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Release Plans for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry Introduction| Dominic Systems
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, organizations using Microsoft customer relationship management (CRM) products to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and drive business growth may wonder what’s next? In this blog post, we will delve into the exciting release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Cloud for Industry, highlighting the key updates and features that organizations can look forward to. What’s Next for Dynamics 365: Powering Intelligent Business Processes Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s flagship CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, designed to unify data, processes, and business applications. Let’s explore some of the release plans for Dynamics 365: Enhanced Customer Insights: Microsoft is investing heavily in AI and machine learning capabilities to enrich the customer insights provided by Dynamics 365. Expect advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and customer segmentation to enable organizations to deliver personalized experiences and build stronger customer relationships. Industry-Specific Solutions: Recognizing the diverse needs of different industries, Microsoft is developing industry-specific solutions within Dynamics 365. Whether you’re in retail, manufacturing, healthcare, or any other sector, these tailored offerings will provide pre-built functionality and best practices to accelerate implementation and address industry-specific challenges. Deeper Integration with Power Platform: Dynamics 365 will be tightly integrated with the Power Platform, which includes Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents. This integration will empower users to build custom applications, automate processes, analyze data, and engage with customers seamlessly, enhancing productivity and collaboration within organizations. What’s Next for Power Platform: Empowering Citizen Developers The Power Platform is a low-code development platform that enables individuals, often referred to as “citizen developers,” to create business applications without extensive coding knowledge. Let’s discover the exciting release plans for the Power Platform: Easier-to-Build Power Apps: Microsoft is investing in enhancing the capabilities of Power Apps, enabling citizen developers to create powerful and intuitive applications. Look forward to improved UI customization, integration with Azure services, and expanded connectors to various data sources, making it easier than ever to build tailored applications. Enhanced Processes in Power Automate: Automation is key to increasing efficiency and reducing manual efforts. Power Automate will introduce new features like advanced approvals, document processing using AI models, and deeper integration with Microsoft Teams, allowing organizations to automate complex business processes and streamline workflows. Deeper Insights in Power BI: Data-driven decision-making is crucial for organizations to stay competitive. Power BI will receive updates that focus on enhanced visualization options, improved AI capabilities for data modeling and forecasting, and tighter integration with Azure Data Services, enabling organizations to extract meaningful insights from their data and drive strategic actions. What’s Next for Cloud for Industry: Industry-Specific Cloud Offerings Microsoft’s Cloud for Industry is a suite of industry-specific cloud offerings designed to address the unique needs and challenges of various sectors. Here’s a glimpse into the release plans for Cloud for Industry: Expanded Healthcare Cloud: Microsoft is expanding its healthcare cloud capabilities, providing secure and compliant platforms that empower healthcare organizations to deliver better patient outcomes. Expect advancements in interoperability, telehealth solutions, patient engagement tools, and AI-driven insights to revolutionize the healthcare industry. Transformed Manufacturing Cloud: With the Manufacturing Cloud, Microsoft aims to transform the manufacturing sector. The release plans include digital twin capabilities, predictive maintenance solutions, supply chain optimization tools, and AI-driven quality control mechanisms to improve productivity, reduce costs, and drive innovation. Intelligent Financial Services Cloud: Microsoft is committed to helping financial institutions navigate the complex landscape of digital transformation. The Financial Services Cloud will introduce compliance enhancements, risk management tools, fraud detection capabilities, and intelligent customer engagement. Learn How to Apply These Microsoft Updates to Your CRM Business Processes Work with Dominic Systems to take advantage of the latest Microsoft updates with expert functional consulting and user coaching. Schedule a consultation
Streamline Sales and Fulfillment Team Collaboration With a SYSPRO Integration
