Posted by George Delp
| Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers a wide range of business applications. When most people think of Dynamics 365, they think of the traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions. They are, of course, a huge part of what Dynamics 365 has to offer, but there is so much more. Here is a quick rundown of the Dynamics 365 universe. |  |
Customer Engagement Applications
Customer Engagement can be thought of as what is commonly referred to as CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, and includes the following components:
- Marketing – A marketing automation solution that integrates with Sales. Marketing includes expected capabilities such as lead scoring and email tracking. It also includes event management, online surveys, LinkedIn integration and web portals.
- Sales – Sales is all about lead, account, contact and opportunity management. Tight integration with Outlook makes tracking your appointments and emails easy. Sales also includes the ability to set up marketing campaigns so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of your sales efforts.
- Customer Service – Customer Service is great for inbound support call centers and help desks. You can create cases, record interactions, create contracts with service level agreements (SLAs), maintain a knowledge base for easy issue resolution and manage and monitor productivity using dashboards.
- Field Service – More service! Think of Field Service as Customer Service’s blue-collar cousin. Field Service is centered around work orders instead of cases and includes scheduling, communication and dispatch tools to help manage your mobile service agents. You can also track customer assets, schedule preventative maintenance, track inventory, track time and generate invoices in the field.
- Project Service Automation – Project Service Automation, or PSA, helps organizations manage and deliver project-based services. Project planning, estimating and scheduling are core capabilities. You can also forecast and allocate resources, enter time remotely for billing back from the home office and use interactive dashboards to help monitor all of your projects.
ERP Applications
ERP applications are the backbone of an organization’s information systems. They provide the core transactional functionality that businesses need. All of the Dynamics ERP solutions work well and integrate with the Dynamics CRM offerings.
- Finance & Operations – Finance and Operations, or FO, is Microsoft’s Tier 1 ERP offering. It is the spiritual successor to Dynamics AX (Axapta) and offers a wide range of functionality covering everything from financial management to manufacturing and everything in between. It is intended for large, multi-location if not multi-national organizations.
- Talent – Talent is an offshoot of Finance & Operations Human Resources module and is intended to help companies better manage their staffing through the streamlining of record keeping and process automation. Talent can be used standalone from Finance & Operations. Talent covers the full spectrum of the employee life cycle from hire to retire and offers tools to especially help with the talent acquisition process.
- Retail – Retail is another offshoot of Finance & Operations and like Talent, can be used standalone without Finance & Operations. Retail is all about point of sale and unified multi-channel commerce and is built to handle the requirements of large, multi-location retail organizations. Channel management, loyalty programs and advanced analytics are some of the standard features included with Retail.
- Business Central – Business Central is the small, medium and corporate (SMC) ERP option. Where Finance and Operations implementations easily get into the millions, Business Central implementations are most often in the low to mid hundreds (of thousands). Business Central is based on Dynamics NAV, which was based on Navision. Business Central offers a complete suite of rich functionality, including Financial Management, Warehouse Management, Manufacturing, Projects, Service, Human Resources and Customer Relationship Management.
Complementary Applications
Some of the apps listed here require one of the Dynamics ERP and CRM applications and some of the can work stand alone. In any case this is where Microsoft pushes the edge of technology. This is the must-read section of the blog.
- Gamification – Included with Sales Enterprise (there are two versions of Sales, a basic version and one that includes all of the cool addons like Gamification), Gamification helps to foster a healthy, competitive environment for your sales team. You can create multiple types of games, broadcast leaderboards on TVs around the office, and in general, have a lot of fun!
- Social Engagement – Social Engagement helps you monitor social channels so that you are aware of what is being said about your company and have the tools to respond and communicate to your customers effectively through various social channels.
- Voice of the Customer – Voice of the Customer is a survey tool designed to be used with the CRM apps. It lets you create surveys that your customers can take on their phones, tablets or computers and tallies and stores the data with their records in the applicable CRM application.
- Artificial Intelligence – Artificial Intelligence, or AI apps are offered for Customer Service (Customer Service Insights), Social Engagement (Market Insights) and Sales. Customer Service Insights uses natural language understanding to group your cases into topics to provide insight into emerging trends. Likewise, with Market Insights, Microsoft AI will analyze what is being said, group things together and help you identify trends that require attention. Sales AI offers capabilities like predictive lead scoring and relationship analytics, such as identifying who knows who across your database. Introductions and referrals make a sales person’s life so much better. AI is a very powerful tool worthy of its own blog.
- Mixed Reality – You can also think of this as augmented reality. Using a device such as a Microsoft HoloLens, a field service tech could put on the device, work on a piece of equipment with which they are not familiar, share what they are seeing with an expert at the home office (or anywhere in the world really), and get guidance on how to proceed, including real time hand written diagrams, technical documents, etc. All while having two hands free to perform the task at hand.
- PowerApps – Earlier I mentioned that all the ERP and CRM applications work well together. This is because everything works with something Microsoft calls the Common Data Model. The Common Data Model establishes a reference framework for everything a business might need, from customer records to invoices to time sheets. Using this Common Data Model Microsoft applications all have a consistency that allows for easy integration. PowerApps allows you to design forms and applications that access the Common Data Model, and therefore can access the Dynamics CRM and ERP applications. You can also use PowerApps standalone. For example, you can create forms to enter data, update data and view data. PowerApps forms are responsive, meaning that you can design a form once and have it work on desktops, tablets and phones. PowerApps often allows you to bridge the gap when an out of the box solution meets only 90 to 95% of their requirements.
- Flow – Where PowerApps is about entering, updating and viewing data, Flow is a workflow engine that pushes data around. At a high level it is a trigger based tool where if A happens then do B. Like PowerApps, you can use Flow with Dynamics 365 applications or stand alone. An simple example Flow would be to monitor Twitter for references to your company, and when Flow sees one, to send you an email alert.
- Business Intelligence – What we are really talking about here is Power BI, Microsoft’s very flexible data analysis and reporting tool. All of the Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM applications are designed to work with Power BI “out of the box”, often with Power BI reports embedded right into those applications. What I like most about Power BI is the capability to create custom visualizations. Any possible way that you might imagine visualizing your data, chances are you will be able to do it with Power BI. Geographic heat maps have always been one of my favorites as I love to see where across the country we are having the best sales. Check out this listing of 175+ Power BI visualizations available for download on Microsoft AppSource.
This list is not 100% complete and everything here is subject to change, but it should provide you with a solid understanding of everything that is available in the wide world of what we call Dynamics 365.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us!