Industry Cloud solutions using Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

As Cloud applications are now the global standard, there is a demand for building vertical industry specific cloud solutions that provide pre-built insights and intelligence, business processes and relevant experiences for the industry. Microsoft has introduced multiple Industry Cloud with Dynamics 365 solutions. This blog is to introduce the Industry Clouds solutions from Microsoft built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Currently there are 4 Industry Cloud solutions available and I am sure Microsoft is working on few more in the pipeline. They are as below.

• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Microsoft Cloud for Retail
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Each Industry Cloud has the following - 

1. Industry specific functionality - For example the Financial Services Cloud consists of the following -

A unified Customer Profile (Customer 360) app, Customer Onboarding app, Loan Management app  Customer Engagement app etc.. The Industry apps provide tailored experiences for both the users and Customers. They help in better collaboration and decision making.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 

2.  Each Industry Cloud includes specific components - Solutions, Apps, Templates and Services. It also includes data model built for the Industry Cloud. The data model can also be installed as a stand alone solution. For example The Retail Banking data model.

3. A Compliance program for Microsoft Cloud which enables the Clients to measure and control Risks and manage Industry compliance. This also includes specific architectural templates to help in designing and deploying Microsoft Cloud solutions for the specific Industry. An example for Financial Services Cloud Architectural template is shown below.

There is certain requirements that needs to be followed.

1. You need to have the specific licenses before you can deploy the Industry Clouds. 

2. There are pre-requisite that needs to be completed and after the Industry Cloud solutions are deployed there are also post deployment steps to be followed. 

3. Pricing - Each industry Cloud has a specific pricing template. The price for Financial Services Industry Cloud is approx $20k per Tenant. If you have 1000+ users this is a very reasonable (imho) price for the OOTB functionalities that the Industry Cloud provides.

Pricing for Financial Services Cloud

I would recommend to first do an internal analysis on the business processes and perform a proof of concept testing of the Industry Cloud solution. 

The Microsoft Industry Cloud are great examples of how to best utilize Microsoft cloud apps for your specific Industry. They come pre-built with the data model, AI apps and solutions that you can easily test and deploy. I am certain this will help accelerate your cloud transformation journey. 

In my future blogs I will explore some of the Industry Clouds and write more about it. Thank you for reading and let me know about your experience with the Microsoft Industry Cloud.

@mihircrm

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Intelligent Automation using Power Automate as a Platform - Introduction

Globally as demand for products and services increases there is a need for automation. Intelligent Automation is the combination of multiple automation technologies infused with AI. Intelligent automation, also known as Cognitive automation can help organization to achieve gains in operations productivity and efficiency, enhance business outcomes and gain insights for making better business decisions. This blog introduces Intelligent Automation (IA) and how Microsoft Power Automate can be utilized as a platform for Intelligent Automation.

Enterprises today have challenges with the ability to provide service across multiple digital platforms. The customer expects better standard of services with faster turn around times. Some of the use cases of Intelligent Automation are described below -

1. Finance - AP process - In an organization the finance Accounts Payable specialist may need to automate the daily task of receive an email from Vendor with a attachment of invoice, printing and manually enter the invoice in ERP system. In addition to entering the invoice the IA can also review the invoice, compare against the Vendor PO and detect any anomaly to provide insights to the business.

2. Customer Service - Receive a customer request for warranty service repair. Search and find the customer agreement on warranty repair, confirm it is a valid request. Prepare and send an RMA and Shipping instructions email to the Customer. In addition the IA can also do analysis on the Items being returned to notify the business of any issues found with returns of the same item from multiple customers. 

3. HR - New Hire onboarding process - The enterprise HR department can automate the various steps in new hire on-boarding. They can also help in guiding the new hires in the process and getting them the needed IT authorizations and assets like laptops etc. IA can help in streamlining the onboarding so it is a great experience for the new hires.

There are many such business scenario where intelligent automation can be applied to automate the process and reduce the effort.  The main benefits of applying Intelligent Automation (IA) for enterprise organization are -

1. Improve productivity and reduce operational costs - IA when applied to automate manual tasks at scale the organization gets benefitted due to improved process efficiencies and / or productivity. This also reduces the operations costs. 

2. Consistent processes - Another benefit is the consistency of processes across business units and improved accuracy and less manual errors due to automation. 

Lead to Opportunity Sales process with Cloud workflow

2. Enhance Customer experience- Intelligent Automation can provide faster turnaround and consistent delivery improving the quality of products and services which ultimately leads to a better customer experience.

