As enterprises are asked to manage increasingly complex business processes and data environments, context-aware AI summarization by Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 streamlines operations by synthesizing data from multiple sources across Supply Chain Management, Finance, Commerce, and Human Resources. By delivering clear, actionable insights from ERP data, this generative AI feature eliminates context-switching and allows users to make better decisions faster.

Transformative AI summarization in Dynamics 365

Copilot generative AI features are revolutionizing the user experience in Supply Chain Management, Finance, Commerce, and Human Resources. Insights that used to require literally dozens of clicks, searches, and views in multiple windows—and a lot of deep thinking about complex data—are now presented to the right user, at the right time, automatically. Let’s take a closer look at how Copilot aggregates data from multiple sources and displays it in easily digestible and context-aware summaries.

Vendor summary streamlines understanding of vendor performance and financials

What do we mean by “context-aware”? One meaning is that Copilot summarizes data based on the user’s role to deliver real-time, role-specific insights. Take the vendor summary, for example. Traditionally, procurement managers had to navigate multiple forms to understand vendor performance. Copilot summaries streamline these insights by providing quick access to crucial information, such as active contracts, purchase orders, late deliveries, and overdue payments. For accounts payable teams, however, the vendor summary presents essential financial details about a vendor. For both roles, the vendor summary enables faster, data-driven decisions for better vendor interactions.

Sales order and purchase order summaries pinpoint critical items in open orders

Another perspective on “context-aware” is AI summarization based on task. Consider purchase and sales orders. Procurement and sales teams often spend significant time following up on open orders. Getting a comprehensive overview or pinpointing lines that need attention can be challenging, because the necessary data is typically spread across multiple forms. Copilot summaries consolidate the information, enabling users to easily identify critical items.

It’s not just about summarizing data, though. AI summarization also facilitates quicker action on next steps. Copilot’s summary includes convenient one-click filtering options, allowing users to swiftly access the information they need to act.

Customer summary streamlines insights by role for more effective customer relationships

When it comes to customer information, “context-aware” refers to everything that creates a relationship between an organization and its customers—information that’s often found in multiple, disparate tables, reports, and modules. Copilot addresses the challenges faced by roles such as accounts receivable agents, sales order agents, and customer account managers, who need comprehensive and role-specific information about customers that’s often scattered across multiple systems. For example, while accounts receivable teams need quick access to open invoices, sales order teams require details on open orders and shipments. Copilot consolidates all relevant data into a single, context-aware summary that’s specific to each role, allowing agents and account managers to tailor their interactions with customers, strengthen relationships, and enhance operational efficiency.

Warehouse worker home screen brings warehouse teams up to speed quickly

“Context-aware” can also refer to a user’s surroundings and situation. Warehouse start-of-shift stand-up meetings can miss important updates, and they don’t cover changes that happen throughout the day. Copilot’s dynamic operational summary on the Warehouse Management home screen brings warehouse workers up to speed at the start of their shifts and keeps them on top of the situation as they go about their day, helping them quickly adapt to changes and ensure daily goals are met.

Workflow history summary streamlines review and approval of invoices and expense reports

AI summarization streamlines examination of workflows by providing a concise overview of recent actions and comments, allowing approvers to quickly act without navigating through separate detail screens. Copilot summaries apply to workflows in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Finance, Commerce, and Human Resources, aiding review and approval processes and supporting informed decisions for things like vendor invoices, time-off requests, and expense reports.

Product preview summary consolidates product details for quick consumption

Procurement managers typically must navigate multiple forms to gather product details such as name, description, dimensions, hierarchy, life cycle state, and release policy. Copilot consolidates this information and other key product attributes in a single, concise summary, making these details quick and easy to consume.

Product detail summary streamlines inventory management

When a warehouse manager views the product detail page, Copilot’s summary focuses on relevant information that would take multiple clicks to find, such as on-hand inventory levels, purchase information like main vendor, and batch numbers that are expiring soon.

