requestedPattern” method that can be overridden to return the specific Page Pattern that is necessary. This is typically done through a workflow-specific factory class that understands the correct workflow steps and thus can return the correct XMLDecorator class depending on the stage in the state machine.
For example – here is the standard factory class for the Work List functionality. You can see that it typically will return the WHSMobileAppServiceXMLDecoratorWorkList object – which will render the work list Page Pattern as you would expect, however if the user has switched to the edit filter view then we need to display a different Page Pattern – thus the factory has the context to make this switch.
Multi-Scan API
Now that we know how to enable the Multi-Scan UI through a Page Pattern, we need to understand the basic API for passing the scanned items back and forth. Once the MultiScan Page Pattern is requested, the first input control registered on the page will be used for the multi-scan input. Remember that most of the UI interaction is all done client-side – so the only thing the server X++ code needs to do is define this control and the data that it contains.
When the user clicks that “submit” check box and sends the multi-scan data back to the X++ code, this is formatted in a very specific way. The actual parsing of the data is done using the same interaction patterns as before – it will be stored in the result pass object for the specific control defined as the primary input of this page. But the data will be passed in this format:
<scanned value>, <number of scans>|<scanned value>, <number of scans>|…
Thus, in my demo example above the data that the server would receive would be the following:
BC-001,2|BC-002,1|BC-003,1
In the X++ code you would then be responsible for parsing this string and storing the data in the necessary constructs. We will see a simple example in a moment of how to parse this data.
Asset Scanning
The workflow I will demonstrate is very similar to some of the WHS workflow demos we have described in previous blog posts. In this flow we will be scanning a container and then capturing all the “assets” that are stored in that container. Imagine that these assets are very numerous and thus are stored outside of the standard batch tracking mechanisms in AX – they are implemented in the sample as a simple asset table associated with a container. The assumption here is that scanning assets needs to be extremely quick and thus the offline “multi-scan” mode is the perfect solution.
The state machine for this workflow is similar to our previous examples – we will have an initial scan container screen, which will transition into the multi-scan enabled “Scan Assets” state – and finally when the list is returned we process the assets and return to the initial state.
You can see this reflected in the core displayForm method below. We will not be covering some of the lower-level details of the code – please review the earlier blog posts for details on the enums and control classes necessary to facilitate the new workflow. All the code necessary for the solution can be downloaded at the end of the post if you want to dig into the details.
The getContainerStep is identical to our previous examples – it simply shows a simple UI and grabs the container ID from the user. The getAssetStep method validates this container ID and calls the buildGetAssets method – which is where the UI for the multi-scan screen is built. This is copied below:
As you can see this does not look much different that standard WHS code we have done previously. The first input control (in this case the Asset ID field) will be used as the multi-scan field, but this code does not need to be modified in any way to support the multi-scan Page Pattern. Instead what we need to do in ensure the correct Page Pattern is returned to the app during the correct workflow step. To make this happen I have added a new DecoratorFactory class which will return a WHSMobileAppServiceXMLDecoratorMultiScan object at the appropriate step for my workflow – which in turn is what renders the Page Pattern to the app.
Please note the attribute at the top of this class – it is the same WHSWorkExecuteMode mapping attribute used for the WHSWorkExecuteDisplayAssetScan class in the code sample above. This is how the framework knows that this specific decorator factory class is used for this work execute mode – the enum-based attribute ties these classes together through the sysExtension framework. The key point here is that if you need a custom decorator factory to define when exactly to switch to multi-scan mode, the above example is how you will enable this.
In the final workflow step we need to process the incoming multi-scan results. As mentioned before these are returned to the server in the same way as normal data – it will simply look like a specially formatted string in the value of the input control. Recall the discussion above with the format of the string being <scanned value>, <number of scans>|… In my simple example below, I am parsing this string using X++ and saving the assets to a new table associated with the Container. In this case I am not making use of the second piece of information in the collection – the number of scans was not necessary in this case.
Hopefully it is clear how we loop through all the scanned assets and save each one to the new table. After this is complete, we reset the workflow and move back to the first stage in the state machine.
Example Workflow
Now that you have seen the code to enable this in a custom workflow, let’s walk through this demo. You can download the complete code for this project in the link at the bottom of this post – you just need to get it up and running on a dev environment and configure the necessary menu items to enable the workflow for your system.
The initial screen shows the Container ID scanning field. Not that in the sample project I have included the necessary class to default this to the scanning mode – however you will need to set these up in Dynamics as defined here.
Scanning a container id (CONT-000000001 works if you are in USMF in the Contoso demo data) will navigate you to the next screen and enable the multi-scan Page Pattern.
Here you can enter any number of assets and the app will store them into the local buffer. As we described above you can view the scanned assets by clicking the icon in the lower left. After a few scans we would see the UI updated:
Clicking the list icon would show us the scans we have performed offline:
Finally clicking the “submit” button on the main screen will push the items to the server, which will then be saved to the custom table we have and the UI will display the success message.
Conclusion
Hopefully this help you understand the new control scheme that was added and how it can enable fast scanning operations. The code used for this demo is available to download here – please note that this code is demonstration code only and should not be used in a production system without extensive testing.
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Protect your e-commerce business with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection
Big data AI is no longer a fantasy, but a reality. The AI marketspace is delivering real solutions for real world problems. Currently, e-commerce retailers are faced with fraud losses daily; reduced revenue, increased operational expenses, and wrongful rejections are just some of the impacts fraud creates on a local and global scale, all of which contribute to a suboptimal experience for customers. Current approaches to fraud protection solutions require account creation and customers to complete multi-step authentication, forming barriers within the ecommerce channel.
Microsoft, at the forefront of innovation as a global e-commerce technology leader, is equally impacted by fraud, necessitating a fraud protection system that can help safeguard more than a billion transactions a year and deliver the best shopping and purchasing experiences possibleboth at the same time. Microsoft developed Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection as an application designed to provide the best fraud protection to fulfill both Microsoft's, and our customers' needs. It provides the agility and capabilities to apply adaptive AI and operation research to millions of assessments necessary, which puts merchants at ease.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection benefits
Over the last 2 years, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection has saved Microsoft more than $76 million in incremental fraud costs by reducing fraud losses and manual review rates, as well as helping boost revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars. Now all online merchants can use Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to help reduce fraud and its related costs, increase revenue, and deliver better buying experiences with lower friction and more support.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is comprised of three unique offerings that can work in parallel:
- Diagnose a risk-free assessment using three months of customer data to provide insights to the potential revenue boost Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection could provide.
- Evaluate an API integration, by comparing insights in real time with real world data to current solution(s) that are being used.
- Protect the full solution to help safeguard e-commerce retail from fraud threats.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is an innovative solution with five powerful capabilities designed to capitalize on the strength of machine learning to provide merchants with an innovative fraud solution:
- Adaptive AI technology continuously learns and adapts from patterns and equips fraud managers with tools to optimize fraud controls.
- A fraud protection network maintains up-to-date connected data that provides a global view of fraud activity and maintains the security of merchants' confidential information and shoppers’ privacy.
- Transaction acceptance booster shares transactional trust knowledge with issuing banks to help boost authorization rates.
- Customer escalation support provides detailed risk insights about each transaction to help improve merchants' customer support experience.
- Account creation protection monitors account creation, helps minimize abuse and automated attacks on customer accounts, and helps to avoid incurring losses due to fraudulent accounts.
How Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection complements the existing payment authorization flow for better fraud assessment and signaling to issuing banks:
How global data is used to benefit all: Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is architected to bring global data across participating merchants together in a secure and privacy-aware way to enable improved fraud protection across the ecosystem.
As a global e-commerce leader, Microsoft cares about the bottom line just like you, and encourage you to learn more by visiting the web page Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and viewing the product video.
Virtual Launch Event for a closer look at Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection
We invite you to attend our Virtual Launch Event on Thursday, October 10th streaming live at 8:00 am Pacific time, then on-demand, for a look at Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and all the other new innovations coming to market.Be sure to register for updates and reminders leading up to the event.
The post Protect your e-commerce business with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.
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Watch the Microsoft Business Applications October Virtual Launch Event
The Microsoft Business Applications virtual launch event for the 2019 wave 2 release is just two days away, streaming live this Thursday morning! Don’t miss this opportunity to get a first-hand look at the new innovations we're rolling out for Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform. Register today for this free event, and then tune in to the live stream on October 10, 2019 from 8:00 AM 9:30 AM Pacific Time.
You'll get an in-depth look at the new capabilities announced in the 2019 wave 2 release across Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform. James Phillips, Corporate Vice President of the Business Applications Group, and other Microsoft experts will demonstrate new applications and features, guide you through the new updates, and discuss what these releases mean for your business.
Learn how these new Dynamics 365 and Power Platform features and applications will help you:
- Reimagine how you engage your customers, proactively and across every channel.
- Create a flexible, scalable platformto extend existing applications, build new solutions, and integrate your choice of technologies.
- Make fast and informed decisions, quickly adapt to changing market demands, and drive rapid business growth.
- Use enhanced artificial intelligence capabilities in Dynamics 365 to accelerate the transformation of customer service, sales, and marketing functions.
- Unify your relationships, processes, and data for greater impact across applications and ecosystems.
- Build higher-quality apps more easily and better engage your customer and partners using PowerApps Portals, AI Builder, and enhancements to Microsoft Flow
With updates, insights, and demonstrations directly from the experts, you'llbetter understand how toleverage thesenew technologiesas part of your organization's digital transformation initiatives.
Onboard the new capabilities in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform with confidence prepare for the updates, read the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform release plans, and then tune in on October 10.
Unlock what's next for your business: Watch the virtual launch event today!
The post Watch the Microsoft Business Applications October Virtual Launch Event appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.
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Defining customer experience and customer engagement
Technology is fueling seismic changes in customer expectations. Research shows that customer expectations continue to rise year over year, while businesses continue to struggle to meet these ever-changing expectations. In response, many businesses are transforming how they understand and value the customer over every channel across the entire customer life cycle.
Customer experience and customer engagement are significant to a company's overall success. But creating a positive customer experience and increasing customer engagement can seem like moving targets. Plus, confusion can arise as these terms are often used interchangeably. Understanding the difference is key to achieving both.
Customer experience (also known as CX) is how customers perceive their interactions with your company. The first half of the definition focuses on perception, where the experience is positive, useful, and enjoyable. The second half focuses on the exchange, the two-way interaction with the brand. CX is the customer's emotional, physical, and psychological connection with your brand, stemming from a product, system, service and/or channel interactions. CX considers the context and empirical aspects of the interaction and the customer's perceptions. Simply put, customer experience is about a moment in time and the memory of that moment.
Customer experience is one of the primary differentiators that businesses can exert control. By 2020, some analysts predict customer experience will overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator. It's not easy, but CX should be measured against customer expectations across all touch points. Was the customer satisfied, frustrated, angered, or delighted? Did the interaction meet the customer's expectations? When customers navigate to your website, contact your call center, visit a retail location, make a purchase, use your product, and reply to your emails, they’re making judgments about whether or not you satisfy their needs, are easy to do business with, and whether their experience is positive.
For the customer experience to be great, every interaction along the customer journey must be exceptional, which doesn't start and end within one department. The entire organization needs to work together to deliver a positive customer experience. When marketing, sales, operations, finance, and customer service departments operate independently, and are measured by different key performance indicators (KPIs), delivering a consistent positive customer experience can be a significant challenge.
Customer engagement
Customer engagement differs from customer experience. Customer engagement is the ongoing, value-driven, emotional relationship between the customer and the business. It's not the memory of one moment, but the sum of all momentsthe customer's overall emotional connection arising from the totality of experiences with the company. This includes direct, indirect, offline, and online interactions, as well as the actions that the customer might takeposting, emailing, tweeting, liking, recommending, buying and so on.
If you provide a positive customer experience, your customer should become more engaged. Highly engaged customers buy more and are advocates of your brand. They refer friends, write positive reviews, and are more loyal. However, all it takes is one negative experience to damage the memory of the entire customer experience and the association with a brand. This can ultimately lead to a disengaged customer, who can act on their dissatisfaction by purchasing from competitors and letting others know.
Understanding the difference between the customer experience and customer engagement is critical. Customer engagement goes beyond managing individual experiences from each touch point to include all of the ways companies motivate customers to invest in an ongoing relationship with a brand or product. More and more customer interactions spanning across more and more touch points are shaping the amount of engagement a customer has with your company. Knitting together each experience and focusing on the customer journey will generate greater engagement and a positive ROI.
Measuring customer experience
It's clear that the customer experience is integral to customer engagement, as a better customer experience generates better customer engagement. But how does a company measure the customer experience to identify gaps? What are the areas that need improvement?
Get customer feedback. An overwhelming 90 percent of customers want to provide feedback about their experience with you and your product, while only 37 percent are occasionally given the opportunity to share. This frustration can be easily fixed through an automated email survey. Surveys can provide a wealth of information. However, surveys won't help if you fail to analyze the responses.
Understand churn. Churn is natural in business, but understanding when churn happens can help you prevent churn in the future. Regularly analyze your churned customers so you know whether your churn rate is increasing or decreasing, and what action you can take in the future to prevent a similar customer from moving on.
Solicit ideas from comments on products and features. This is similar to customer feedback, but in a community forum where your customers can request new features, share new ideas about products or share problems they're trying to resolve. Give customers the opportunity to proactively offer suggestions and actively monitor the forum and participate. If there are recurring topics, it may be a sign you may need to do additional research into product development.
Analyze support ticket trends. Review your customer or field service support tickets for recurring issues that are causing customer angst and/or are taking significant agent time to resolve. The solution could be as simple as an edit to a product manual, a new quick start guide or an update to an online FAQ.
Get the right tools. It can be daunting to create positive customer experiences across all channels and touchpoints when customer data is fragmented into silos within a confusing landscape of independent applications and disparate departments. Most companies struggle to measure performance over time and across channels, and are unable to identify areas for growth and remove barriers to improving productivity. Without measurable insights into your customer experience, a lot of time and budget can be wasted pursuing unicorns. Instead get the right tool to unify and measure your data so you can easily glean valuable insights and take informed action to improve the customer experience, boost engagement, and strengthen loyalty.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is an easy to implement and use application to help you personalize the customer experience by unifying data, presenting a 360-degree view of the customer, and helping you discover insights to further drive a positive customer experience. Using historical customer data and machine learning models, organizations can derive insights that empower employees across all lines of business to deliver the best message or service for every customer scenario. From marketing advertisements based on customer search histories to next-best-offer sales suggestions based on past purchases or interests, and proactive customer service support leveraging predictive analytics and anomaly detection. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables cross-department alignment on every interaction a customer has with your organizationfrom sales and marketing to finance and operations, and customer servicecreating a seamless customer experience across the organization.