When your business manufactures complex products, your sales team must collect a lot of data and specifications in order to quote prospects correctly with the help of your schedulers, engineers and production managers. Then, when those hard-working salespeople get a ‘win,’ there is still a lot of work required to pass all that critical data from sales to fulfillment. Sales handover tasks may include: Create Bills of Material (and Operations) for the permutation quoted Create Jobs for one-off production of a specific client solution Create detailed Sales Orders with many components Feed into SYSPRO Product Configurator Create Kits to meet a particular configuration To collect all this data, your sales team might be using: Experlogix, Salesforce CPQ, Cincom, Configure One, or another third party CPQ system An industry-specific quoting tool A custom/in-house quoting system The dreaded Excel spreadsheet template! If your team is manually gathering these materials and sharing them with your fulfillment team, there is absolutely a better way: automate it! You can send all the sales-gathered data to your fulfillment team automatically via SYSPRO. Connector for SYSPRO is an integration tool that can take data from a variety of sources (not just Dynamics 365 or Salesforce) and cleverly restructure it for SYSPRO in whatever manner your business processes require. The best part is that you can completely automate the creation of the required complex entities in SYSPRO. The best part is that we can completely automate the creation of the required complex entities in SYSPRO! For example, Dominic Systems consultants have used Connector for SYSPRO to: Connect Bills of Material and Operations from Salesforce with a custom Quotation system. Take Experlogix configurations fed into Dynamics 365 and create Sales Orders with supporting Inventory Items (and BoMs). What is your permutation? Let’s streamline your sales and fulfillment handover process If you collect complex information during your sales process and find it challenging to pass that information into SYSPRO, let us know. We can discuss how that transfer might be automated and let you know if one of our Connector for SYSPRO integrations can connect those dots. Schedule Free Consultation
Samson Rope Case Study: Integrating a Quoting System
If you are looking to increase profitability and reduce costs with a CRM Quoting System, this story is for you! Background: Who is Samson Rope and What Do They Do? Samson Rope is a manufacturer and supplier of innovative synthetic rope solutions to customers across a multitude of industries, including mining, craning, defense, and utility. Samson Rope aims to deliver top-notch customer service by completely understanding its customers’ operations, rope needs, and challenges. Samson Rope’s Fabrication Department created a custom quoting system for calculating the complex components and costs that go into their fabricated rope products. Challenge: The Custom Quoting System Involved Manual Efforts In order to use the Custom Quoting System, teams had to perform multiple manuals, and repetitive tasks using different systems, including the sales team, the scheduling team (using SYSPRO) and the internal team (using the Custom Quoting system). This resulted in delays, additional costs, and undue stress. “It took our team 7-8 minutes to use the custom quoting system, then enter the same information into CRM and then again in SYSPRO when it was time to use those same specs for an order.” – Samson Rope (Dean Haverstraw) Solution: Integrating the Quoting System To help the sales team save time, we coordinated with the Samson Rope Fabrication Department to support the functions of the Custom Quoting System using the Quoting System. The end result is a system that flows seamlessly between CRM, the Custom Quoting system, and SYSPRO. With a single ‘click’ of a customer order, the Connector for SYSPRO creates the required Inventory Items AND their associated Bills of Material and Routings, AND then the actual Sales Order. Processing time is reduced from hours to seconds. Integrating these systems required a complex set of integration steps, each of which depended on the results of the prior steps. Results: – Eliminated a lot of manual effort such as rekeying – Significantly reduced human/rekeying errors – Reduced wasted time – Lowered costs – Fast and secure order processing The Bottom Line Once we activated the new integrations, we immediately saw a reduction in time to process orders. We are also able to track the accuracy of our quotes and flag costing exceptions or other anomalies so our quotes will become even more accurate in the future. “After integrating the Custom Quoting System with the Quoting System and SYSPRO, all this manual re-entry was eliminated. Saving 40-50% of the overall entry time. It just pulled in the information for our teams to start using immediately. We could deliver feedback, orders, and answers to inquiries with record turnarounds.” – Samson Rope (Dean Haverstraw) Interested in streamlining sales processes using a Quoting System? We are eager to help deliver the same results as this Samson Rope project. Learn more about how we can support and manage your customized integrations with our integration services. Please schedule a free consultation and take advantage of your CRM capabilities!