Employee workspace summary makes leave management easier for both HR and employees

An organization’s success relies on both employees and customers. Effective time-off management is crucial for employees to make informed decisions and for the organization to optimize time-off utilization and manage financial liabilities from unused leave. Time-off information is scattered across multiple screens in the employee self-service portal. Copilot consolidates key details like vacation and sick leave balances and potential forfeitures due to policy, and includes a link to submit leave requests, all in one summary view.

Retail statement summary provides insights about risky transactions across multiple stores

Physical stores send cash-and-carry transactions to Dynamics 365 Commerce for inventory and financial updates. The store operations team must ensure proper posting, but identifying pending transactions can be difficult across multiple stores. Summaries of posted and unposted retail statements highlight stores needing attention and flag risky transactions like returns without receipts or price overrides. Brief error summaries for failed statements aid in quick resolution, enhancing store management efficiency.

Merchandise workflow summary streamlines managing product configurations

For retail merchandisers, the challenge lies in managing complex product configurations without errors. Copilot addresses this challenge by streamlining merchandising workflows, offering a clear summary of settings, automating data validation, and providing a risk preview to anticipate issues. Here, context-aware AI summarization enhances efficiency, reduces the risk of lost sales, and drives growth.

More benefits of context-aware AI summarization of ERP data

Beyond the specific benefits we described earlier, Copilot summaries in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Finance, Commerce, and Human Resources enhance user experience and operational efficiency in multiple ways.

• Enhanced productivity: With key data points automatically summarized, users spend less time analyzing vast datasets and can focus on strategic decision-making and core activities.
• Proactive problem-solving: With real-time summaries, users can anticipate challenges and address them proactively, improving business agility and resilience.
• Improved accuracy and insight: Copilot highlights critical information and trends, reducing the risk of human error in interpreting complex data. Analysis is more accurate and insightful, crucial for effective decision-making.
• Customized user experiences: Each summarization feature is tailored to the specific needs of different roles within an organization, ensuring that every user receives the most relevant and actionable insights.
• Seamless integration: AI features integrate seamlessly into your existing Dynamics 365 framework, providing a smooth user experience without the need for extensive setup or training.
• Scalable decision support: Whether for small tasks or large-scale strategic decisions, Copilot summaries meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, scenarios, and requirements.

These benefits collectively contribute to a more streamlined, efficient, and informed ERP environment, setting the stage for more advanced AI features to come.

Introducing generative AI responsibly

Integrating generative AI into ERP products presents challenges. It requires ensuring that the AI features are reliable and robust enough for mission-critical business settings. It also requires building customer trust in the AI capabilities. Our vision is an autonomous ERP system that automates and optimizes business processes with minimal human intervention. However, this is a journey we’re embarking on together to instill confidence in the results and encourage greater adoption over time.

Our approach is to gradually introduce low-risk AI features that provide immediate benefits and time savings, gather user feedback, and build excitement. This way, we can improve the AI features based on user needs and business operations, laying the foundation for more advanced AI features in the future. We prioritize the safe deployment and continuous improvement of AI features in our ERP suite and are leading the way for responsible and impactful integration of AI in the ERP landscape.

Ensuring the ethical use of AI technology

Microsoft is committed to the ethical deployment of AI technologies. Through our Responsible AI practices, we ensure that all AI-powered features in Dynamics 365 adhere to stringent data privacy laws and ethical AI usage standards, promoting transparency, fairness, and accountability.

Learn more about AI summarization in Dynamics 365

Interested in learning more about the power of AI summarization to transform your business processes with unparalleled efficiency and insight? Here’s how you can dive deeper:

• Watch a brief video demonstrating the new AI summarization feature.
• Read the documentation to understand the specifics of each Copilot summarization feature:
  • AI summaries with Copilot in Supply Chain Management
  • Customer page summary in Finance
  • Enable Copilot statement posting summaries – Commerce | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
  • Workflow history summary in Finance
  • Employee self service leave summary – Human Resources | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
• Engage with other Dynamics 365 users in our community forums to learn from their experiences and share your own.

Not yet a Dynamics 365 customer? Take a tour and get a free trial.