3. Compliance and Regulations - Intelligent Automation can help organizations in complying with Industry procedures and provide reporting for Government regulations. 

Intelligent Automation platform with Power Automate can use the Microsoft Low code Power Platform automation and AI technologies when applied to improve business operations -

1. Digital Process Automation (DPA) - This is using cloud workflows to automate and integrate business processes. Power Automate provides cloud based workflow automation capabilities with 400+ connectors to many SaaS applications including Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. 

2. Robotic Process Automation  (RPA) -  Also known as UI automation which helps organizations improve their manual processes by automating the back office tasks. For example this can be done by capturing the clicks on the desktop and automating the manual processing of data. Power Automate Desktop is the RPA tool that can help in automating legacy business processes. 

3. Business Process Automation (BPA) - This can be used for automating business workflows like a Lead to Opportunity to Sales process. This helps in managing a consistent business process throughout the organization. The steps in the process can be automated that helps in improving the process efficiency. The standardized process can also help in interactions and engagement within the Sales team.

4. AI - AI when added can become the decision engine for automation. AI can be in the form of machine learning or cognitive algorithms that can recognize process patterns and make inferences for business. They can also detect anomalies or provide prediction based on the process data. In Microsoft Power Automate we can use AI builder to automatically process forms and documents, detect and identify images, text analysis and much more. 

AI builder in Power Automate

5. Process Mining - Process Mining can help in understanding and identifying the business process bottlenecks and select processes that can benefit from automation. Microsoft Power Automate includes Process Advisor that can help organizations in gaining deeper insights and optimizing business processes.

The combination of the above Intelligent Automation technologies can help Enterprise organizations in accelerating their digital business transformation goals and improve business outcomes. Let me know if you have implemented Power Automate for Intelligent Automation. Thanks for reading.

@mihircrm

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Making your digital transformation a successful journey with an Enterprise App Adoption Strategy

 Many organizations have embarked on their digital transformation journey with new cloud native enterprise apps like Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Power Platform. They want to ensure that they are able to achieve the goals initially set for the new business app and also get a return on their investments. Planning and preparing a enterprise app adoption strategy is essential for the operational success and future of the business. 

The enterprise transformation journey may have started as a pilot project. In an agile driven world the pilot may be implemented in a particular country / region or for a department to test the results of implementing the new app. The successful adoption of the new app will determine the next steps in the journey for the eventual implementation in the enterprise. It is at this critical juncture that the adoption playbook needs to be run to ensure the success of the project. 

As organizations venture into new cloud native apps there are many challenges. 

1. Technological change - Cloud apps are new technologies and are constantly evolving. This was not the case earlier when the on premise legacy enterprise apps rarely had changes and had worked pretty much the same for the past 10-15 years. The new cloud apps will change periodically months and will need a constant learning culture for the business.

2. Business environment change - As the past 2 years have shown "business as usual" cannot be taken for granted. The business environment can change any time, many of us could be working from where ever and still supporting our customers. We need to be ready for future business environment changes. Successful adoptions of the new apps are necessary fir business to thrive in new digital world.  

3. Employees needs change and the enterprise needs to be agile to provide the support needed for the employees. Employees want proper guidance and nurturing in the new apps they have to use. They want to be trained and empowered for success. When organizations do not support their employees with the new tools and training needed, the digital transformation may not be a success.

The above are some of the factors that an Enterprise App Adoption Strategy is required. 

Microsoft has provided a Dynamics 365 Adoption guide that can help customers implementing Dynamics 365 to have a successful application adoption. The below pic shows some of the highlights in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 App adoption guide. (link) 

The Enterprise App Adoption Strategy should also change, be relevant and useful as future enhancements are made to the app.  The focus is on making sure the employees adopt and customers are engaged and the app is getting better business outcomes.  Hope you have an Enterprise App Adoption Strategy and do let me know your thoughts on it,

Thanks for reading. 

@mihircrm

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Azure Synapse link for Dataverse - Introduction

Microsoft has recently announced that the Data Export Service (DES) will no longer be supported after 1 year (Nov-22). This may come as a surprise to many of the Clients who are using and depending on DES for their data extraction, integration and analytics. DES was one of the main tool used to extract and store data from Dataverse for analytical processing and integration purposes with other systems. 

There is a new option to get data from your Dataverse environments, store the data in a data warehouse and perform analytical and machine learning processing using that data. This is the Azure Synapse link for Dataverse.