Remember, building positive customer experiences that increase customer engagement isn't magic. It's hard work, but it's work that pays off with strengthened customer loyalty and increased revenue. Don't forget that acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. Focusing on the customer experience and deepening customer engagement is not only critical, it's the most cost-effective strategy for long term success of your business. Companies that create positive customer experiences, and design and execute an effective customer engagement strategy will fast track forward, leaving the competition behind.
Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights today.
The post Defining customer experience and customer engagement appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.
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Celebrate Customer Service Week and the agents who make it all happen
Customer Service Week is this week, October 7-11, and it certainly feels like an opportune moment to reflect on how much has changed in the customer service space over the past year. For those of you who understand what goes on behind the veil of customer service, you know how it feels to get in that groove of providing answers and support, knowing you're helping to improve someone's day. You also know how crucial it is that the tools you use to get your job done don't fail you in the middle of said groove.
The general understanding of a contact center is rather simple: call in and get an answer. Period. However, anyone who has ever worked in a contact center knows the reality of how operations are run, and that general understanding is far from simple. Running a contact center takes strategy, analytical thinking, flexibility, and creativityand most of all, it takes grit.
How well you deliver customer service is really based on two factors: your customer service operating system and the people wielding the tools. There needs to be a balance and a harmony between the customer service application and the agents, because one is only as effective as the other. Your agents and your customer service application are equally important in this customer service equation and need to be in sync to maximize efficiency and productivity.
When agents and technology are off-kilter
If your customer service application is under-performing, then it's safe to assume your agents are under-performing as well. For example, clumsy, ill-kept customer service knowledge bases lengthen issue resolution, as agents must dig through content to secure an answer. This increases call handling times, which in turn affects agent job performance and ultimately leads to agent turnover and poor customer satisfaction.
Perhaps worse than having a poorly maintained knowledge base is the absence of any customer self-service option at all. When self-service isn't an option, agents must carry the burden of handling even the most trivial customer inquiries, which takes their time and attention away from resolving more stimulating and challenging issues. Monotonous, repetitive tasks and the lack of intellectual stimulation are often cited as factors in agent turnover.
Consider the paradox of offering agents a high-performing customer service application but failing to adequately train agents on how to leverage the tools provided to them. What's the value of a tool if the user doesn't know how to use it? Nails are of little use without a hammer. These are just a few of the imbalances that plague customer service organizations.
How to create a state of Zen in your contact center
First, since this is Customer Service Week, I'd like to embrace the equation of balance and take time to honor every agent's contribution and fortitude to resolve customer issues day in and day out. It's hard to imagine what the customer-brand relationship would look like without these dedicated stewards of customer care.
With this sense of gratitude in mind, let's look at some of the ways to create better balance within your customer service organization by leveraging technology to empower your people.
Offer a self-service portal
As previously mentioned, repetitive, mundane inquiries can erode an agent's morale. This lack of challenge creates tedium, which can drive an agent to seek employment elsewhere. Rather than saddling agents with this monotony, create a self-service portal where customers can receive 24/7 support to answer the most common, easily-resolved questions. Since 66 percent of consumers opt to begin with self-service options before seeking help from a live agent, satisfy your customer's needs for independent, immediate resolution by providing a self-service portal for routine inquiries. Give your agents time to tackle more complex issues when the simplest questions are being resolved on their own.
Automate, automate, automate
Free up agent time even more by automating warranty registrations, information on product deliveries, disseminating manuals and quick start guides, updating address changes, and billing inquiries. Customers can complete a form or answer a few questions, and then be guided to the right department or process to complete the task.
Virtual agents or bots are a great way to introduce automation to the self-service workflow. Bots can be created to assist customers in better defining their service needs and can guide customers to the right article or action. Bots can be designed to complement self-service options by navigating customers to the best knowledge article to find the best answer. Customer service bots should engage conversationally with customers using natural language processing, and if the issue is too complex, bots can provide a warm hand-off to your human agent. In this way, agents are challenged by only receiving the issues bots are unable to resolve.
Food for thought: beef up your knowledge base
After ensuring your self-service portal and virtual agents are established, and agents are spending their time on more complex issues, you can focus on leveraging your agent's knowledge by having them help with ongoing knowledge base article updates. Your agents harbor a wealth of knowledge after spending most of their time on the front lines tackling customer questions and knowing which information is most pertinent in getting answers. Documenting agent knowledge is a great way to assess the skill set of your agents while sharing their expertise on a particular product or service. Plus, it offers variety to their workday and allows them to showcase their strengths.
Agents can also help create and maintain bots. Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service uniquely allows those closest to the customer to create bots without the need of a developer or data scientist. Your subject matter experts can update the bot with fresh content at-will, thereby avoiding the need for intermediaries, while learning something new.
Never stop learning
Continuous training and career advancement can help create balance. Keeping agents abreast of new customer service application features and processes can ignite agent interest and creativity around improving processes. Staying in-check with what agents know and are interested in can also lead to identifying agents based on skills or expertise in specific areas and can make it easier to set up a skills-based routing system. A skills-based routing system directs specific issues to specific agents based on that agent's area of expertise. Segmenting agents based on expertise can increase first contact resolution rates while providing a sure-fire way for agents to successfully resolve issues they know the most about.
Provide the best toolbox
Of course, none of these suggestions will help create greater balance if you fail to provide your agents with the best tools available. You can create a portal, add bots, train, and incentivize your agents, but their performance will never be optimal if you don't give them the right toolset. To fully create a state of Zen, you need a customer service application that reflects your strategy, analytical thinking, flexibility, and creativitythat is, a customer service application designed to empower agents to succeed.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers a rich toolset designed to arm your agents with exactly what they need for continued success. Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers a 360-degree view of the customer, including a complete customer history available on an intuitive and easy to use dashboard. This ensures agents have all the information they need to resolve issues quickly. And, with omnichannel capabilities, agents can resolve issues on the customer's channel of choice, bridging the entire channel landscape and providing a single, seamless experience for the customer.
And that's just the beginning. Customer Service and Virtual Agent for Customer Service easily integrate with Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights, an AI-enabled analytics program that identifies opportunities for improvement within customer service organizations. This set of customer service applications fuels your organization with a modern, efficient, and adaptive work environment that enables you to earn customers for life.
Now that is how you create a state of Customer Service Zen.
Get more information on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service.
The post Celebrate Customer Service Week and the agents who make it all happen appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.
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New scenarios added to Dynamics 365 Higher Education Accelerator
Dynamics 365 Higher Education Accelerator now includes internships, scholarships, grants, accomplishments, and more.
Technology is transforming how institutions engage with students and their constituents and improving student outcomes. Last year at Educause we released the Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator which provided a data model and sample apps and analytics tailored for higher education.
Along the way we've made updates, and today at Educause we announced additions to the Higher Education data model to include scenarios around business partner management. The Higher Education Accelerator now includes use cases around internships, scholarships, grants, and student accomplishments. Schools will now be able to track students who have applied for various positions offered by various business partners and track the status of students’ applications. The Accelerator also includes scenarios around student accomplishments which helps schools, business partners, and potential employers evaluate a student's achievements outside their curriculum and extracurricular activities.
The Higher Education Accelerator includes a new research grant mobile app to easily view and take action on applications from Ph Ds and Doctoral candidates. In addition, you can experience a new student engagement bot and portal experience.
In addition, we've added new partners to our ecosystem who are building on top of the Common Data Model for Higher Education including Frequency Foundry and KPMG.
"At Cambrian College, we have a vision: to motivate everyone who studies with us to use imagination, inspiration, and innovation to make the world a better place, no matter where they live in it. By partnering with Frequency Foundry to implement Dynamics 365 greymatter and the Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator, we can build stronger relationships with potential students from anywhere in the world. We will be able to better understand their needs, which will allow us to make their post-secondary education more accessible and effective. We're excited to use greymatter to change the world, one mind at a time." – Rene Scott, Director of Student Success and Recruitment, Cambrian College
You can test drive the new experience on AppSource today or access the preview in your own PowerApp or Dynamics 365 environment by filling out this short form. The Higher Education data model and Accelerator is free and open sourced and can be found on AppSource and GitHub.
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4 essential capabilities to make the most of AI in the workplace
To realize the benefits of AI, your business needs more than great technology and great data. That's a given. You need tools and applications your employees will actually use that empower them to quickly develop solutions that drive efficiencies. Then, as they become more familiar with AI, that help them confidently reach for bigger outcomes. Let's look at specific AI capabilities that can empower your team to unlock your most ambitious digital transformation goals.
We believe AI is most useful and usable when it's most accessible
But first we'll share a quick word on our vision for AI in the enterprise.
As described in our initial post in the Reimagining AI for Microsoft Business Applications blog series, we believe AI works best when it's in the hands of people closest to a problem. When you let people devise their own solutions instead of scrambling to have someone do it for them, you enhance their competencies and magnify their impact. This opens the way to market differentiation and competitive advantage.
Sounds great, but how exactly do you make this happen? What technologies, capabilities, and policies help your people harness their know-how to achieve more with AI? How do you choose tools that won't sit on a proverbial shelf and will alternatively be readily adopted? Here are some criteria we consider essential to useful, usable AI.
Recommended capabilities for your AI evaluation checklist
- AI integrated into everyday business workflows. Most AI implementations are set apart from the rest of an enterprise's systems. This puts AI in somewhat of a gilded cage beautiful but inaccessible. If AI is embedded in everything you do as part of a modern workflow, business users without technical knowledge can create highly-effective AI solutions. This not only drives results but also builds satisfaction, because people naturally feel good about being able to achieve success using AI. And that has the added benefit of accelerating adoption throughout your company.
- Relationships, processes, and data sources unified across applications. What good is all of your data if it's trapped in business silos and hidden from view? It's much better for your data, business analytics, and insights to be unified on one platform, so that people throughout your organization can see the entire picture of a customer's experience or fully comprehend a critical business operation. As a result, everyone has the knowledge to innovate to create more relevant customer experiences and more optimal processes.
- An on-ramp to robust AI capabilities, not just a starter set. It's never desirable to put a ceiling on what people can accomplish. In order to create lasting change, your team needs to be able to tap into sophisticated AI products and guidance, not limited functionality. This means the tools need to be usable by people with domain expertise but be as full-featured as those of data scientists.
- Scalable, flexible platform. It can be daunting to get started with AI. Many organizations begin by using a point solution to focus on a specific challenge, with plans to expand their use of AI as they develop in-house competencies and skillsets. This is a wise approach, but the AI system in place needs to be able to scale to accommodate additional users, data, and data sources, and many more applications across the enterprise.
We believe all these capabilities are vital to your success. That's why we elected to infuse our AI as a core ingredient across our Microsoft Business Applications offerings. Check out the links below for a closer view.
Learn more
How do your employees benefit when you make AI accessible to all? How do they work smarter and faster? That’s the topic of our next post in Reimagining AI for Microsoft Business Applications.
- Read our previous post, 3 common roadblocks to maximizing AI and how to bypass them
- Get acquainted with AI for Dynamics 365
- Try our preview of AI Builder
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Customer Data Platform (CDP): It’s not just for B2Cs anymore
The CDP Institute's latest research indicates that 34 percent of B2B companies plan to start deploying a customer data platform (CDP) in the next year, compared with just 19 percent of B2C companies. B2Bs have significantly longer and more complex sales cycles that create huge volumes of data, and the relationship-driven nature of B2B business requires a persistent and holistic view of the customer across the entire customer journey.
Also, today's B2B buyers are changing the rules of the game. Accustomed to fast, frictionless, and personalized buying experiences in their everyday life as a consumer, they bring those high expectations to their roles as B2B buyers. They are technically savvy and comfortable engaging via digital channels, which means their data is scattered across different systems. Without unified customer data, it's impossible for companies to personalize experiences with B2B decision-makers.
A CDP provides B2B organizations with the means to unify customer data and gain a complete view of customers. This unified data is the foundation for gaining insights, from better account segmentation to predictions about customer behavior, that drive intelligent and personalized experiences.
A CDP brings together customer data from all sources – CRM, ERP, email, website, POS, cases, partner systems, firmographics, and social networks like LinkedIn – and performs identity resolution at the contact and account level to generate unified profiles for individuals and accounts. The data combined with AI generates insights – accounts to target, content to share, products to recommend, and the best time to call. Insights are activated when they are integrated with business applications and tools like sales applications, marketing applications, workflow, and analytics. In today's fast-paced, competitive environment, a robust CDP is an essential tool for delivering personalized B2B experiences:
- Account-based marketing Complete customer profiles and the resulting intelligence lead to better prioritization of high-potential customers and alignment of B2B sales and marketing teams in delivering coordinated and personalized experiences.
- Sales enablement Organizations that equip their B2B sales team with rich customer data, curated content, and insights from across the customer journey, without salespeople having to search for it, can have more intelligent conversations, deepen relationships, and be more productive.
- Recommended next best action and automated workflow Proactive recommendations and automated processes based on unified customer profiles including product usage data, ensure a well-orchestrated customer journey. For example, when product trial usage exceeds a threshold, an alert is automatically sent to the salesperson to follow-up with a call.
In order to deliver personalized experiences at scale, organizations need a foundation to better understand and engage their target customers. Microsoft's CDP solution, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, is a pre-assembled and ready-to-go CDP solution that helps B2B organizations achieve a 360-degree view of customers and deliver personalized omnichannel experiences, making B2B experiences as engaging as B2C experiences.
To learn more, read Digitally Transforming Customer Experiences.
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Delivering five star experiences with a customer data platform
For the hospitality industry, founded upon the very premise of providing welcoming and delightful experiences to guests and patrons, the need to continue evolving to meet today's changing customer demands is vital. While advancements in technology have led to more automated and self-service functions across hospitality organizations like online booking and reservations, it has also resulted in the loss of personal touch and service that is often what makes a travel, entertainment, or dining experience so memorable. Now, more than ever, it's essential to deliver a personalized, hyper-connected guest experience across every touch point. With the vast amount of data already available to organizations today, the hospitality industry can refine its approach to customer engagement, leveraging customer data and insights to empower every employee to deliver exceptional experiences to guests.
Creating a hyper-connected guest experience
Today's customers have more options available than ever and are increasingly more selective in the brands they choose to do business with. In fact, they expect brands to use their data to personalize recommendations and experiences and are even willing to pay more for a personalized experience. Engagement should be not only be personalized, but also convenient and consistent across every channel, providing guests with the same, seamless and intelligent experience at every touch point whether online, mobile app, phone, or in person.
