CHAPTER 1
Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Machine Learning

INTRODUCTION TO DYNAMICS 365

There was a time when businesses used individual applications to perform several business functions like marketing, field service, project service, customer service, operations, and finance. No one ever imagined how difficult and time-consuming it would be to navigate from one application to another and maintain large amounts of data that were growing every second.

For digital transformation to happen, we needed an intelligent system that can be molded to all businesses and has the agility to evolve and expand as the business changes. Such a system can consolidate individual apps that you use for customer service, sales, or field service; can be easily deployed and customized; and, most of all, can provide a unified experience.

Here comes Microsoft Dynamics 365. It is a set of cloud-based business applications, such as components of customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), along with productive applications and artificial intelligence tools, all together in one platform. Dynamics 365 brought an end to information silos between the CRM and ERP, all because of a shared business database known as the Common Data Model, which helps you to overcome obstacles between critical business platforms and make your data work together.

Microsoft Business Applications

Who doesn't want to envision the future of their business? And what's better than relying on customers for the transformation of your business? Understanding what customers want is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses today. To understand what customers want requires focusing on these four transformational outcomes:

1. Empowering employees. Dynamics 365 empowers employees by giving them tools and actionable insights with the knowledge and information required to operate in real time.
2. Engaging customers. Dynamics 365 improves customer engagement by enabling employees to connect with potential customers proactively and regularly capture customer feedback to provide a personalized service experience.
3. Optimizing operations. Dynamics 365 provides a central source of intelligence that offers instant knowledge of your global workforce and supply chain with the flexibility to collaborate with various devices anytime to manage operations effectively and build innovative products.
4. Modifying the products or services in the business model. Dynamics 365 streamlines all your business processes and analyzes your business requirements to help you achieve your desired goal.

These four areas give an organization a comprehensive view to provide a standard rich data model that can consistently work across all your business applications to connect customers, products, people, and data.

Customer Relationship Management

As the name suggests, a traditional customer relationship management system focuses on developing and maintaining relationships by meeting the needs of the customers. It uses advanced technologies to organize, automate, and integrate different business components such as marketing, sales, and customer service. But how is Dynamics 365 CRM different from others?

• The significant difference between a Dynamics 365 CRM and the others is that it is a cloud-based platform that enables users to access it.
• All the different kinds of apps are integrated with this system. It supports all Dynamics 365 apps and Microsoft apps, including Office 365, Excel, and Power Board, and enables you to use different apps at the same time without any problems or delays.

Let's move on to the Dynamics 365 CRM applications:

• Dynamics 365 Sales. Dynamics 365 Sales provides data and digital tools to your sales teams to turn relationships into revenue. It empowers the sales team to build relationships; evolves using adaptable, scalable, and easy-to-use sales solutions; and maximizes productivity with intelligent automation.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Dynamics 365 Customer Service ensures that your team gets the right tools and streamlined data in a unified platform to intelligently handle requests and complex issues, to deliver authenticated personalized experience, and to earn customer loyalty for life.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service. Dynamics 365 Field Service is a proactive application that enables your technicians to monitor every piece of customer equipment remotely. If any issue arises with the equipment, the technician proactively takes action to resolve the issue by scheduling the appointment with the customer for on-site service, thus empowering your organization to deliver maximum quality service with a seamless end-to-end experience.
• Dynamics 365 Marketing Dynamics 365 Marketing is an application that helps you to plan, automate, and monitor all the prospects that can turn into qualified marketing leads. It enables you to automate marketing processes such as email campaigns, prioritize your leads, design interactive online forms, generate and score leads, share information seamlessly across teams, and much more all in one place.

Enterprise Resource Planning

Businesses need an ERP system to manage core business operations and improve data perceptibility around finance data management and manufacturing. How is the Dynamics 365 ERP system different from others? Dynamics 365 has connected both CRM and ERP systems to reduce information silos. By integrating CRM and ERP systems, it saves employees the trouble of having to make data entries on both systems individually. Dynamics 365 provides connectors that enable both systems to communicate with each other.

Let's investigate Dynamics 365 ERP applications:

• Dynamics 365 Commerce. Dynamics 365 Commerce is an e-commerce solution that enables you to deliver personalized shopping experiences across various physical and digital channels. It helps you build an omnichannel website that can connect all your stores to understand customer needs by monitoring their behavior. It also improves operational efficiency to upscale your business.
• Dynamics 365 Finance. Dynamics 365 Finance is a tool that automates and unifies all your global financial operations and predicts future outcomes to make data-driven decisions smarter and faster to drive business growth. It monitors performance in real time to optimize operational expenses with budget control and financial planning and analysis.
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources. Dynamics 365 Human Resources is an application that empowers employees to proactively enhance their careers by landing the best candidates using easy-to-use human resources (HR) tools. It helps them in optimizing HR programs, making better decisions using valuable insights, and improving organizational agility for impactful results.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is a tool that enables you to build a unified and resilient supply chain with the ability to provide business intelligence that can help you to innovate manufacturing operations, extend the life of your assets, improve warehouse management, and enhance workforce performance.

Dynamics 365 for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

Dynamics 365 Business Central is an all-in-one management solution for organizations across a spectrum of business processes used for managing sales, customer service, marketing, finance, and operations. It helps organizations to stay connected with customers in real time and make smarter decisions faster. It is possible to integrate and adapt business processes effortlessly with Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Common Data Model

Businesses use multiple applications for different business processes, such as marketing, sales, and manufacturing that lead to a poorly planned architecture that holds back organizations from scaling in the long term. The employees are wasting time navigating data from one application to another, which increases manual errors and loss of credibility. The only solution to this problem is an integrated system that empowers employees to share data across the spectrum of business applications. Therefore, businesses are switching to Dynamics 365.

But how does Dynamics 365 connect these applications? The answer is the Common Data Model. It is one of the foundations on which Dynamics 365 is built. It provides a shared data language for all the business processes to use. The Common Data Model metadata system consists of a set of standardized predefined schemas, including entities, attributes, semantic metadata, and relationships, that make it possible to share data across Microsoft Power Apps, Power BI, Dynamics 365, and Azure. Because of this, organizations can achieve semantic and structural consistency across applications.

INTRODUCTION TO POWER PLATFORM

Businesses are harnessing large amounts of data every second from sources such as social media, web, and business systems like Dynamics 365 ERP/CRM. How can this data be used to gain insights and drive intelligent business processes? This is where the Power Platform comes in.

What Is Power Platform?

Power Platform is a collective term for four Microsoft products: (1) Power BI, (2) PowerApps, (3) Power Automate, and...