So what is Azure Synapse? - In Microsoft speak - "Azure Synapse is an enterprise analytics service that accelerates time to insight across data warehouses and big data systems. Azure Synapse brings together the best of SQL technologies used in enterprise data warehousing, Spark technologies used for big data, Data Explorer for log and time series analytics, Pipelines for data integration and ETL/ELT, and deep integration with other Azure services such as Power BI, CosmosDB, and AzureML."

The main benefit of using Azure Synapse link for Dataverse is to get near real time insights on your Dataverse data. 

The below diagram shows the architecture of Azure Synapse. 

Azure Synapse Architecture

There are other benefits of using Azure Synapse link for Dataverse - 

1. You can utilize Synapse SQL, a distributed query system for T-SQL that enables data warehousing and data virtualization scenarios and extends T-SQL to address streaming and machine learning scenarios.

2. Enable Big Data and ML using Apache Spark for Azure Synapse - deeply and seamlessly integrates Apache Spark--the most popular open source big data engine used for data preparation, data engineering, ETL, and machine learning.

3. Use SQL and Spark together with data in your Azure Data Lake 

4. Built-in Data integration engine to ingest and create ETL pipelines at scale

5. Perform near real-time log and IOT stream analytics using Azure Data Explorer services

6. Use Azure Synapse Studio to build solutions, maintain and secure your data with a unified experience

Some of the challenges that you may need to consider -

1. Existing integration with external systems will need to be re-designed

2. Investments in non-Microsoft analytics and ML solutions may need to be evaluated against the above benefits.

3. Change management - The data engineering and analysis team will need to update their skills to be able to move to Azure Synapse.

4. There could be some cost benefits analysis that you will need to make to consider moving to Azure Synapse. Planning and budgeting for the move to Azure Synapse link for Dataverse is going to be critical for enterprise clients. 

To overcome some of the pain points and ease the transition from DES to Azure Synapse link for Dataverse, Microsoft has also provided a playbook. (link is here)  

Hope the above gets you started in planning to move from Data Export Services to Azure Synapse and do let me know about your experiences.

Thanks for reading.

@mihircrm

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Accelerate your Sales with Dynamics 365 - 2021 Wave-2

 Dynamics 365 has introduced many new and updated functionality in its 2021 Wave-2 release. This blog is part-1 of a series of blogs on the Dynamics 365 wave-2 release. This blog will focus on the updates on the new Sales accelerator (Sales - Customer Engagement app). 

The Sales accelerator focus is on empowering the Sales workforce to better collaborate (Teams), improve their productivity (intelligent worklist) and achieve better sales outcomes (smart sequences). The figure below shows the Sales Insights with conversational intelligence (in preview)

Sales insights with intelligence

Another exciting new functionality (which was lacking in Dynamics 365) is the ability to do a round robin assignment of leads. This will be only available in the Feb-2022 timeframe so I will write about it once the public preview is available.

1. Teams integration - The teams integration with Dynamics 365 was available earlier. There is new enhancements to the integration that allows the user to do the following (public preview starts in Dec 2021/Feb 2022 so will be able to get more details and post later). This is very useful if you are already using teams as a communication and collaboration tool within the organization.

    a.    Edit a D365 record from within a teams conversation

    b.    Ability to add a note or task to a D365 record from teams chat with the required security access

    c.    Share D365 records with other users in a teams chat as a interactable card

    d.    Create and join team meetings from D365 record. Access Sales records and add notes from meetings. 

    e.    Ability to @mention a user in D365 record timeline and the Sales bot will post a message to teams

    f.    Get notification of updates to D365 Sales records that you follow from within teams

Enhanced Teams integration

In addition to the above you can also add Conversation Intelligence to the teams call (in preview). This will provide the capability to analyze the call recordings and get insights on the customer interactions.

2. Worklist & Sequencing - Worklist allows the manager to setup a view of items that are assigned or created that the sales rep should be focusing on. The sales rep can than search, filter, sort the items on the worklist. The work list detail view shows the up next priority item that the seller needs to work upon based upon the sequencing as set-up by the manager.

Sales accelerator - Worklist 

3. Smart sequences - can be set-up to have the seller follow a guided particular sequence of to-do events or activities for working on a lead or opportunity. The below figure shows a new lead nurturing sequence steps. 

New lead nurturing sequence

This sequence can be configured and setup by sales managers and can automatically creates activities for the seller to complete as per the steps in the sequence.

The sequence needs to be assigned to the records (leads or opportunities) so that the sellers can follow the same while working on the sales records. The sequence assignment is shown below.

Assign sequence to lead records

I hope the above helps to accelerate your sales and help the sellers to better convert leads and close more opportunities with the wave-2 release of Dynamics 365 - Sales app. Please let me know if you would like to know more about the new Sales accelerator enhancements.

