Continued advancement of communication technology has provided marketers with the tools to reach audiences faster and on a broader level. As such, marketers need to keep moving faster and faster to stay ahead and keep their customers engaged.

Marketing automation tools like customer journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing allow for that instant connection to be made when potential customers first express interest. Coming up in April, Microsoft will be releasing real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities for preview.

For the mid-market space specifically, providers like Microsoft, SAP, and NetSuite all have cloud-based ERP applications that offer similar functionality. It can be difficult to wade through the many online resources and sales calls to determine the best solution.

To make it easier, we have put together a high level comparison between Microsoft’s premiere mid-market ERP application Dynamics 365 Business Central, and the most common competitors include NetSuite, SAP, and Epicor.

Customer Satisfaction surveys can have a major impact on both sales and customer service operations. Allowing customers to provide meaningful insight into their interactions with your organization can positively influence process changes and impact the bottom line.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice (formerly Forms Pro), organizations can create comprehensive customer satisfaction surveys and distribute them directly to contacts from Dynamics 365 apps like Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Service.

Microsoft Teams stands tall not only as an effective method for businesses to facilitate internal communications, but also as a way for them to collaborate on their work. Teams allows for seamless collaboration in a variety of applications, especially with other Microsoft applications such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint.

Teams has an integration to work with Dynamics 365 applications such as Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing. This integration is receiving some new features as part of the 2021 Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1. They’re expected to be coming with the first part of the release wave next month.

Time sheets in Business Central are used to track resource time usage. These time sheets are most often used in tandem with jobs to track resource time to a specific job planning line.

Jobs in Business Central are a system that is used to manage projects that utilize resources and materials. Resources in Business Central can be employees or machines. Keeping track of the time used by resources is critical to ensure costs and billing can be properly calculated for each project.

As with most ERP systems, keyboard shortcuts and process tips can make the life of a day to day user so much easier. As a cloud-based application, Dynamics 365 Business Central includes many of these tips and tricks to speed up data entry and increase the efficiency of end users.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is a comprehensive digital marketing platform that gives users the ability to create a wide variety of content including landing pages, forms, email designs, marketing automation campaigns, and more. With either system customizations or Power Automate workflows, marketing admins can effectively control the production and sharing of digital marketing content.

Data analytics have become increasingly important for business departments and modern cloud-based applications like Dynamics 365 continue to give users easy ways to visualize that data. Dynamics 365 Sales provides both sales managers and staff with insight dashboards right on the home screen.

Sellers often offer multiple inventory items together as bundles, products that otherwise require some assembly prior to being shipped to the customer, or items customized to-order. These typically don’t involve extensive production processes and can be accomplished by one or a few employees.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central, these types of items are created via assembly orders which can improve process efficiency and decrease manual labor. For inventory management and selling purposes, assembly policies can be set to either assemble-to-order and assemble-to-stock.

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive ERP system featuring a wide range of capabilities including manufacturing management. This diversity in functions allows Business Central to cover virtually all business processes for manufacturers.

For manufacturers that sell items assembled or otherwise produced from component parts and resources, Bills of Material (BOMs) are likely to be an integral business function. Business Central allows BOMs to seamlessly connect with all related processes because it manages not just inventory but also inventory, employee and machine resources, and sales documents.

One of the most crucial parts of managing a business is balancing supply and demand. Without proper balance, supply may be insufficient to meet demand causing a drop in customer satisfaction, or there may be too much supply thereby hurting profits. Dynamics 365 Business Central includes robust planning functionality to give guidance on purchase and production orders to ensure items are in stock and available for customers.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central, there are multiple ways to conduct manufacturing processes depending on industry and process type. In this blog we’ll go through the difference between Jobs and Manufacturing capabilities in Business Central so manufacturers have a better understanding of what the differences are, which one makes the most sense for their business, and even if it makes more sense to implement a combination of the two.

For manufacturers planning to use Dynamics 365 Business Central or those already doing so, adding a product configurator can have a major impact on manufacturing operations. Why is this? Product configurators remove the time-consuming task of manual entry of customized product orders and eliminate costly mistakes in customizes sales orders. In this blog we’ll discuss the capabilities and benefits of using a product configurator in Business Central and how to get started implementing one.

We often encounter organizations that are looking to upgrade from an existing business system and discover Dynamics 365 without truly understanding what it is. While it’s true that Dynamics 365 has an answer to almost every business process at this point and it is a major benefit to use business applications that speak to each other natively, it isn’t necessary to dive head first into Dynamics 365 and overhaul all existing processes.

Currently there is a decent selection of fonts available in Dynamics 365 Marketing when creating content like email messages, marketing forms, and marketing pages. While more fonts will be added in future updates, many marketers prefer to use fonts that adhere to brand standards or frankly just look better than available fonts. Web fonts provide marketers with the flexibility to stretch their creative muscles within the context of text within an email design or marketing page.

With the recent release of Microsoft’s plans for Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 1, many exciting new features for the Dynamics 365 platform were announced. Dynamics 365 Sales is receiving numerous updates to make it easier and more accessible for sellers to effectively reach and communicate with their customers.

A large portion of the updates are expected in April, with more release over the following months.

Keyboard shortcuts are important tools for many ERP system users that spend their days entering data and navigating around the system. With Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft has included a comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts to make actions and navigation easier within the application. The shortcuts discussed below are mostly the same between Windows and macOS, however if a shortcut doesn’t work on macOS, there may be an alternative shortcut listed in Microsoft’s official documentation.

Microsoft has made no delay in getting started with planning updates to Dynamics 365. Recently, Microsoft put out its plan for the 2021 Release Wave 1. A multitude of enhancements and features are coming to the Dynamics 365 applications, including Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The updates to Marketing aim to make content creation easier, allow it to be distributed through more channels, and give users better tools to analyze their data. Many of these updates are expected to become available in April with the rest rolling out in the months after.

When integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can provide sales teams with crucial information regarding their opportunities directly in the Dynamics 365 interface. But what is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an add-on application available through LinkedIn that gives sales teams a boost in capturing and nurturing leads. It provides features like Advanced lead and company search, lead recommendations, deals, organic marketing alerts, and more.

Microsoft Teams is a great tool for facilitating internal communications and ensuring every member of the organization stays up to date. It keeps teams focused and advancing towards the same goals. SharePoint is a file management system that gives secure file storage to the entire organization.

SharePoint can be customized and structured to best fit the needs of the business. These are both great products that help facilitate effective collaboration within an organization.