The post AI summarization in Dynamics 365 synthesizes and simplifies complex data appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re excited to announce unlimited application installs when starting with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an improvement to our license definition and installation management experience. As of June 30, 2024 we’ve removed application installation limits for Customer Insights–Journeys (real-time journeys only) and Customer Insights–Data. Previous application installations had restrictions of four per base license of the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license launched September 2023, and one if using the older, standalone Marketing license.  

Unlimited application installations: What it means for you

 After June 30, 2024, as an admin, you have unlimited application installs with Customer Insights – Journeys (real-time only) and Customer Insights – Data on as many production and sandbox environments in the Power Platform Admin Center as you’d like. Admins with a paid Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license on their tenant (i.e. production or sandbox environments) will no longer see the application installation counter and limits. See details on how to install Customer Insights. Customer Insights –Journeys, application install limits still apply to additional installations of legacy outbound marketing solutions. (This accommodates the high cost of the background services.) For customers using only real-time Journeys, there is no installation limit.

• Access the installation management page by going to admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com -> Resources -> Dynamics 365 apps -> Dynamics 365 Customer Insights or Marketing -> … -> Manage. Because it’s no longer restricted, the meter doesn’t display the count of paid application installations you’re entitled to or have used. However, trials are still limited to one per license.
• If your tenant has used outbound marketing solutions, you see a meter monitoring your entitled and installed instances of outbound marketing. We count outbound marketing instances based on the previous application logic. For Dynamics 365 Marketing standalone licenses and application add-on licenses you get one install per license. For the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights combined license launched September 2023, you get four outbound marketing installs per base license. Learn more about who can enable outbound marketing.

Enhancing your applications installation experience

While making this change, we took the opportunity to simplify the user experience further with the following small changes:

• We removed the little gray “i” icon with the environment URL. Find the environment URL in the green checkmark.

• If your tenant does not have any Dynamics 365 Customer Insights or Marketing licenses, you see a view which offers you links to learn how to buy.

We hope these license definition and user experience improvements simplify your experience installing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

The post Announcing unlimited application installs in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Building a successful sales team starts with collaboration and insights. To boost performance across the sales journey, business development professionals must be empowered to engage across internal teams to better connect with customers and easily interact with data and insights. Like any organizational transformation, adapting teams to a new way of selling requires coordination between people, process, and technology—a challenging effort for any organization.

So, how does one of the largest professional services organizations in the world—with almost 400,000 people across 700 offices in 150 countries—transform and connect a sales organization that spans nearly every corner of the globe?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Optimize your organization and transform your sales processes.

Learn more

For Ernst & Young LLP (EY), one of the largest professional services member firms worldwide, its sales transformation journey included Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. EY began its extensive rollout of Dynamics 365 Sales with the simple mission to deliver exceptional client service. By equipping more than 100,000 EY member firm professionals across the globe with an intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) system that is integrated across marketing, sales, delivery, and insights, EY can help its clients and itself maintain a competitive edge across markets.

The sales system also sets the stage for enhanced seller productivity with Microsoft 365, including the ability to access and collaborate on customer opportunities within the flow of work from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. And Microsoft Copilot capabilities are expected to help sellers work more efficiently and improve customer experiences with email assistance, personalized sales content creation, AI-generated insights, and recommendations for next steps.

Breaking down barriers for a globally-connected team

To help their clients solve their most complex problems, EY needed a digital sales foundation that helped enable sellers to be connected, proactive, and insightful with a deeper understanding of account and opportunity data. A collaborative sales system can empower teams to help deliver consistently exceptional client services and continuously adapt to rapid changes across each client organization, industries, and entire markets.

That’s why EY turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and the latest advancements in AI to both unify and transform sales processes with a goal to improve cross-team collaboration and deepen connections with clients.

Led by a need for a more integrated approach to client relationship building focused on client value, EY identified the people who would gain the most from a global sales transformation. For example, EY pursuit leaders, who are dedicated to leading complex client relationships, could benefit from deeper insights into client and industry issues to deliver the right set of solutions when pursuing opportunities. Client-serving teams could also benefit from a system that provided targeted, meaningful information and insights, helping them to create winning proposals in less time.