Thanks for reading.

@mihircrm

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Where is your Data? - A need for Data governance platform

Digital transformation and app modernization programs results in new applications developed in the cloud or legacy apps moved to cloud. Along with the apps the data is also generated, moved, collected and stored in the cloud. The cloud data also needs to integrate and work with the data in onsite data repositories. As new data sources gets created it create new challenges for enterprises to track and manage data. 

Data storage and flows in hybrid cloud (image from Microsoft learn)

The consumers of data need to know where the data source is and how to connect to it. They also need to be able to trust the source of data. Data reliability is a concern when the data is used for AI and machine learning models and business insights generation.

The data producers needs to annotate, classify and create documentation for the data. Data management and maintenance is quite a challenging task for an enterprise with multiplying sources of data.

The data security admins needs to discover, identify, protect and restrict access to new and existing data sources. They need to make sure that proper process is followed when accessing sensitive classified data. Ensuring data classification, security and reliability is a concern for the admin with the increasing data generation and usage.

Finally there is the compliance aspects that needs to be met with Corporate data policies. This includes GDPR, HIPPA, PCI and other regulatory and industry standards. Data reporting is needed to ensure  compliance is met.  

This exponential growth and complexity in enterprise data in the cloud requires a cloud data governance platform.

The benefits of having a data governance platform can be -

1. An enterprise data catalog provide easy access to different source of data and information on those sources. This helps in better data discovery.

2.  Ability to make use of the data source and collaborate on the same with other users - for example asking for access 

3. Help in compliance - to make sure there is proper policy and procedure for enterprise data - manage the producing, consuming, storage and archiving of enterprise data, 

Microsoft has a cloud PaaS data governance platform called Azure Purview. Enterprise clients looking for Cloud data governance and compliance can benefit from using Azure Purview.  

I will write more about it once I have got some hands on experience testing Azure Purview with Power BI and Dynamics 365. How are you planning to manage and govern your data in cloud and onsite? Do you know where is your data? 

Thanks for reading.

@mihirCRM

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Managing Environments in Power Platform - Risk Management Part-2

Environment in Power Platform is where you would store, share and manage your business data, Dynamics 365 and Portal apps, Power Automate flows, chatbots and connections. It is important to understand, control and manage your environments. This blogs provides some of the considerations in environment management for Power Platform / Dynamics 365 - Dataverse. The focus of this blog is on environments with Dynamics 365 apps & Dataverse database.

1. Environment Scope - Each Power Platform environment is created in the Azure AD tenant and bound to a geo location. Only users within the AD tenant can access the environment. An environment may only have a single Dataverse database.

Typically you will have multiple environments - Dev / Test / Staging / Production. Each environment will have its own Dataverse database. Any Power platform resource - app, chatbot, portal apps created within the environment will only connect to the environments Dataverse database. You can move, migrate solution and data from one environment to another. The data is stored in the environment's geo location data centers. This is important to know when storing customer data.

Environment and Tenant

2. Environment Types - The system will create a default environment. The default environment should not be used for building any Power Platform resource. Admin users can create multiple environments of type Sandbox. A sandbox environment can be converted to a type Production. You can have multiple Production environment within a Tenant. A production environment can also be converted to sandbox.

In addition there are other type of environment - Trial environment which are active for 30 days, developer environment for personal dev use and Microsoft Dataverse for Teams environment.

3. Environment Security Access -

To add a user to an environment the user needs to be added in the Azure AD Tenant, provisioned a license and also given the correct security role to access the data in the environment. There are 2 main roles Environment Admin and Environment Maker for Environments that do not have a Dataverse database.

Environments with Dataverse database have the following roles - 

Security Roles

The security roles can be assigned to a user, owner team and Azure AD group team. The Azure AD Group team can be Security or Office group team. The Azure AD groups can be used to manage licensed users apps and data access.  

4. Environment Backup and Restore - The system backs up all environments except Trial environment. The difference is only in how long the backups are stored. The Production environment backup with Dynamics 365 Apps are stored for 28 days. All other environments backups are stored for 7 days.

The backup is a continuous backup using Azure SQL Database. You can also do manual backups. You cannot download the backup. There are other options to download Dynamics 365 data such as using data migration. 

You can only restore a backup to a non production environment. To restore to a Production environment first convert the Production environment to Sandbox and than do the restore.

I hope the above helps you to understand and manage the Power Platform Environments with Dynamics 365 apps. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for reading. 

@mihircrm

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