Effective financial reporting is crucial for finance professionals to ensure accuracy, compliance, and strategic decision-making. Financial reports are the backbone of organizational transparency, offering insights that drive timely business decisions. However, managing financial reporting across multiple environments can be a daunting task, often leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies.

To address these challenges, the latest update to Dynamics 365 Finance introduces the financial reporting add-in, a powerful tool designed to streamline financial reporting processes, enhance data accuracy, and provide comprehensive business insights. With this change, Financial reporting is no longer deployed by default in all environments. 

Comprehensive Yet Configurable and Easy-to-Use Financial Reporting 

The financial reporting add-in for Dynamics 365 Finance offers a robust suite of functionalities and capabilities that make it both powerful and user-friendly: 

• Flexible Report Design: Create custom financial statements tailored to your organization’s needs using a drag-and-drop interface. 

• Real-Time Data Integration: Access real-time financial data, ensuring that reports reflect the latest financial position. 

• Collaboration and Sharing: Easily share reports and collaborate with team members, facilitating efficient communication and decision-making. 

• Secure Access: Ensure sensitive financial information protection by maintaining data security with role-based access controls.

• Get Started Quickly with 22 Reporting Templates: Generate standard financial reports efficiently by using a variety of pre-built templates. This saves time and ensures consistency across your financial data.

These features provide finance professionals with the tools they need to generate accurate and insightful financial reports without the complexity often associated with financial reporting systems. 

Consistent and Efficient Financial Reporting Across Environments 

Financial reporting often involves juggling multiple environments, each with unique configurations and requirements. This can lead to inconsistencies and inefficiencies, especially when moving data between production and sandbox environments. The financial reporting add-in for Dynamics 365 ensures a standardized approach to financial reporting across all environments. This reduces the time and effort required to set up and maintain reporting systems.  

Ensuring Availability Across Existing and New Environments 

For users currently utilizing financial reporting, there will be no changes to your existing environments. The financial reporting add-in remains accessible through lifecycle services (LCS), ensuring seamless access and continuity. The add-in continues to be available within the Dynamics 365 Finance menu, maintaining user familiarity and ease of use. 
 
Users not currently utilizing financial reporting should have received communication about its removal from your LCS environment. (Reinstall via LCS if needed.) The financial reporting menu item will always be accessible within Dynamics Finance. 

Financial reporting is not deployed by default in newly created environments. However, easy installation via LCS is available, if needed. This provides users the flexibility to customize their environment setup based on specific reporting needs. This optional deployment feature empowers users to manage and configure their reporting tools according to their requirements. This in turn streamlines operations and reduces unnecessary pre-installations. 

Streamlined Data Management for Multi-Environment Setups 

For customers managing multiple production and sandbox environments, please note financial reporting may be used in some environments but not others. When moving data, the financial reporting database will only transfer if both the source and target environments have it installed. To ensure smooth transitions, we recommend pre-installing financial reporting in both source and target environments to include it in data migrations. 

This selective deployment capability ensures operational continuity, avoiding disruptions during data migrations and maintaining financial reporting capabilities. The flexibility to tailor environment setups based on specific operational needs, creates a more efficient and effective financial reporting process. 

Enhanced Simplicity and Improved Efficiency 

By integrating the financial reporting add-in for Dynamics 365 Finance, organizations can achieve significant business outcomes. The streamlined financial reporting processes reduce complexity and administrative overhead, leading to enhanced simplicity in managing financial data. Faster setup and maintenance of reporting systems contribute to improved operational efficiency. IT resources are freed up and finance professionals can focus on strategic tasks rather than manual reporting processes. 

Better Financial Insights and Informed Decision-Making 

Consistent and accurate reporting across environments provides reliable data for informed decision-making. The financial reporting add-in provides finance professionals access to precise insights, enabling strategic decisions driving business growth and success. With these enhanced reporting capabilities, organizations can better navigate the complexities of financial management and achieve their business objectives. 

Expanding Regional Availability 

The financial reporting add-in is now generally available. All regions supported by Dynamics 365 Finance will find access to these enhanced capabilities. Organizations worldwide can leverage the benefits of streamlined financial reporting, driving greater efficiency and accuracy in their financial operations. 

Get Started Today!

We believe these improvements will significantly enhance your financial reporting processes. We also believe they will deliver tangible business value and support your strategic financial goals. Visit the financial reporting documentation for more information and installation instructions. 

The post Enhancing and Streamlining Financial Reporting with Dynamics 365 Finance appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Introduction

Companies are increasingly facing regulatory and consumer requirements for traceability. Traceability ensures product compliance with regulations, captures sustainability metrics, and even demonstrates commitment to ethical sourcing and manufacturing practices. Traceability has long been critical for companies in industries like food and beverage, aerospace, and life sciences. Now, it’s also coming to the forefront for many emerging or developing industries.  