In 2022, EY and Microsoft got to work on an architecture design and implementation plan for a sales platform that bridged both existing solutions and a modern, future-proof platform for insights, automation, collaboration, productivity, and reporting. These transformative solutions build on a years-long commitment to power growth and innovation of EY on Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

A new way to power a global organization

EY client-serving teams around the world are standardizing sales processes on a single, unified customer relationship management and productivity system. On this new, flexible platform, with the ability to integrate third-party applications and adapt new technologies, teams can leverage both tools they currently depend on and leverage the latest in Dynamics 365 and AI enhancements.

For example, teams will continue to manage engagements in SAP ECC, but the integration with Dynamics 365 Sales will help ensure a more seamless handoff of crucial information to delivery. This allows EY to take advantage of Microsoft capabilities, such as Microsoft Power BI data visualizations, Outlook, and Teams for enhanced collaboration and AI and automation features to streamline processes.

“We’ve brought the opportunity management process closer to where we spend our time—in Outlook, in Teams, and on the go while on mobile.”

Kris Kuty, Global Product Manager, Ernst & Young LLP

Early signs of success

Only months after deployment, EY reports that the new sales platform is making a real impact on the way they do business. Some of the results include:

• An enhanced CRM solution that has connected marketing, sales, and service processes for better collaboration between teams.
• Greater access to intelligence and insights, enabling client-serving teams, financial forecasters, and business planners to be more efficient and knowledgeable, equipped to make better decisions faster, and, ultimately, make deeper connections with clients.
• Standardized sales processes and unified views across accounts, using a globally consistent and streamlined system that includes a mobile Power App, Outlook, and Teams, with integrations to key EY systems for master data, risk management, and enterprise reporting. EY sales, service, and finance teams can access the information they need when they need it, right in the flow of work.
• Improved pipeline visibility, giving EY client-serving teams a clear view of client pursuits across their broad services, supported by contextual insights into each sales contact and activity.
• Tighter team collaboration, leading to more connected peer conversations and better outcomes for their clients’ most complex challenges.

Moving forward, the EY sales excellence journey will include AI and Copilot. To reinforce Dynamics 365 Sales as a key enabler for client serving individuals they expect to:

• Provide AI-based recommendations for client communications and next best topics utilizing historical interactions as well as industry insights and trends.
• Analyze seller behavior to recommend new ways of working.
• Provide AI-driven recommendations for deal scoring and lead prioritization.

“We are extremely excited about what is coming and what is possible. We’ve already kicked off with Copilot and the possibilities with AI are extremely attractive as we aim to serve our clients even better. We have our integrated platform in place, with Dynamics 365 Sales at the center. Now we can build on this and continue the transformation.”

Jeremy Hallett, Global Markets Enablement Leader, Ernst & Young LLP

Better positioned to design and deliver transformative cloud solutions to organizations worldwide

The EY transformation story showcases how Dynamics 365 Sales can help complex, regulated, multi-national organizations inspire a unified, customer-focused global sales operation—empowered to move business forward with a shared vision and digital toolkit. And, as one of Microsoft’s top systems integrators, EY is well positioned to help deliver that value to organizations everywhere.

“Putting Dynamics 365 and Copilot in the hands of more than 100,000 EY member firm professionals showcases how modern architectures and the latest advancements in AI create competitive advantage. Part of embarking down this journey was to demonstrate for our clients that it can be done for even the most complex global enterprises. The time is now to create new ways of working with AI-powered transformations.”

Jim Little, Global Microsoft Alliance Leader, Ernst & Young LLP

The EY organization can help complex organizations find their own path to differentiate with Dynamics 365 and AI and surface the right data for personalized customer experiences, critical business insights, and operational agility. Applying direct learnings from their global implementation of Dynamics 365 Sales, as well as day-to-day experiences using the technology, will bring a wealth of additional perspective, insights, and guidance to every engagement.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales, as well as the EY Microsoft Alliance. 