Unlock ChatGPT for Sales Emails With Microsoft Viva Sales and Dynamics 36
Did you know that ChatGPT is built into Microsoft Viva Sales and it’s already included in your Dynamics 365 Enterprise or Premium Subscription? In fact, Viva Sales is a companion integration for any Dynamics user! Now your sales team can quickly and easily respond to sales emails with AI-generated messages from ChatGPT. Make sure your teams know how to take advantage of this service—because your competitors already are. Believe it or not, this email was generated by ChatGPT using data in Dynamics365: What is Viva Sales? Viva Sales is a responsive AI service that takes data from your CRM system to create a personalized response to your clients, saving your sales team a tremendous amount of time! Instead of writing out a response that takes a lot of time and effort, Viva Sales uses ChatGPT to combine customer and product information found in Dynamics 365 with the specific email context to create a response for your sales team. It is the ultimate email crafting service that is practical and easy to use. See how Viva Sales works in this video How to Take Advantage of ChatGPT and Microsoft Viva Sales Anyone with an active Dynamics 365 subscription can take full advantage of Viva Sales. It is the perfect, simple addition for any small to medium size business. It won’t cost your company a dime to access this feature, and Dominic Systems can show you how to best leverage it with your business practices. You do not need to purchase any extra licenses; it is already available to you! Viva Sales Benefits ・Viva Sales is connected to your CRM system, so it contains all your customer and product information ・Saves a significant amount of time for your Sales team ・Reduces manual effort ・Guides email responses to efficiently deal with client’s concerns or questions ・Viva Sales will store and update new insights directly back into your CRM system ・Better data capture ・Intelligently automates customer updates ・Boosts collaboration and productivity Viva Sales Features ・Azure Open AI Automatically suggests a reply enriched with the content from your CRM system ・Can craft your own message with Viva Sales using keywords, instead of using their prebuilt reply ・Includes pre-set options to help guide user responses ・Conversational intelligence It is time for your team to hop on board with this easy-to-use and simple Dynamics 365 feature aimed to boost productivity and efficiency. Transform Your Sales Process With Microsoft Viva Sales and ChatGPT Schedule a consultation and learn how we can implement Viva Sales with your Dynamics 365 system!
How to Create a CRM Migration Plan That Includes ERP Integration
What happens if you’ve successfully integrated your CRM with your ERP, but then for whatever reason decide to migrate your CRM to another system? An example of this would be a business that is using SYSPRO CRM and SYSPRO ERP but wants to migrate to Dynamics 365 CRM while maintaining the SYSPRO ERP integration. SYSPRO CRM + SYSPRO ERP -> Migrate to -> Dynamics 365 + SYSPRO ERP In a situation like this, you must take a two-pronged approach: 1) migrating your CRM data to the new system and 2) ensuring the new CRM system integrates with your ERP. Next, we’ll look at how to do this, step-by-step. Key steps to implement a CRM migration and simultaneous ERP integration Internal Buy-In Make sure you have your team on board with the upcoming CRM migration, especially the teams that will need to use it every day. Set Goals What would your ideal CRM be able to accomplish? Imagine what success would look like and set goals for the upcoming migration. Find the Right Partner A vendor can help you choose the right CRM to meet your goals. The vendor should also have migration experience for the specific CRM you choose. 360 CRM Assessment With a vendor on board, it’s time to assess what’s under the hood. What types of data, file attachments, third-party integrations and customizations need to be mapped out? Data Mapping The data mapping stage is essential for matching data from your old system to your new system in the right format, with the right automation and the necessary customizations. If you need to migrate your CRM data and integrate the new system with your ERP, this should also be considered in the data mapping phase. Migration This is where the magic happens. Your CRM migration partner might use different strategies for the CRM Migration, depending on your goals. For example, they might do a custom migration or use a pre-built tool to streamline the process. Integration With the data safely in its new CRM environment, your partner can now connect it back to your ERP to synchronize this data. Team Onboarding Once your new CRM is ready to use and loaded with