Traceability in Dynamics 365 enables your business to track product genealogy information and custody events. It can also collect data against unique identifiers such as serial numbers and batch numbers. Built on the Microsoft platform, it allows you to connect to any sources of traceability data across your business. This allows you to quickly access the data you need to support your genealogy requirements. The intuitive user interface provides multiple options to view the data and Copilot summaries to drive insights to actions.

With Traceability, businesses can reduce the time and cost of completing product recalls and pass regulatory audits with ease. Traceability helps businesses use insights to improve product quality and increase customer satisfaction. We are pleased to announce the Traceability add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is now available in preview. 

Benefits 

Improving product traceability in your business can help with the following areas:

Capabilities 

Traceability offers the following capabilities as part of the preview release:

Genealogy trace reporting 

One out-of-the-box reports offered with Traceability is the genealogy trace report. Search for any batch or serial number and view the multi-level bill of materials of the batch or serial item. The graphical interface drills in quickly to any of the specific components or view further details of relevant attributes and events tracked on the traced item. 

Where-used reporting with Copilot summary  

If companies need to recall products quickly and efficiently, the where-used reporting allows quick views of any items that have consumed a batch or serial component in your manufacturing process. Coming in Wave 2 2024, Copilot will provide summaries of where-used products, so you can assess the impact and scope of a recall much faster. With Copilot-summarized impacted goods and suggested next steps, QA managers will feel informed and competent because they can quickly view a list of impacted finished goods, evaluate the impact, and take the right action for those goods offline. 

Microsoft Platform architecture 

Traceability is built on the Microsoft platform, so it connectsto any product genealogy or traceability system in your network, like quality management systems, manufacturing execution systems, or third-party ERP systems. The backend uses a managed Azure Data Lake to retain the data, so you can rest easy knowing you’ll have long-term access.  

Native integration with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 

Traceability is part of Dynamics 365 SCM, so product genealogy data captured in Dynamics 365 is shared natively with Traceability. This now includes linking specific batch and serial components to batch and serial produced items with release of the tracked components feature in April 2024. Coming next is support for additional modules like Procurement, Sales, Asset management, Quality management, and more. 

Scenario Example

Contoso-EV, an electric vehicle manufacturer, recently received customer complaints about power attenuation in their latest model. After root cause analysis, the quality engineer identified that this issue was caused by a specific batch of batteries. The solution is to replace the battery pack. 

Quality engineers use the “Where-used” report in Traceability to search for vehicle identification numbers (VIN) associated with defective batteries. From sales order activity tracking, Traceability helps the quality engineer find cars sold to customers or dealerships as a subset of all cars sold by Contoso. This saves engineer from having to review every single car sold to identify which are impacted by the battery issue. The engineer uses the “Item trace” report to identify the vendor who sold the defective batteries and opens a non-conformance, ensuring the issue does not happen again. 

The quality engineer orchestrates a coordinated response involving the sales team to inform customers and dealerships of the issue, with Contoso-EV committing to complimentary repair services. With Traceability in Dynamics 365 SCM, Contoso rapidly identifies issues in their products and deploys the fix, improving customer satisfaction. 

Conclusion

The Traceability add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management heralds advanced insights, sophisticated data modeling, and robust track and trace storage capabilities. It seamlessly integrates with Dynamics 365 SCM and extends public API support for third-party integration. This innovation amplifies transparency and control, underpins regulatory compliance with centralized data management, and elevates customer satisfaction and trust in suppliers’ brand reputations.

Call to action

Please join the Yammer group to communicate with others and refer to help for detailed information. Any questions? Please contact Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Traceability for support.  

The post Introducing Traceability add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This post was co-authored by Michael Mendoza, Director of Service Transformation, Hitachi Solutions.

The era of AI came upon us quickly, and many business leaders are scrambling to determine AI strategies that provide the best way forward for their employees and customers alike. The 2024 Microsoft Work Trend Index shows that 79% of leaders agree that their company needs to adopt AI to stay competitive; however, 60% of leaders worry that their organization lacks a plan and a vision for implementing AI.¹

Many leaders in service organizations see AI as a boon for providing capabilities that can help them improve operations and serve customers better. After all, these days, high service quality is absolutely critical to driving greater revenue and customer satisfaction. But having a vision for AI and implementing that vision are two different things. Service leaders want to implement AI solutions in the most impactful way possible to ensure that service agents and field technicians alike feel confident using the solutions to help them be more productive throughout the day. And they also want to ensure that customers reap the benefits of these AI solutions as well through more positive and efficient interactions with agents and technicians and faster resolution times.