The post Ernst & Young reinvents sales globally with Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Being able to efficiently and effectively manage your resources is key to Dynamics 365 Field Service. Today, we introduce a new Crew Allocation Tool to streamline the process of making single-day membership changes to all your crews.

We’ve heard from users that it can be tedious to manually go into crew records, take a resource out for a day, add a new resource, and reset it all at the end of the day. Now, when a technician is on leave, a piece of equipment is out of service, or you need to add some additional support for a particularly intensive day, making the necessary crew reassignments will be a seamless, intuitive experience.  

Accessing the New Tool 

To find the new Crew Allocation Tool, you’ll first head to the Resources page. There you can either navigate to a view with your desired crews or just select up to fifteen crews you want to work with. You’ll see a new button in the control bar titled Crew Allocation that will open the tool. 

Making Single Day Membership Changes 

When you enter the new tool, you’ll see your selection of crews displayed in a grid along with all the members that are working that day. You’ll also see all the bookings that the crew has for the day listed for easy reference. To move a crew member from one crew to another is as simple as dragging and dropping one or more of these resources from their original crew to the target crew. You can also make your resource selection and use the Assign to crew button to select a new crew.  

Of course, sometimes the resource you want to add to a crew is not already on another. In this case, you can use the Available Resources Panel. This section of the tool, which is based on the views you already have defined from the Resources page, is where you will find any resources working that day who are not already on a crew. From here, you can also select one or more resources, and move them to a crew either by dragging and dropping or the Assign to crew button.  

The last kind of single day membership change is removing a resource from a crew. Let’s say you know a particular resource is booked up with individual training that day and won’t be able to contribute to crew activities. You can simply select that resource (or more than one resource) and click on the Remove button. Additionally, if you want to start from a clean slate, you can click Remove all and start all your crews from scratch.  

Updating Schedules 

Once you save your changes, the crew tool updates your crews and cascades your existing crew bookings. First your membership changes will be saved, with new resources being added to a crew, and removed resources being taken out for a full day in the target crew’s time zone. Then, the impacted resources’ schedules will be updated with appropriate bookings and cancellations. This phase will happen in the background, so you’re free to go on to your other daily tasks while the booking changes cascade.  

Now that all the booking changes are cascaded, your crews’ schedules will be up to date with the latest memberships and bookings.

This also means that if you create a new booking for the crew on the active day, it will populate to your new resource’s schedule like any other crew member.  

We’re excited to roll this new Crew Allocation Tool streamlines process tool out to all Field Service users and look forward to hearing about your experience. 

Explore more on Dynamics 365 Field Service documentation and share your feedback within the Field Service product or via our ideas portal. Your input drives continuous improvement for enhanced operational performance. 

The post Dynamics 365 Field Service announces the new Crew Allocation Tool, which enables the “Morning Shuffle”  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Azure Application Insights is now our comprehensive solution for end-to-end conversation diagnostics. As part of this advancement, we are phasing out unified routing diagnostics and integrating its capabilities into Application Insights. 

Key dates

• Disclosure date: May 9, 2024
  We sent communications to affected customers that we are deprecating unified routing diagnostics in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
• End of support: July 1, 2024
  After this date, no new diagnostics records will be generated for conversations/records routed.
• End of life: July 15, 2024
  After this date, unified routing diagnostics will be taken out of service.

Next steps

We strongly encourage customers to leverage Azure Application Insights, which will be enriched with all the conversation and routing diagnostics related events. Application Insights offers a flexible and cost-effective alternative with the added advantage of customization to meet business needs. We aim to iteratively improve diagnostic capabilities of conversation lifecycle events. This ensures reliability and alignment with our commitment to cost-efficiency and user-centric innovation. Learn more about conversation diagnostics in Azure Application Insights. 

Please contact your Success Manager, FastTrack representative, or Microsoft Support if you have any additional questions. 

The post Transition from unified routing diagnostics to Azure Application Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.