data, it’s time to get your team familiar with the new system to ensure CRM success. This involves training, motivating and potentially even personal CRM customizing. You want your team to not only use the system but love it. Fully Customized Integration vs. Using a Pre-Built Tool While the steps above can be completely customized and implemented on a project-by-project basis, another more efficient option is to use a tool that has been pre-built to handle migrations and integrations for your CRM/ERP combination. A pre-built tool will have the data mapping, migration and integration phases ready out of the box to configure to your specific data. Pre-Built Tool Example: Connector for SYSPRO® An example of a pre-built CRM migration tool is our proprietary Connector for SYSPRO® that is designed to fit a wide range of migration scenarios for moving from SYSPRO CRM to Dynamics 365 and then integrating this data with SYSPRO ERP. Our CRM Migration package includes drivers and mappings (DTS) for all the necessary integration points that also utilizes a variety of “Reference Table” integration points for ancillary SYSPRO Tables (like customer classes, price lists, tax tables and more). A pre-built tool like Connector for SYSPRO® can save a lot of time and cost for your CRM migration project. Do you have an upcoming CRM Migration? Check out our CRM Migration Services, including fully customizable CRM migrations and our SYSPRO CRM standard migration package, using our proprietary Connector for SYSPRO® tool.
What to Expect When You Migrate from SYSPRO CRM to Microsoft Dynamics 365
Are you looking to migrate from SYSPRO CRM to a best-of-breed full CRM system like Microsoft Dynamics 365? Be prepared to embrace Microsoft Dynamics 365 and have all your CRM pain points melt away. But, before you make this transition, we understand your team probably has a number of questions about how to get started; this informational blog is here to provide some answers! What data can you migrate from SYSPRO to Dynamics 365? You can migrate all your important CRM data directly into Dynamics 365. SYSPRO CRM data is stored in a readily accessible SQL database. Dynamics 365 can support a wide variety of specific processes: Sales Customer Service Warranties Returns Quoting Quote Configurator Field Staffing/Remote Users What integration points should you have between your CRM and SYSPRO? In order to have a successful CRM setup, your CRM and ERP data must be able to communicate. Here are some of the key integration points: Sales Orders / Order fulfillment RMA’S New Customers Customer Updates Customer Account Status and History Inventory Queries Pricing Rules And more – ask us how easy it is to configure the migration to your specific business processes. The best part is that we can completely automate the integration between CRM and SYSPRO ERP (and vice versa)! Do you need to provide your customers or third parties with a portal? Dynamics 365 supports the following actions: Account inquiries Order inquiries Quote Requests Online Ordering Return Requests Warranty Claims Is it time-consuming to set up the SYSPRO CRM Migration? It depends if you do it manually (which can be both time and cost-intensive) or via a pre-built tool like our Dynamics 365 Connector for SYSPRO. Are You Ready to Fully Utilize Microsoft Dynamics 365 Power? With our Connector for SYSPRO pre-built integration tool, you can create custom CRM integrations that fit your unique business processes. This entire process can be automated, saving time and cost for your company. Dominic Systems acts as a trusted advisor and provides ongoing user coaching and support after the implementation process. Learn more about previous customer success stories. If you are looking to migrate from the SYSPRO CRM to Dynamics 365 CRM system, support your implementation with our highly qualified CRM consultants. Learn More About CRM Migration
Four Reasons to Integrate Your CRM and ERP
Quickly and accurately predicting when you can deliver your product is critical to customer supply chains, and there is little room for stocking errors. But you can’t gather the necessary customer and inventory information from your CRM alone. This blog post will review why your CRM needs information from your ERP to help your sales team answer key customer and product questions. Estimating when you can supply critical products How confidently can your salespeople respond “I can get you x units today and the rest in y days”? Your salespeople can sell more efficiently and effectively if they can give prospects and customers immediate and concrete information on current and future availability. This is why they need access to key ERP information, such as: quantity on hand, quantity allocated and quantity on backorder, and