Intelligent Order Management announced a truck load of new features in November 2022.  This article explores the core investment themes for the November Release enabling our customers and partners to explore and implement the relevant features for their business.  

Prior to this release, IOM only contained broad functionality in certain key Order Management functions that span across the Supply Chain. This release focused on closing the gaps for these critical functionalities, while continuing to expand on IOM’s core strengths which include the Provider Ecosystem, Fulfillment & Returns optimization, and the continued embrace of the low code-no code Power Platform. 

Investments made to IOM focusing on improving 3 core tenets. These are: 

• Resiliency:  Will this investment reduce the time taken to orchestrate and adapt to dynamic events  
• Visibility: Will this investment improve the end-to-end view of an order and inventory across heterogenous systems and locations 

• Extensibility: Will this investment help customers extend features and fine tune for their own business needs 

With the November 2022 release complete, we fulfill multiple order scenarios in a way that customers can leverage the power of the low code platform. The pre-built providers also now span the order to cash (and returns) lifecycle. 

Some of the new feature set capabilities for the Nov ’22 release are below. 

Additional Order Capabilities

We have introduced comprehensive application support for various order scenarios. These include:

–             Back Orders

–             Pre- Order Management

–             Returns integrated with F&O

–             Purchase Order support

–             Enable Manual Orders

–             Transfer Orders

–             Subscription Orders

Customers can leverage the orchestration platform to consume and orchestrate business processes based on these order scenarios. Order preferences can be configured, and workflows can then be orchestrated to adapt to these configurations.

Additionally, these order attributes (where applicable) will seamlessly work with the built-in integration of Inventory Visibility.  This puts the focus on allowing users to define their specific business rule while IOM takes care of the inventory integration.

Real Time Inventory Visibility

Intelligent Order Management is one of the few Order Management systems that does not rely on a pub-sub architecture (where the source of inventory is Dynamics 365) to report Inventory levels. We provide an out-of-the-box integration via the Inventory Visibility provider. 

We h made it easier and more accessible for various IOM personas like a CSR worker to query and get real-time inventory information within the IOM application.

Through improvements made with how we categorize warehouse through D365, customers can look up store inventory and further orchestrate BOPIS or Ship from Store scenarios. This information can now also be used in e-com shopping carts to provide shipping options to customers.

Here is an example of how we are leveraging this feature to build out carting functionality.

Error Handling

For an orchestration-based system like Intelligent Order Management which interacts with other heterogenous systems, timely and intuitive error handling is imperative.

One of the key feedbacks we had received was to make Error Handling more concise, arranged logically to reflect the key flows in IOM and to make them more intuitive. The latest release now simplifies and streamlines the Error Handling experience and provides:

• Improved error visibility across the system – giving you a single source of truth for all errors across all entities.
• Ability to navigate directly to the power automate flow that failed from the orchestration step.
• Improved surfacing of error messages that allow for quicker debugging.

Providers

Providers remain a core component of how IOM connects to other systems and ecommerce engines. Our viewpoint is biased to extensibility, and we have extended the provider ecosystem to ensure increasing coverage across the order lifecycle.

We will continue to build key providers (based on mutual agreement) on both the left and right side of IOM.

As of November, ’22 we added Amazon and Adobe Magento to the Order Channels (left side of image).  We are pleased to add UPS as a Delivery Provider (right side of image). These providers now allow customers to ingest Sales Orders into IOM seamlessly. Moving forward we will extend this support via APIs for customers to avail carting features this will be e-com platform agnostic.

The goal is to optimize time to value for our customers who don’t need to build, maintain, extend, support, and scale these integrations.

Learn more

Read the product documentation:

• Inventory Visibility Add-in overview Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
• Inventory Visibility inventory allocation Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

Not yet a Supply Chain Management customer? Take a guided tour.

The post Leverage the latest Intelligent Order Management features to accelerate your e-commerce business appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In times of economic uncertainty, business agility is critical to meeting stakeholder expectations and delivering customer value. These challenging times put CFOs and finance teams in the spotlight as leaders across the business look to them to protect short-term financial health and long-term growth. Yet, many leaders struggle to get the insights needed to pivot quickly. Join us at Finance Reimagined on February 28, 2023 to see how automation, AI, and analytics can help you lead the way through disruption.

While business intelligence (BI) and cloud analytics tools can provide actionable insights, a significant obstacle that hinders finance professionals and business leaders from maximizing the potential of these tools is the need for advanced technical skills to consolidate, manipulate, and integrate data from various systems utilized in business operations. This requires a deep understanding of complex data models and the ability to normalize, transform, and combine data sets to provide a coherent, usable output for all business users.

Historically, finance teams have spent most of their time running accounting and financial operations, closing the books, and creating financial reports and statements. Business performance insights were delivered monthly, quarterly, or yearly. As the speed of business has accelerated and continues to accelerate at an unprecedented pace, finance professionals are being asked to deliver performance metrics daily and at a micro level. Many teams have invested in data scientists and reskilling their people to take on modern data storytelling roles. However, this approach does not scale. To achieve the level of business agility to succeed in ultra-competitive markets, business leaders need to activate actionable insights securely at every level of the organization. This means that all people, regardless of their technical expertise, need the ability to get the analytics they need to understand business performance better.

The question becomes, how do we get the business performance analytics needed in the hands of people across the organization? The answer lies in creating a hyper-connected enterprise through an intuitive data model and empowering people to use familiar tools like Microsoft Excel and Power BI for self-service analytics.

Finance leaders can create a hyper-connected enterprise

Although CFOs may not be directly responsible for data security and connectivity, a strong partnership between finance and IT is crucial for successfully implementing business performance analytics. During our upcoming virtual event, Finance Reimagined, on February 28, 2023, you will hear how Robert Walters, a leading global recruitment and talent management company, strengthened their partnership by adding a finance expert to their IT team. The results were remarkable, as they were able to replace their financial management solution on time and within budget, providing near real-time insights to all recruiters within their workflow. Easy access to correct information enables teams to achieve strategic objectives more efficiently and effectively.

With unified and accessible data, finance leaders can empower their teams to quickly gain insights and position themselves as leaders in innovation and business transformation. To realize these benefits, it is essential to consolidate all business data for a comprehensive view of the organization and embed intelligence in every function to promote proactive decision-making and collaboration among employees. To achieve this, finance leaders should collaborate with IT to:

• Unify data: Many well-defined business processes, like procure to pay, quote-to-cash, and other regular ledger and subledger processes, consist of a collection of documents related to the other. Unifying data from the ledger, subledger, and source documents makes using data from these different sources simpler. 
• Simplify reporting: Streamlined reporting enables the finance team and other teams to create the reports they need, which previously would have taken weeks or months with IT experts or outside vendors.
• Adopt self-service analytics: Operationalizing custom reports and ad hoc analytics for the business through self-service analytics enables comprehensive digital transformation, even for organizations with limited IT investment. This empowers finance teams to use their data.

Actionable insights with self-service analytics

Self-service analytics refers to the ability of a business user to access unified, actionable data and intelligent technology to make informed decisions quickly. This technology is designed to be used by any user, no matter their sophistication, and can significantly contribute to driving growth and creating value beyond financial metrics. In the past, these benefits were challenging for organizations to achieve due to the complexity of technology implementation.

With self-service analytics, organizations can take advantage of technology that eliminates the need for finance professionals to have expertise in data science and IT, or access to external resources.

Now, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance users can validate data quality, generate customized reports, and easily extract valuable insights. With self-service analytics, finance teams can independently access, analyze, and use their data to make informed decisions. 

Business performance analytics

To tackle the challenges faced by CFOs and finance professionals in consolidating data and utilizing self-service analytics, we are proud to introduce new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance. Our latest innovation, business performance analytics, delivers insights directly to all users, regardless of technical ability. Business performance analytics empowers finance professionals to make informed decisions without needing advanced skills or data science understanding. This solution simplifies the process of gaining insights from data by providing a comprehensive and user-friendly view across multiple business processes.

With business performance analytics, all users can easily access and analyze data, helping to streamline regular financial reporting and shorten cycle times, allowing finance teams to focus on strategic initiatives. It enables reporting in a more holistic, less siloed way, across multiple systems of record, by normalizing data. Built on Microsoft Dataverse, it includes a web-based reporting hub where customers can create reporting via Excel, Power BI, and other templates. 

Finally, with business performance analytics, we enhance the growth potential of Dynamics 365 Finance capabilities by leveraging unified data for AI and machine learning. With AI-powered solutions, we will enable teams to identify opportunities to improve financial performance automatically. Through our partnership with Open AI and recent acquisitions in business domains like process mining and AI-driven spend analytics, Microsoft will help auto-detect and recommend ways to protect organizations from risk and guard against future disruption. 

Learn what’s next at Finance Reimagined

Integrating financial data across an entire organization and giving the finance team a wealth of self-serve analytics tools will deliver significant benefits across a business. Business performance analytics will be available in public preview with 2023 release wave 1. Our focus will be on ensuring the business performance analytics capabilities within Dynamics 365 Finance helps customers to:

• Simplify data insights by providing a comprehensive and user-friendly view across multiple sources in near real time. 
• Allow all users of all technical abilities to quickly access and analyze data to facilitate faster decisions and better business performance. 
• Enable ease-of-use through familiar apps like Excel and Power BI.
• Streamline financial reporting and operations to reduce cycle times and focus on strategic initiatives.
• Provide auditors with direct access to financial data, enabling them to quickly access and analyze the information they need, making the audit process more efficient.