By harnessing customer data generated at every interaction like website activity, search histories, previous visits, social engagement, transactions, and more hospitality organizations can better understand their customers in order to anticipate and serve their needs.
Let's see what a data-driven engagement strategy can achieve in the hospitality industry:
Restaurants
- Leveraging unified customer profiles to enable hosts and servers to provide highly personalized service like already knowing a guest's drink or table preference or food allergies
- Analyzing customer data to predict churn and trigger personalized dining offers to guests who haven't been back in a while
- Making informed changes to menus, events, or specials based on guests' preferences and response
See how Marston's Pub is harnessing its customer data to provide an exceptional guest experience
Hotels
- Empowering every employee, from reservation agents to onsite hotel staff, with holistic customer profiles that enable personal engagement at every touch point, like knowing a guest's preferred room location or special requests before they need to ask
- Seamlessly connecting online and offline experiences like hotel staff already having a customer's name and reservation details surfaced when they call in about a booking made online
- Leveraging search data and previous stays or preferences to deliver personalized follow-up offers like sending a previous guest a loyalty offer for a discounted rate at another location they searched for
- Making better informed business decisions and adjustments to offerings based on rich customer insights and feedback
Airlines
- Providing personalized ticket pricing based on customers' past spending behaviors or search criteria
- Creating a consistent and intuitive experience across all channels, enabling customers to engage how and where they want to, from website to call center to mobile app to in-flight experiences
- Delivering highly personalized service at every interaction when a reservation agent already knows a customer's preferred seating choice and meal selection when booking a flight
- Proactively identifying and engaging at-risk customers who had a bad travel experience by sending a tailored loyalty offer or discount
Delivering an exceptional, personalized guest experience from the first interaction to post-visit helps secure guest loyalty and keeps them coming back, increasing brand advocacy and customer lifetime value. According to a recent report by McKinsey, guests report being 61 percent more willing to recommend a hotel that gets the entire customer experience right, versus those that merely focus on individual touch points.
How a customer data platform can help
Hospitality organizations can collect customer data across many systems and channels that guests interact with. Yet without the ability to effectively unify and interpret all of this data at scale, it can be difficult or impossible to derive the holistic customer profiles and actionable insights necessary to deliver a hyper-connected, personalized guest experience.
With a customer data platform (CDP) like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, organizations can bring together customer data from all sources to gain a truly 360-degree view of customers, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to unlock rich insights that increase customer loyalty and lifetime value with personalized experiences across all channels.
To learn more about customer data platforms, read Selecting the Right Customer Data Platform.
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Fuel your field service with mixed reality
Technology is transforming quickly and evolving at an accelerated pace. That evolution is significantly impacting how we work, what we work on, and how we serve our customers. As technology is speeding forward, creating greater efficiencies, it's also pushing bleeding edge technologies into the mainstream.
Mixed reality is a combination of realitiesaugmented, virtual, and real world, where the user can interact with all views. Mixed reality starts with the real world where virtual objects are overlaid onto that real world view. The user remains in the real world environment while digital content is added to it.
Mixed reality has inspired countless novels and movies, painting a futuristic portrait of life, where any web-based file can be immediately accessed with a blink, swipe, or mental command. Some analysts predict that mixed reality will be a multi-billion dollar market in the next few years and some listed it among the critical technologies that businesses should prioritize. One area of business where mixed reality is playing a significant role is field service. It's safe to say that mixed reality is creating not just ripples, but a tsunami of change within the field service landscape.
Field service often consists of a boots on the ground labor force making service calls and often, ordering much needed parts and rescheduling site visits to complete the repair. All of this costs the customer and the field service organization time and money.
Enter mixed reality
Imagine the efficiencies that could be created through mixed reality. For example, your technician is at a job site inspecting a part that has failed and doesn't have the knowledge to fix it. Your technician has a couple of possible solution pathways:
- Call the office and reschedule a service call with a more experienced technician.
- Leverage mixed reality to fix the part now.
The first choice extends the customer's downtime and cuts into customer and field service operating costs by creating not just one service call, but another. Days or weeks can pass until the repeat call is conducted by a more experienced technician. This choice will inevitably decrease customer satisfaction and lower first time fix rates.
The second choice empowers technicians with the ability to collaborate and solve problems faster. With heads-up, hands-free video calling using mixed reality eyewear like HoloLens or through a mobile app or PC, technicians can access the customer's history and technical documentation, and view an overlay of instructions, diagrams, and specifications with step by step guidance to repair the device. Using mixed reality, technicians can share a real world view and 3D content to collaborate with remote, more experienced technicians anytime, anywhere. Through mixed reality, technicians can access technical documentation, speak to a colleague, and follow guided instructions all at the same time, thus ensuring the device is repaired properly the first time.
Leveraging mixed reality can positively impact first time fix rates by reducing repeat visits. Repeat visits are one of the most commonly tracked field service performance metrics and any movement, no matter how slight, can significantly impact operating costs and customer satisfaction.
But that's not all
Mixed reality has other benefits to field service. Possible use cases to consider include, but are not limited to:
Remote customer service. There are times when maintenance or a repair is so minor, it can be completed by the customer. Through mixed reality, a customer can be guided by a technician or customer service agent through a quick repair in minutes. The service is instant, easy, and straightforward, eliminating the cost of an onsite visit and minimizing customer downtime.
Training and onboarding. An aging workforce is a constant struggle within field service. Mixed reality can be used to train new recruits or used to support novice technicians in the field. Imagine when the newly hired technician arrives onsite, a repair sequence is received via mobile or PC, complete with 3D technical illustrations. The technician is guided through the repair process without the need of a more experienced technician. Or if the repair is more complex, the technician can receive assistance from a more experienced technician.
Remote inspections. Consider conducting inspections and walk throughs using mixed reality. You can avoid scheduling hassles to cover for out of office staff and save on travel time and expenses.
Product lifecycle information. Assuming your parts and service information are up to date, your service team can use mixed reality to confirm equipment details in the field including part numbers, device model and generation information, and operational data such as response to humidity, cold, heat, or other environmental factors.
Improve your field service world
These are just a few areas where mixed reality can improve the delivery of field service. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist is a mixed reality tool specifically made for field service. Remote Assist empowers technicians to collaborate more efficiently by working together from different locations with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens, Android, or iOS devices. Remote Assist helps technicians share their real time view and solve problems with experts in remote locations. It helps reduce costs with remote inspections by combining video, screenshots, and annotations for more seamless workflows. Remote Assist is the perfect companion tool with Dynamics 365 Field Service.
Want to learn more?
Curious as to how mixed reality can improve your field service organization? Interested in resolving issues faster, reducing costs, and increasing efficiencies? Differentiate your field service offering by leveraging the power of mixed reality.
Starting November 1st, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist is available as an add-on to Dynamics 365 Field Service at a special promotional price. This offer applies to both new and current Dynamics 365 Field Service customers.
Hurry! The reality isthis mixed reality offer won't last forever.
Discover how Dynamics 365 Field Service and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist can make technician success a reality. Learn more or register for a free trial.
Watch the Dynamics 365 Remote Assist video below to learn more.