more. Quickly turning around price quotes and RFQs To turn around quotes, your sales team needs an up-to-date list of product types, units of measure available, and prices. By integrating your CRM and your ERP, you can put all this product and pricing information directly in the hands of your sales team. Proactively notifying your customers in the event of a supply chain disruption Your CRM should be able to gather and display the latest information about product orders. By integrating your CRM and ERP, you give your sales team an important window into the manufacturing process to better inform customers about their order status. Determining how to prioritize or score the customer When you can identify your best customers, you can allocate scarce inventory and attention to those most deserving and profitable for you. You might even ask whether you should be focusing on this particular customer or prospect at all. Are they in good standing? Are they an “A” customer or a “C” customer? What items do they normally buy? How quickly do they pay?Effective sales involves looking for customers that have bought a particular product before, that have a high sales volume with your company, that have a good payment history, and more—all details you can find in your ERP. CRM Customization is Key To gather and display very specific information regarding your products, your CRM must be highly configurable so that it can store and display whatever information is relevant to your products AND it must have the capability of integrating with your ERP and/or Supply Chain Management system to retrieve the most accurate and timely data. Learn More About Integrating Your CRM and ERP At Dominic Systems, we help companies integrate their CRM with the ERP and Supply Chain management systems they have in place. Since many manufacturers use the SYSPRO ERP system, we have developed a proprietary tool that includes a suite of integration points between SYSPRO and CRM called the Dynamics 365 Connector for SYSPRO. We can also provide custom integration solutions. Contact us or download the eBook “Three Methods for Integrating Your CRM and ERP” to learn more.
How to Protect Your CRM From Data Loss and Corruption With OwnBackup
If you think your SaaS CRM provider is protecting your CRM data, you might be surprised to learn that you’re the one in charge. What are you doing to protect this valuable company data, including your customers’ personal information, deal values, and your entire history of correspondence? If the answer is ‘nothing,’ you should consider a solution like OwnBackup, which is built to integrate with SaaS like your CRM and keep this data safe and compliant. What is OwnBackup? OwnBackup is a SaaS Data Protection service that can be implemented with CRM systems such as Dynamics 365. OwnBackup protects data in the cloud from loss and corruption that may be caused by: Human error Bad code Integration error Migration error Malicious intent Protecting over 4,000 businesses, OwnBackup is becoming one of the largest recovery and data protection solutions in the marketplace. Following a motto of ‘Zero downtime, never lose data in the cloud,’ there are several ways OwnBackup protects your data: Automated backups: OwnBackup provides automated backups of company data. Data is backed up over 250 times a month and is retained for up to 99 years. Rapid recovery: If data loss or corruption were to occur, most non-customers will experience a 7+ delay to recover their data. However, OwnBackup customers recover their data in less than a day Cutting-edge R&D: OwnBackup has invested $1 billion in security research and development Key Features of OwnBackup Here are just a few of the reasons you should choose OwnBackup to protect your CRM data: Quickly search data history: You can search data history in order to save time instead of having to try and manually uncover records. Find an account you know was deleted and restore just that account and its associated child records. Stay informed with smart alerts: OwnBackup sends the user intelligent alerts which reminds and assures them that an automated daily backup is occurring. Throw a red flag if too many records are deleted or changed at once. Monitor sensitive data fields to make sure they are not overwritten accidentally. Compare data to identify changes: Another beneficial feature of OwnBackup is the quick compare feature which allows the user to compare data within different environments and can even get down to a specific field or entity. Quickly identify what has changed and whether something needs to be restored. Carefully restore granular data: One more highlighting benefit of OwnBackup is the feature of granular restore which restores just a selected subset of columns, rows, tables, and