Finance Reimagined

Learn how Dynamics 365 Finance can deliver the benefits of digital transformation, activating insights through analytics, AI, and automation.

Register for the event

The post Deliver insights with Dynamics 365 Finance business performance analytics appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re thrilled to invite you to the first-ever Microsoft Customer Success Day, a free virtual conference for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform users on March 16, 2023. This event is open to all community members, customers, partners, and enthusiasts, globally. Microsoft is committed to supporting your success, regardless of your company’s size, industry, or location.   

Microsoft Customer Success Day will include more than 20 sessions and panels across four tracks: implementation, adoption, optimization, and migration. In addition, we will have keynotes from thought leaders, and a lively discussion panel on women in technology. All the content is designed to support you in building your own success journey, driving user adoption, and realizing business value for your organization.  

This year’s event will take place back-to-back with the annual DynamicsCon Virtual eventhosted by Dynamics User Groupwhich takes place on March 15. Best of all, your registration provides access to both events.

Learn more below and register today for updates leading up to the eventwe look forward to connecting with you!

Event details

What: Microsoft Customer Success Day

When: March 16, 2023

Who should attend: Anyone who wants to achieve more with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You’ll join thousands of users, enthusiasts, MVPs, experts, and beginners gathered virtually to achieve greater success and business value with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

What to expect: This learning-packed day features more than 20 sessions and panels presented by more than 30 Microsoft team members, Microsoft MVPs, and community experts, including:

– Keynotes from thought leaders at Microsoft who will provide insight into the future of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

– Specialized sessions across four tracks, each designed to deliver skills and best practices that can be applied right away.

• Implementation: The foundation to driving business outcomes is a well-architected, well-built solution. Sessions on this track will include tips and tricks for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales programs, building apps fast through Microsoft Power Apps, while maintaining control of your environment, and developing a compelling business value story.

• Adoption: The best built solution will not drive business outcomes if people don’t use the tool. This track will help you build your own customer success power team with customers describing how they have succeeded post implementation. We’ll discuss change management strategies, partner selection, and even how to use AI to drive success.

• Optimization: Once your solution is built and adopted, it’s time to expand your solution to drive even more impact. We’ll discuss ways to do this using the software you already own, with sessions on sales and marketing alignment, customer experience and Microsoft Viva Sales.

• Migration: For customers still using our on-premises solutions, we’ll discuss the journey to the cloud. We’ll walk through real-world customer programs and highlight what makes a successful migration with sessions like, “Optimize Your Migration to Business Central.”   

– Live question and answer panels, as well as “ask the expert” breakout sessionsyour opportunity to connect directly with experts at Microsoft.

Agenda

Microsoft Customer Success Day, March 16

• Opening keynote: Toby Bowers, General Manager of Product Marketing, Business Applications Go-To-Market, will kick off the conference with a welcome keynote. 
• Featured keynotes:  Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platform, and Emily He, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications Marketing, will deliver featured keynotes. Don’t miss this firsthand look at digital innovations shaping the future of business, across industries and roles and best practices to build a resilient, digital-first business. You’ll learn how to amplify business value across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, as well as explore AI, automation, and low-code tools that are helping organizations streamline business processes, enhance collaboration, and improve customer and employee experiences.
• Track-specific keynote sessions: Keynotes from Microsoft leaders, including Swamy Narayana, General Manager of Dynamics 365 FastTrack Program; Monica Flaherty, Senior Director of Customer Success Marketing, Business Applications Go-To-Market; and Jason Kim, General Manager of Dynamics 365 FastTrack Program.
• Individual event sessions: Sessions that will focus on Microsoft best practices and methodologies, hosted by thought leaders from Microsoft’s engineering and customer success teams. Session speakers include Steve Green, Director of Business Programs, and David Bailey, Director of Value Realization (Business Applications). 
• And more! Additional speakers and panelists, including Microsoft partners and customers, will be announced over the next weeks. View the full agenda for the latest lineup.

A focus on customer success

Microsoft is leading a new era of business productivity with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Through the Microsoft Cloud, we’re creating opportunities for businesses to accelerate innovation and do more with less. We’re empowering people to achieve more, from business users to IT pros, and from citizen developers to pro developers. To achieve the promise of innovation and business value, we need to focus on what happens after you buy the software.

With Microsoft Customer Success Day, we aim to provide a differentiated experience from traditional product-focused technology conferences. While our products and technologies are amazing, in this event, we shift focus to business value realization. Based on your feedback, we know that our customers are seeking more assistance in areas including change management, adoption, best practices, training, and implementation services. Microsoft Customer Success Day will address these topics in ways that empower customers to drive their own success and productivity with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Customer Success Day

Learn how to achieve more with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Register today

The post Join us for Microsoft Customer Success Day—dedicated to realizing business value with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.