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New digital messaging offer enhances omnichannel features in Customer Service
Today we’re announcing the release of the new Dynamics 365 Customer Service digital messaging offering. This new digital messaging offering expands and unifies the core capabilities of Omnichannel for Customer Service. With digital messaging, you're able to further empower contact centers to provide seamless, more personalized customer service across a wide range of channels. Combining a variety of digital add-ons into one end-to-end offering, digital messaging expands the options for how your agents engage customers, including:
- Chat for Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- SMS (requires additional TeleSign agreement)
- Microsoft Bot Framework integration
- Facebook Messenger, available today in preview*
In addition to these engagement channels, we've included real-time sentiment tracking, which now supports more than 40 languages. We've included seamless escalation support from bot to live agent with the agent receiving complete context of the existing conversation, so the customer never has to repeat information they've already shared. Plus, we've included access to future digital messaging channels within Omnichannel for Customer Service.
The channel of choice
Omnichannel for Customer Service is a configurable, high-productivity interface that extends the power of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It provides contextual customer identification, real-time notifications, integrated communications, and agent productivity tools, including knowledgebase integration, search, and case creation. With our new digital messaging offering, customers can contact support organizations via their channel of choice, while simultaneously arming agents with a true 360-degree view of the customer journey and the tools needed to deliver a quick resolution that is consistent across all channels of engagement.
We're just getting started
In addition to launching this new offering, I'm also pleased to announce additional capabilities coming to Dynamics 365 Customer Service over the next few months:
- Agent-facing bots that can help agents resolve issues faster by providing quick responses based on conversation context, knowledge article suggestions to share, or suggestions on the next best action the agent can take to resolve the issue.
- Skills-based routing will ensure conversations are routed to the best-fit agent available, based on a specific agent's area of expertise. This ensures the right agent with the right skills is quickly resolving customer issues.
- Macros will enable agents to automate routine responses or repetitive tasks with a single click, such as updating a field, sending acknowledgment emails or performing session wrap-up activities.
- Agent scripts will help agents accelerate issue resolution, ensure regulatory compliance, and deliver a consistent customer experience. Organizations can create scripts to provide step-by-step guidance to agents and then automate the steps based on session type.
- Unified entity routing and auto-assignment enables customers who have implemented custom entities to route and automatically assign those activities to agents.
At Microsoft, we're investing in customer service to enable you to consistently deliver world class customer care. From agent productivity tools to AI-enabled apps, we're innovating to help you earn customers for life. With our latest omnichannel capabilities available through our new digital messaging offering, customers can receive the seamless, personalized support they expect across any number of channels and agents.
Stay tuned. There's much more to come.
Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Read more about what's coming to Customer Service in release wave 2
*This feature is a preview, which means that it is made available to you before general availability so you can test and evaluate the preview and provide feedback to Microsoft. This preview may employ reduced or different privacy, security, or compliance commitments than a commercial version. As such, this preview is not meant to be used with any “live” or production Customer Data, Personal Data, or other data that is subject to heightened compliance requirements. Any use of “live” data is at your sole risk and it is your sole responsibility to notify your end users that they should not include sensitive information with their use of the preview. This preview, and any support Microsoft may elect to provide, is provided “as-is,” “with all faults,” “as available,” and without warranty. This preview is subject to the Preview Terms.
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Announcing RPA, enhanced security, no-code virtual agents, and more for Microsoft Power Platform
It's a privilege to work with global organizations every day to help them compete and innovate in a modern, data-driven economy. Our goal with Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform is to help your organization drive more impactful business outcomes and take proactive actions that will uniquely position and differentiate your business in the fast-evolving market.
We introduced over 400 new capabilities just a few weeks ago with the 2019 release wave 2. Today, at Microsoft Ignite 2019, we're announcing more major updates to the Microsoft Power Platform that unlock new possibilities, including:
- Microsoft Flow is being renamed to Microsoft Power Automate, to better align with the Microsoft Power Platform.
- Robotic process automation (RPA) has been added to Microsoft Power Automate, delivering an end-to-end automation solution that spans AI, APIs, and UI on the Microsoft Power Platform.
- Microsoft Power Virtual Agentsa no-code/low-code app that allows anyone to create and deploy intelligent AI-powered virtual agents.
- A host of new security enhancements for Microsoft Power BI, that add industry leading data security capabilities no matter where your analytics data is used and accessed.
- Tighter integration between the Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Teams, bringing the world's most popular collaboration app and the Power Platform closer together.
- A new set of prebuilt models for AI Builder that add even more advanced AI models to Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps that are available to everyone.
These new features and products substantially advance our vision for the Power Platform, an unmatched set of capabilities that enable everyone to analyze, act, and automate across their organization to transform businesses from the ground up.
Be sure to watch my technology keynote today at Microsoft Ignite(or on-demand after the 11:00 AM presentation) for a deep dive into these new capabilities.
Introducing RPA in Power Automate
One of the biggest challenges organizations face is scaling and automating business processesfrom digitizing pen and paper processes, to automating complex processes that span legacy and modern applications. Robotic process automation has rapidly become a key technology to address many of these scenarios but generally requires a patchwork of automation services that need integration and management before the real work can get done.
Power Automate simplifies these end-to-end scenarios through a unified automation platform that can bridge the gap between API-based automation and UI-based automation.
Today we're announcing the preview of our new RPA capability in Power Automate called UI flows. Creating a UI flow is a simple and familiar point-and-click, low-code experience that makes it easy for users to turn manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven interaction with software systems that don't support API automation. Couple the capabilities of UI flows with Power Automate's prebuilt connectors for more than 275 widely-used apps and services that support API automation, and you have an end-to-end automation platform capable of reinventing business processes for a wide range of workloads across industries.
For example, let's say you work for an insurance claims processing company, where clients fill out digital forms, paper forms, or communicate through email. The claim is processed on modern cloud services while staff also maintain cumbersome paper records and legacy applications. With Power Automate, this entire process can be automated. Digitized data from scanned paper forms is processed with AI that recognizes forms, and old legacy systems can be automated with RPAone platform that brings both worlds together seamlessly.
TruGreen, one of the largest lawn care companies in the U.S., recognizes the growing need for powerful automation capabilities.
“The need for automation at TruGreen is growing quickly, and Power Automate is, and will continue to be an important part of accelerating TruGreen’s digital transformation journey. Power Automate will help us bridge the integration gap between legacy systems and modern applications. With the new UI flows RPA capabilities, we are excited to bring automation to legacy applications with no API capability." – Ayman Taha, CIO of TruGreen
Take a closer look at UI flows in Power Automate and sign up today for the UI flows preview.
Power Virtual Agents: Enable anyone to build a no-code/low-code virtual agent
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, now in preview, is a new offering that enables subject matter experts in your organization such as customer service, sales, marketing, finance, or HR – to easily create virtual agents using a guided, no-code/low-code point-and-click graphical interface without the need for data scientists or developers. Customer service questions and other types of external or internal inquiries at an organization can be serviced by a virtual agent, freeing up staff to focus on more complex tasks.
There's no code to get started, no AI expertise needed, and you can be up and running in minutes. And because they're already integrated with Microsoft's Power Platform, you can use hundreds of prebuilt connectors so your virtual agents can talk to your backend systems with a few clicks or easily add capabilities like using Microsoft Power Automate to call an API.
What's more, if you want to add code or, say, some more complex capabilities, Azure Cognitive Services and Microsoft Bot Framework are fully integrated and just a few clicks away.
Learn more about Power Virtual Agents and sign up for the preview.
Power BI security enhancementshelpprotect data wherever it's accessed
Organizations recognize the value of empowering theiremployees toembrace data-driven insights. Power BI helps customers drivedatademocratizationin theirorganization becauseit enables anyone to draw insights from data with easy-to-use data visualizations and analytics to guide business decisions. As customers empower every employee with Power BI, it is critical for them to ensure that theybetter protecttheir datano matter where it is accessed.