attachments to the backup environment directly. No more wiping everything out just to recover some records a user accidentally deleted! Keep Your Data in Compliance OwnBackup is compliant with SOC2 and HIPAA, so all data is encrypted when in transit and at rest, it is made a primary initiative that the user fully trusts the cloud and what happens with their data. Canadian users can rest assured that their backups are stored in Canada and never leave the country. It’s Easy to Protect Your CRM Data with OwnBackup OwnBackup focuses heavily on the simplicity and ease of the user experience. The implementation process is efficient and easy to learn, install, and delegate. The user is guaranteed access to a 24/7 on-call support system if needed. Implemented with Dynamics 365, OwnBackup is able to handle any amount of data and ensure successful integration. Protect Your CRM Data! Implement OwnBackup with Your Own CRM Dominic Systems provides expert advice on how to best protect your CRM data with OwnBackup and can also help you implement this data protection solution. To make sure your CRM data is protected, schedule a consultation with one of our CRM experts today. OwnBackup customers say they feel 3x more prepared to deal with a situation of data loss and corruption in comparison with a non-customer.View Site Schedule Free Consultation
How to Integrate Mapping and Geospatial Data Into Your CRM With Maptaskr | Dominic Systems
What would you do if you could combine satellite and aerial data with your CRM data? Maptaskr users find that they can quickly identify opportunities near their sales leaders, efficiently plan sales trips, improve territory coverage, and optimize field service routes. When you integrate Maptaskr with your CRM, like Dynamics 365, you can give your users the ability to connect geospatial intelligence and location intelligence information with all other data from customers and prospects. What is Maptaskr? Maptaskr is a CRM integration that pulls in information from geospatial and location intelligence, such as ESRI ArcGIS data, and automatically correlates it with the customer, operational, and field data in your CRM. Maptaskr is a Microsoft Preferred Solution built to enhance your business processes by enriching customer information with location data and allowing you to trigger actionable processes from within the map. Here are just a few of the ways Maptaskr enhances your productivity with location data: Route optimization: For a faster journey to customer locations, Maptaskr offers route optimization Accounts near me: The “accounts near me” feature shows customers near you and helps you efficiently make a plan to serve them. User-friendly UI: Users can optimize their CRM by quickly colour coding data sets and generate custom workflows with just one click Automatic triggers: Automate trigger actions from the data A Maptaskr implementation can help you enhance the way you work with location data: Map CRM Data: Reduce cost and time by accurately planning a journey Territory Management: Optimize territory coverage by creating, managing, and reassigning territories Automate manual processes: For more efficient planning, geocoding CRM data automates many of the manual processes associated with territory and route planning. Optimized routing: Maptaskr uses intelligent mapping to automatically optimize routes and schedules Add detail with third-party maps: Users can import 3rd party excel files and OGC-compliant mapping layers to create detailed maps. Geofenced Zones: Share maps with colleagues and customers to increase time productivity “We blend your data with location intelligence and artificial intelligence to bring you insights and actions that will make your business better organized, more productive, and more profitable.” Satellite and Aerial data help gather detailed insights regarding your customers, view the high-resolution aerial imagery provided in this metromap. To further enhance the user experience of Maptaskr in Dynamics 365, users are able to connect with your Canvas apps to create base maps, search custom endpoints, add enterprise layers, and more. If you’re interested in learning how Maptaskr combines customer data with geospatial information, check out this video that shows the results in Dynamics 365. Enhance Your CRM Data with Mapping and Geospatial Data Dominic Systems is one of Maptaskrs main integration partners, with deep expertise in enhancing the Dynamics 365 CRM use experience with rich location data. Book a consultation to see how we can help streamline your business processes by combining mapping data with your Dynamics 365 CRM. Did you know? Maptaskr is the only approved way to integrate Dynamics 365 data with ESRI ArcGIS data. Schedule Free Consultation