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Learn how to make your AI vision a reality in field service.

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The promise of AI for field service organizations

Enabling quick, first-time resolution of customer issues in the field is critical to ensuring the efficiency of service operations and providing the best possible experience for customers, to help build loyalty and grow revenue. Arming field technicians with intuitive, AI-powered solutions that combine capabilities such as workflow automation, scheduling algorithms, and mobility can significantly enhance service outcomes. Research shows that high performing field service organizations have been early to embrace AI and automation to help improve job performance—and 93% of mobile workers in high performing organizations also report job satisfaction as a significant benefit.²

A key area for modernizing field service and improving operational efficiency is automation. Over 60% of frontline workers like service agents and field technicians struggle with having to do repetitive or menial tasks that take time away from more meaningful work. According to a recent McKinsey study, service organizations have the potential to use AI-powered workflows to help automate tasks that currently take up to 70% of field service employees’ time.³ This means that both agents and technicians can get back time that lets them focus on servicing more customers.

And all of this is good news for business: more than 55% of GDP gains by 2030 are expected to be driven by improved labor productivity powered by AI.⁴ Smart service organizations know that strategic implementation of AI-powered solutions helps agents and technicians find information and experts, personalize service, and automate mundane tasks. So the question is: Where to begin?

Preparing field service for AI

The benefits of AI—improved service, increased efficiencies, and deeper business intelligence—to name a few—are clearly compelling. But successfully implementing AI solutions and making them part of the organization’s work culture requires careful planning and certain key steps.

We’ve identified five critical steps to help field service organizations prepare for implementing AI solutions in a way that benefits employees and customers alike.

Step 1: Focus on a framework for capturing and proving business value

Proving business value is absolutely critical to the success of any AI strategy. Field service leaders must identify their overall goals for adopting AI solutions, ensuring they are relevant and aligning them with the organization’s overall priorities for the business. They must consider the specific goals, whether they include optimizing processes for faster service resolution, improving customer experience by enhancing key customer touchpoints, or increasing overall revenue by servicing more customers. Then, they can identify their key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with these goals, such as resolution rates, customer satisfaction scores, or revenue goals.

Step 2: Evaluate the use cases for AI applicability

Once the high-level objectives are clear, field service leaders should take a closer look at daily operations to understand where AI solutions can most help them improve. For example: Do service agents waste a lot of time responding to and managing customer email, or searching for customers’ service history? What processes are they using to schedule field technicians? Do they need help automating scheduling and filling gaps for service? In the field, do technicians need better access to service manuals or technical experts that can help them resolve issues quickly?

Identifying these use cases can help field service leaders understand which areas could benefit from AI-powered solutions most quickly to gain quick wins, and which AI use cases might take more time and training to implement.

Step 3: Enable innovation and collaboration early on

The whole idea behind adopting AI-powered solutions for field service is to help break down information and communication siloes and improve processes to increase efficiency and keep customers happy. The right AI tools provide clear visibility into processes, surface experts and other critical contacts, and enable collaboration to resolve customer issues—all within the flow of work.

Step 4: Design for iteration, feedback, and agility

Empowering field service organizations with AI-powered, low-code solutions provides the opportunity for field service teams to develop and test new apps and processes quickly. This keeps the service organization agile and helps it do a better job of both meeting the demands of the business and improving customer experience. For example, the ability to tweak a new automated scheduling process based on real-time feedback from field technicians could show immediate benefit in helping technicians reach more customers and resolve more issues each day.

Step 5: Ensure training and enablement to drive adoption

While resistance to change can sometimes be a barrier, the latest Microsoft Work Trend Index shows that when it comes to AI, employees are ahead of employers when it comes to being ready. However, even the most exciting technologies can end up on the shelf—so to speak—once the novelty has worn off. That’s why field service leaders need a clear plan for driving adoption and training for AI solutions. Selecting an AI solution provider that provides training resources, along with developing internal champions within the field service organization, can help employees feel more confident about when and how to use AI solutions in their daily work.

Making the AI vision a reality

AI has the power to drive new levels of productivity and efficiency in field service, so it’s critical to take the right steps to ensure your organization has the most effective approach to adopting—and gaining the most value from—AI solutions. If you want to learn more about how to turn your AI vision into a reality, register for our upcoming webinar. 

Sources:

1 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part, May 2024

2 ZDNET, AI improves field service quality and customer experience, January 2023

3 McKinsey Digital, The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier, June 2023

4 PwC, Sizing the prize: What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalise?

The post 5 steps for becoming AI-ready in field service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.