to act on insights across the entire journey, build lifelong relationships, and create trustworthy selling and service experiences that are consistent, personalized, and always on.
Microsoft business applications are a complete set of intelligent modules that support the business processes of an organization. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on the Microsoft Power Platform, which is constantly evolving. A great example of a successful project implemented using the power of Dynamics 365 applications and Power Platform is shown here:
Michel (Miki) Tabakovic, Country Sales Manager, IKEA Sweden
“D365 and Power Platform gave us a platform for a better experience both for customers and co-workers at IKEA Sweden, giving us the possibility to be part of the total customer journey. We have reduced manual work with the use of the Power Platform. With D365 MVP up and running, we manage to capture a lot of customer insight on behavior and user journey. Now we can ensure that customers feel that IKEA Sweden sees me and for the co-workers that we see the customer. That is a prerequisite to secure a long-term partnership between IKEA and the customer. It allows us to adapt between digital and physical meeting when all depended on the needs of the customer.”
Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers analysis through built-in dashboards, reports, and views, and also allows the extension through Power BI and other reporting tools. You can tailor the platform to your company needs as Power Platform allows users to extend Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure. You can build your applications and share your data across modules easily, and at the same time take advantage of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics built-in features.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications provide value and impact to organizations through:
Engage customers: improve customer engagement, collect valuable information, personalize your customer journey and experience
Improve business processes for sales, marketing, customer service, inventory management, supply chain management, purchases, manufacturing, retail, and more
Optimize operations, reduce costs, and increment your efficiency
Data integration for all modules
Channel integration
Smart actions through built-in Artificial Intelligence scenarios
Flexible, easy to scale, and adapts to changes
Easy to adopt, supports innovation, and accelerates digital transformation
Empower employees: engage and attract the best talent and provide your people with modern tools
Transform products and services: support innovation, providing data to detect new market opportunities
Integrating your business data from Microsoft Dynamics 365 with Power BI, you can have a profound analysis of trends, strengths, and weaknesses of your business. This enables you to produce products, predict an efficient pipeline conversion rate, set personalized offers and sales promotions, and enable a better decision-making process for your sales, business, and operation. We know the importance of data and in today's conditions we are leveraging the intelligence of data to make informed business decisions.
Data Platform: The Secret Sauce
Within the digital transformation strategy, the data is an illustrious citizen. We live in the data age, generating about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. Data is the center of the business and powers the insights that can drive the actions of tomorrow.
To compete and be successful in today's market, it is not enough to simply sell products to our clients. Personalization is a key factor for consumers. Examples of this can be recognized at companies like YouTube or Netflix, which offer content to consumers based on their preferences, or e-commerce sites like Amazon, which make offers to customers based on past behavior. Finally, these are data collection platforms that will be used in the future to improve your value propositions or the customer experience, or perhaps to generate new products and services.
Therefore, data management is vital for organizations and there is a recognition that data is an asset and hence it should be managed in the same manner as financial assets; that is, for financial asset management we have accounting policies and accounting systems, so we should also have policies (data governance and appropriate tools, such as DWH/Data lake), proper management of metadata, and ensure data lineage. Businesses need to capture, analyze, predict, present, and report data. To be effective and efficient, data management must be part of the core strategy of the solution that we implement for users and clients.
The data originates from different applications, devices, channels, and services. The volume of data grows day by day. Normally the data is stored in different providers, technologies, and systems, in such a way that it is extremely difficult to integrate them and to have a consolidated database, which is very costly in time and resources.
Microsoft Dataverse was created that delivers a built-in low-code data platform and provides relational data storage, rich data types, enterprise grade governance, and a one-click solution deployment. Microsoft Project Oakdale is a data service in SaaS mode, which is easy to use, easy to manage, complies with legal regulations, is secure, and is globally scalable. As part of the Microsoft Power Platform (Figure 2.1), it requires no or little code to be written, so it can easily be used by everyone from knowledge workers to professional developers through Microsoft Teams. The new functionality empowers citizen developers and responds to business needs in a rapid and cost-effective way. During the COVID-19 pandemic, where certain areas of businesses needed to transform rapidly, Microsoft Project Oakdale through Microsoft Teams was a quick and rapid solution.
FIGURE 2.1 Microsoft Power Platform
Source: © Microsoft. Used with permission from Microsoft Corporation.
At the time of writing this book, Microsoft has announced that Common Data Service, the sophisticated and secure backbone that powers Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, has been renamed as Microsoft Dataverse. Another key part of that strategy is Microsoft Dataverse for Teams—the essential subset of Dataverse capabilities included as a powerful, built-in data platform for millions of Teams users at no additional cost.2
The combination of Microsoft's Dataverse, Power Platform, and Teams enables businesses to address complex and real problems with a low-code platform (Figure 2.2).
Business Process: Simplification, Standardization, and Automation
Digital transformation is about how you reinvent and innovate your products, services, optimize your processes, and empower your people to create value for your customers and maintain a competitive advantage in a digital-first world. Normally in companies, there are dozens or hundreds of business processes. Many of these business processes present opportunities for improvement, either because they are slow or obsolete or because they do not collect all the data currently required, they do not involve all stakeholders, or the software that supports them is obsolete and the data is stored in information silos. There are business processes that do not