Today we're announcingbrand new capabilitiesinPower BI data protection.
These enhancements take advantage of Microsoft world-class security capabilities, enabling organizations to:
- Classify and label sensitive Power BI datausingthesamefamiliarMicrosoft Information Protection sensitivity labelsused in Office.
- Enforce governance policies even when Power BI content is exportedto Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF,tohelpensuredata isprotectedeven when itleavesPower BI.
- Monitor and protect user activity on sensitive data in real timewith alerts, session monitoring, and risk remediation using Microsoft Cloud AppSecurity.
- Empower security administratorswho usedataprotection reports and security investigation capabilitieswithMicrosoft Cloud App Security to enhance organizational oversight.
Now in preview, these capabilities engage when Power BI is paired with Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security.
Avanade, a management consulting company, recognizes the importance of powerful data security solutions.
"Changing user behavior is difficult, but having Microsoft Information Protection data protection capabilities available to users directly within Power BI, a tool we use daily, greatly increases our confidence that our documents will be labeled and protected correctly," said Cem Urfalioglu, Director of Avanade ITS.
In addition to these security updates, major advances in AI and natural language, Power BI integration with Azure Synapse Analytics, and more are now available. Read more about all of these enhancements and tolearn how togain invaluable insightswhile keepingsensitivedatamoresecure.
Teams and Power Platform empower workers to collaborate in a data-driven business
As organizations encourage a data-driven culture, it's important they break down silos and ensure that the right people in the organization have the data they need to be involved in the decision-making process. The pairing of Teams and Power Platform brings together the best of workplace collaboration and data-driven business into one place.
Bringing Power Platform applications to Teams means users' dashboards, apps, and automations are available within Teams, so they are easier to find, share, and use on an everyday basis. The conversational nature of Teams enhances how users interact with Power Platform applications. For example, adaptive cards and bots let users engage with these tools directly through conversation. This integration also provides IT Administrators with high fidelity control and prioritization of features.
Power Apps creators can now publish their apps directly to their company's app library in Teams, making them more discoverable to users and improving the experience of adding these apps to Teams. By the end of 2019, users will be able to pin Power Apps to their Teams left rail, providing easy access to regularly used apps.
New triggers and actions for Power Automate are now available within Teams. These capabilities streamline the completion of common team and personal tasks, such as scheduling focus time and automating document approvals.
New features coming to Power BI in 2020 include the ability to create rich adaptive cards in Teams conversations, which help users see and act on their data. An improved Power BI tab experience in Teams will also make selecting the correct reports easier than ever.
The American Red Cross is leveraging Power Platform integration with Teams to improve disaster response times.
"When we respond to disasters, we have to ensure communication and understanding both internally and with external partners. Workplace collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Power BI enable different groups to exchange information and collaborate quickly when it's needed most. Being able to pair that with tools made in Power Apps also helps us gather important data so we're making informed decisions to better help people in need." – Denise Everhart, American Red Cross Division Disaster Executive Pacific Division.
Learn more about the enhanced Power Platform integration within Teams.
AI Builder unlock new low-code and no-code AI scenarios
AI Builder is the no-code AI capability for Power Apps and Power Automate, made generally available on October 1st. It enables organizations to tailor AI to their specific business needs and their unique data without the need to hire data scientists or pro-developers to make their apps and processes more intelligent. AI Builder takes common AI scenarios and provides point-and-click solutions for app makers to solve everyday tasks like forms processing, object detection, and text and binary classification.
Today, we're introducing a new set of prebuilt AI models for the Power Platform. For business users, having prebuilt AI models means they don't have to gather data, build, or train their models. Now available in preview, these prebuilt scenarios include:
- Key phrase extraction identifies the main talking points from your text
- Language detectionidentifies the predominant language from your text
- Text recognitionextracts embedded, printed, and handwritten text from images into machine-readable character streams
- Sentiment analysisdetects positive, negative, neutral, or mixed sentiment in social media, customer reviews, or any text data
Learn more about the new prebuilt scenarios
Learn more about AI Builder in this post
Take a closer look at the new Power Platform enhancements
Browse the release notes and watch my technology keynote live or on-demand to learn more about these new updates.
Unleash your organization's creativity and innovation with a deep dive into the Microsoft Power Platform.
The post Announcing RPA, enhanced security, no-code virtual agents, and more for Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.
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Our vision for the Microsoft customer data platform
Empowering organizations everywhere to gain insight from all their data sources and deliver personalized customer engagement
There is a fundamental change occurring across industries and organizations: Data now comes from everywhere and everything. As customers have access to more content, purchasing channels, and brand options than before, the touchpoints become exponentialevery website visit, use of a product, and interaction with a customer service representative creates an observation or generates data. But this data is often siloed across multiple systems and organizational departments, making it difficult to gain a single source of truth.
With such an overload of information and choices available, organizations must demonstrate they both understand and value their customers. To this end, we've been working to bring customer experiences to the forefront of the business conversationwith a new set of intelligent applications with ourmodern, unified, intelligent,and adaptable business applications. Today, I'd like todig into our vision and strategy for Microsoft's customer data platforma critically important investment from Microsoft. Specifically,how it is helping organizations overcome data silosand leverage artificial intelligence to guide decisions and empower organizations totake meaningful actionsfor their business.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: Microsoft's customerdataplatform
Historically,the customer interaction with a brandended the moment they completed the purchase and walked out the doorlimiting an organization'sunderstanding of why or how its customers are usingits products and services.Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables organizations to gain the most comprehensive view of their customers by unifying data across diverse sourcesbe it transactional, behavioral, or observational dataas well as uniquely enriching profiles with market insights and real-time product usage.
From data analysts to marketing, sales, and service professionals, every employee in an organization can leverage AI-driven insights. These include churn risk, customer LTV, and recommended next best action, to power business processes across the customer journey that help boost personalization and build richer relationships.
The Microsoft CDP enables breakthrough experiences for customers while maintaining the strictest compliance and security standards so that all customer data is securely managed and adheres to GDPR regulations. Built on a hyper-scale Microsoft Azure platform, the application allows organizations to run powerful analytical capabilities using Microsoft AI and Azure-based machine learning models. Customer Insights can easily extend and customize with the Microsoft Power Platform for even richer data processing and customizations. Customers can benefit from the Microsoft partner ecosystem for development of custom applications and solutions to fit specific industry or business needs.
Let's look at a few organizations using our CDP to deliver business outcomes and rich customer experiences:
Empowering organizations worldwide
TheUnited Nations Children's Fund(UNICEF) workstirelessly in over 190 countries and territories to save the lives of millions of children. As private donors and volunteers are increasingly hard to find and retain, UNICEF Netherlands found that personally engaging supporters increased their overall commitment to the organization. Key details on donors, such as their contact information, philanthropic interests, and donation history, were housed in disparate data silos, making it difficult to gain a unified view of the donor base and personalize interactions at scale. To solve this problem, the team adopted Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to quickly and easily combine data from multiple sources, analyze the data to derive insights, and activate the insights via marketing and communication channels. Customer Insights' out-of-the-box interoperability with Dynamics 365 Marketing helps the team create and optimize marketing campaigns on-the-fly, enabling UNICEF to better develop a customer lifetime value model, which will help it identify and optimize engagement withhigh-impact donors. Learn more in the UNICEF video below.
