Whether you call them support incidents, tickets, cases, or another term, most organizations need a way to effectively manage and track all support activities related to their customers. Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides support teams with comprehensive tools to capture and store support related information while guiding support staff through the remediation process to final resolution.

For organizations already using other Dynamics 365 apps like Sales for CRM capabilities, Dynamics 365 Customer Service allows them to store and update client info in the same database as Sales data meaning it is easy to keep all prospect and client data up to date in the same system.

Today, Microsoft held their Business Applications Launch event for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2021 release wave 1. During this event Microsoft walked through a few of many new capabilities coming to Dynamics 365 apps like Sales, Marketing, Business Central, and more over the course of April through October 2021. Here are the biggest announcements.

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for sales teams as it provides them access to new opportunities to find and engage with more, and usually higher quality, prospects and leads from LinkedIn. Most companies are not limited to just LinkedIn for lead generation, so LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales.

Integrating the LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 Sales helps to bring together LinkedIn contacts and leads with the Dynamics 365 Sales interface. In addition, it gives access to some of the other features available in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Many organizations support multiple companies and will also often have users that process data, documents, and other tasks from multiple companies within the organization. While these companies are part of the larger organization, they still need to process and track their individual financial and operations data. Dynamics 365 Business Central allows multiple environments and companies to be set up and has tools to assist users in more easily managing work across them.

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides multiple ways for companies to collect data from web forms and import submission data into Dynamics 36 with marketing forms. Dynamics 365 Marketing forms allow you to build and customize web forms that can be then hosted on landing pages or using the form capture feature. This blog will walk through the capabilities of form capture and the reasoning behind using it in place of embedding Dynamics 365 forms.

With many organizations still operating in a work from home environment, digital communication is integral to maintaining on the same page. In a recent update to Microsoft 365, there are new ways for team members to interact and improve that sense of comradery that is often missed is a digital setting. Let’s walk through three ways Microsoft 365 apps are now integrated into Microsoft Teams to help employees stay connected.

In recent years, kanban boards have been rising in popularity as an effective way for teams to manage the smaller tasks within a larger project or process. They provide a great visual representation of tasks within a larger project or process.

This visualization can be a great asset to help teams get an understanding of how they are progressing through a project, or what point within a process different items have reached. Opportunity and activity entries in Dynamics 365 Sales can be viewed as kanban boards for quick editing and management options.

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.