What is Dynamics 365 and How It Benefits your Business

Dynamics 365 is one of the diverse Microsoft suites of business applications. It is designed to make business processes more advantageous for organizations and industries. But what exactly is Dynamics 365, which one is right for your business?

As a Dynamics 365 consulting company - it's our goal to help our clients select the right platform that fits their needs. In the article, we are presenting an overview of the Dynamics 365 different options and how you should get started.

Overview of Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 contains several other applications and add-ons, which provide solutions for all your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) needs, as well as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and more.

As a Dynamics 365 customer, you can license the apps that are more beneficial and valuable to your business. The entire Dynamics 365 family promises to provide you with the best possible flexibility and extensibility. It is this flexibility and innovation that allows Dynamics 365 to adapt to and blend with nearly any business type.

However, these acronyms such as CRM and ERP can make it all sound confusing and hard to understand. Therefore, let us briefly examine the full scope of Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 ERP Solutions

Dynamics 365 ERP solutions help with all three crucial areas of business, which include but are not limited to, accounting, manufacturing, and distribution. Overall, they add more value to your business by improving efficiency, control, automation, and scalability.

At the top are the two major Dynamics 365 ERP solutions that you can choose from. These are Business Central and Finance & Operations.

• Dynamics 365 Business Central:

The perfect ERP solution for small or medium-sized businesses. Business Central enables organizations to manage finances, jobs, sales, and more. Business Central is really a step up for SMB who believes they have outgrown traditional accounting systems such as QuickBooks.

• Finance & Operations:

Dynamics 365 Finance and Operation is an ERP solution suitable for more extensive or more diversified companies. It's used mainly by companies with several chains of business, multi-currency needs, international operations, or complex processes in manufacturing operations.

Dynamics 365 CRM Apps

There are about five different applications that form Dynamics 365. They are well suited for the CRM needs of any business of any size. These apps help connect multiple functions and empower your team with data. With Dynamics 365 CRM apps, you can easily connect sales, customer service, and marketing teams.

• Sales: This is the most common and widespread of them all. It gives a 360-degree view of your engagements, connections, and interactions with existing and prospective customers. It helps your team plan and predicts your subsequent interactions with them. The Sales app also provides a single source of information and reference for your team in sales, marketing, and accounting.

• Marketing: You can advance your marketing campaigns by creating long-term, goal-oriented campaigns, determine lead scores, and provide insights for new steps to take to attract and retain new customers.

• Customer Service: A comprehensive customer engagement suite to help your support team deliver exceptional customer service. