Last week, we published part one of our blog series that details the Dynamics 365 release wave 1 plan. Next month, you will begin to gain access to new features across all of the applications associated with the platform. This blog will continue to explain key investment areas as well as top features that will be available starting this coming April.
Finance and Operations
Dynamics 365 Finance will drive automation and predictive analytics capabilities, which, in the end, leads to proactive management. Chief Financial Officers focus on far more than reporting and transactional mediation;, they look at business value, risk reduction, and finding new investment opportunities as well. They must spend time on action rather than simple daily activities. With the CFO in mind, Microsoft states that the following themes will be their main focus for the 2020 release wave 1 plan:
- Automation
- Predictive analytics
- Core capabilities
A few new features:
- Automatic collection task creation: The process of creating collection tasks automatically begins with your organization defining rules that are based on invoice attributes, including payment prediction, due dates, and amounts due. This allows collection agents to focus on important activities that provide value to your organization.
- Customer payment predictions: One challenge that financial institutes face is predicting when customers will pay invoices. This can lead to inaccurate cash flow forecasts and inefficient collection processes. With customer payment predictions, machine learning will predict when an invoice or sales order will be paid. It can help answer the following questions:
- When will an invoice or sales order be paid?
- What customers will pay on time or late?
- What invoices or orders will they pay?
- Electronic reporting advanced formula editor: You can use the advanced Electronic reporting formula editor to improve the configuration of Electronic reporting (ER) expressions. It’s powered by the Monaco editor and is browser-based. The following new features have been added to the formula editor:
- Code autoformatting
- IntelliSense
- Code completion
- Code navigation
- Code structuring
- Find and replace
- Data pasting
- Syntax colorization
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management has the power to help your business move from reactive to proactive operations. By using predictive insights and intelligence from AI and the Internet of Things (IoT), the platform can assist in planning, production, inventory, warehouse, and transportation management
to ensure you are maximizing operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability. The Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management April 2020 release includes:
- Planning
- Asset management
- IoT intelligence
- Sales and procurement
- Warehouse management
- Manufacturing
A few new features:
· Fixed assets integration with Asset Management lifecycle: This feature enhances the “acquire to retire” asset lifecycle with end-to-end process flows with the Fixed Assets module. This allows customers to acquire and install assets by enabling seamless process flows between the Fixed Assets and Asset Management modules. The financial impact to an asset during the “maintain phase” can be transferred back to the Fixed Asset module for relevant accounting treatment.
· Compare item price storage: Microsoft is introducing new functionality for comparing item price storage. The “Compare item price storage” page can adjust columns, and aggregates balances based on the configuration that the user provides. A filter can be added so that items with the largest net change in price are listed at the top of the grid. Microsoft is also introducing a new “compare item price” data entity. This enables users to export the output of a specific “compare item price” report to any format supported by data management.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Microsoft has announced a new Dynamics 365 application that unifies operational workflows to provide the visibility, collaboration, and insight needed to drive success across teams, from sales to finance. Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects your sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams within a single application to win more deals, accelerate delivery, empower employees, and maximize profitability. Since project-based businesses operate in a competitive market, this application was created to help unify teams around actionable data. Powered by the Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365 Project Operations focuses on:
- Business insights for leaders
- Sales enablement
- Resourcing
- Acceleration for project managers
- Team members
- Finance
A few new features:
- Project Management capabilities: This new application will represent comprehensive project management capabilities, such as resource bookings, sales, pricing, costing, approvals, and project actuals. This feature can help project managers plan ahead and estimate the financial impact of the changes they plan to make.E
- Enhanced Project Accounting capabilities: When the “remove project type dependency from project” feature is enabled, an inventory-based project will no longer have a type of fixed-price, time and material, cost, time, internal, or investment included. The project contract line will determine whether a project is “fixed-price” or “time and material,” and projects that don’t have a contract will track costs but not revenue.
Dynamics 365 Human Resources
Recently, Microsoft announced that Dynamics 365 Talent is now labeled as Dynamics 365 Human Resources. This application helps businesses empower and engage their workforce, provide modern benefits packages, and stay compliant. Self-service programs, like Dynamics 365 Human Resources, allow professionals to take better care of employees while optimizing workforce costs. The 2020 release wave 1 is focused on the following areas:
- Leave and absence
- Benefits management
- Data access via Common Data Service
- A few new features:
- Create leave rules to meet company and regulatory policies: This feature provides flexibility in the policies related to leave plans. HR can configure leave and absence to meet their specific company requirements. This feature also provides additional ways on how employees can accrue time off, expiration rules, carry-forward transfer rules, and adjust leave based on holiday corrections.
- Enhanced benefit plan configuration: Organizations now have the ability to manage their benefits that they offer to employees. The enhanced benefit plan configuration includes the following:
- Support for complex rate tables and nested tiers
- Easily create benefit bundles and programs
- Create flexible and robust eligibility rules in a simplified user experience
Dynamics 365 Commerce
Dynamics 365 Commerce delivers a comprehensive omnichannel solution that unifies back-office, call center, and e-commerce experiences to provide a delightful shopping journey for customers across the different touchpoints. The investments in the 2020 release wave 1 empower the different commerce personas to be highly productive in their tasks by helping them serve consumers better, improve outreach, and efficiently run operations across the value chain.
A few new features:
- Auto-charges improvements to support fees based on channel: This feature allows auto-charges to be defined by the Commerce channel. The Commerce organizational model hierarchy will be used to allow headquarters users who have the “Advanced auto charges” configuration key enabled to be able to define additional filters on their auto-charges table by Commerce channels.
- Efficiency and reliability of data synchronization and storage: Microsoft’s Channel Data Exchange, or CDX, component synchronizes data between Commerce Channel Databases. Several updates have been implemented that solve issues regarding data unavailability, slowness on other components, or impact on database data. This feature contains several independent improvements in the following areas:
- Improve data package generation in headquarters
- Improve data package when applying to a channel database
- Reduce the number of required full synchronizations and, when unavoidable, minimize the performance impact
- Multiple data optimizations, including master data stripping at the channel level, updating DB statistics, and indexing during synchronization
For additional details regarding the Dynamics 365 2020 release wave 1 plan, head to Microsoft’s website. If you have any technical questions for our team or are a Microsoft partner looking to collaborate, feel free to reach out! We have an experienced group of professionals who would love to assist you with any challenge you are facing.