American Electric Power(AEP)a competitive retail energy solutions company serving more than 400,000 residential, small-business, and commercial customers nationwideis using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to deliver efficient and sustainable energy solutions to customers. Previously, AEP faced cumbersome manual processes that required lots of analysis and input to piece together various customer information for a holistic view of its customer, which was both timely and costly. With a cloud-first approach, using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, AEP can now easily migrate large data sets across various systems of record into a single, unified customer profile. As a result, AEP can better understand its customer needs, identify gaps in product offerings, and ensure both front and back-end operations are focused and efficient to deliver quality, tailored experiences to its customers.Learn more in the AEP video below.
What's next?
Thus far, we've seen great momentum and impact resulting from the customer data platform and how businesses are evolving customer engagement and experiences. Looking ahead, we will continue to innovate on the platform and plan to deliver more opportunities and features in the coming months.
The post Our vision for the Microsoft customer data platform appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.
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Working together to support our mutual customers
Every customer is unique. Their industry, their size, the regions they operate in, their business model, and even their culture make them distinct from other firms. At Microsoft we believe it's important to serve our customers with platforms and services that empower them to achieve more. With this as our North Star mission, we work continually with integrated software vendors (ISVs) to bring unique capabilities to our mutual customers through their applications and services.
This year we elevated our focus on the SaaS line-of-business applications space by creating the Business Applications ISV Connect program. We will better serve customers in all industries by partnering more closely with ISVs to both drive additional innovation and help those ISVs extend their reach to more customers and markets. We are excited about the momentum we're seeing for the program and the benefits our customers are experiencing. Since the launch of the program four months ago, we've already seen over 700 partners begin enrollment in the program, and more than 250 partners have already published more than 550 certified or recertified apps in the AppSource marketplace. And most importantly, we're seeing customers achieve business results, like Societ Gas Rimini (SGR).
Working together to serve customers
Microsoft and Ferranti Computer Systems worked together to help SGR solve a complex IT problem. SGR is an Italian private gas company with a priority to improve client service. Their current systems used a combination of a CRM solution, a separate billing platform, and a custom middle tier to tie them all together. This solution created too much complexity to be governed in an efficient way, so SGR committed to update their legacy applications toward a goal of breakthrough service
"We needed to have a solution that helps us use the competencies of people in the business, not in solving technical problems" said Fabio Brancaleoni, General Manager Utilia, at SGR.
In looking to create a new system that would be sustainable for the future, SGR worked with Ferranti and Microsoft and chose MECOMS 365, an application based on Microsoft Dynamics and the Microsoft Power Platform. MECOMS 365 is an ERP solution for energy and utility companies that provides the modularity of a cloud-based solution, is user centric, and works seamlessly with the Microsoft clouds Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Office 365. SGR now has a solution that provides for a more natural experience for its employees and is also flexible to extend over time.
Watch the Ferranti video below to learn more.
Microsoft Business Applications ISV Connect program
We make a variety of benefits available for Dynamics 365 ISVs to work with Microsoft to help customers. The ISV Connect program provides the technical and business support for ISVs to provide industry specific capabilities on top of a modern modular platform.
"Microsoft is investing so much in cloud, AI, data and it's moving so fast and this ISV Connect program allows us to keep up with the pace and then translate that innovation to the customer so they can benefit from that." – Johan Vandekerckhove, Chief Commercial Officer, MECOMS Ferranti.
Each partner has unique needs and can benefit from the program in ways that suit their requirements. One example is the co-selling and co-marketing benefits available to ISVs who place an app in the Premium Tier. JayThom for example, likes the opportunity to work with Microsoft salespeople across many regions to help them expand their reach.
"The Microsoft Business Applications ISV program provides a little partner like us access to global sales teams and that ability to scale at levels we could never have dreamed of." – Brett Yorgey, Managing Director for JayThom
Watch the JayThom video below to learn more.
Learn more about how you can benefit from the Microsoft Business Applications ISV Connect program.
- For ISVs: Learn more about Microsoft ISV Connect Program
- For customers: Find the right app for your business on AppSource
The post Working together to support our mutual customers appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.
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Enhance your Dynamics 365 mixed reality experiences on HoloLens 2
HoloLens 2 is now available, with breakthroughs in hardware design, AI, and mixed reality. Dynamics 365 mixed reality applications take full advantage of these breakthroughs to deliver even more immersive ways to learn, communicate, and collaborate hands free.
With a HoloLens 2 device, front line workers using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Guides, can accomplish more, hands-free, using new eye tracking capabilities, voice inputs, and fully articulated hand tracking. Workers experience a more immersive hands-free environment, whether learning new skills on the job site or solving problems in real-time with technicians in different locations.
Work together from anywhere with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist
Dynamics 365 Remote Assist takes collaboration to the next level, empowering technicians to collaborate with remote experts and troubleshoot issues in context with the task at hand, such as maintenance, inspection, and break-fix scenarios. While Remote Assist is available on iOS and Android mobile devices, HoloLens 2 enables hands-free sharing of visual data, so you can solve problems quickly and collectively. With fully articulated hand tracking, you can now just poke at the virtual buttons, drag virtual windows, and place holograms using voice commands.
Learn by doing with Dynamics 365 Guides
Dynamics 365 Guides defines a new form of hands-free interaction, combining voice inputs with our unique gaze fill interaction control, as well as fully articulated hand tracking for holographic authoring. With HoloLens 2, you can now use voice, interact naturally with the interface, or just gaze for complete control of the experience.
Released for general availability this year, Dynamics 365 Guides is the newest addition to Microsoft's mixed reality business applications portfolio. Guides provides a solution for creating step-by-step guided instructions in mixed reality, one of the fastest growing mixed reality use cases within companies today.
Enhance learning and skill training on HoloLens 2
The workforce is undergoing a dramatic transformation, with training and reskilling at the heart of this change. According to a recent report by the World Economic Forum, it’s projected that by 2022, 54 percent of the workforce will require upskilling or reskilling. Classroom education may be effective for disseminating information, but learning is done through experience and hands on skills transfer.
"Our customers are discovering that Guides helps increase time-to-competency for new workers, ultimately reducing wasted labor hours and preventing costly and dangerous production line interruptions." – Edoardo De Martin, General Manager for Dynamics 365 Guides.
Today, most companies still rely on paper manuals and classroom education for training new employees and training existing employees on new processes. Training in mixed reality with Guides takes it into the real-world, with visual instruction in 3D that provides a skills-based, hands-on learning tool.
"Traditionally, workers are still looking at two-dimensional wiring schematics or architectural blueprints and having to construct something in 3D or printing text-based procedural documents on equipment maintenance. There's a better way to do this. That's a mental hurdle we can eliminate, which not only increases productivity but also reduces errors." – Edoardo de Martin, General Manager for Dynamics 365 Guides
We're just getting started
Dynamics 365 launched a suite of mixed reality applications in October 2018 across a variety of use cases from sales to field service, customer service, operations, and training. We're innovating to bring the best technologies to support you across all facets of your business. The solutions work across mobile, PC, and head-mounted displays including HoloLens and virtual reality (VR). The mixed reality applications work as standalone solutions, but also have native integrations with other Dynamics 365 applications, enabling connected workflows through the Common Data Service.
Learn more
- Explore business-ready apps and solutions for HoloLens 2
- Learn more about what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Guides and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist
- Learn more about HoloLens 2
The post Enhance your Dynamics 365 mixed reality experiences on HoloLens 2 appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.
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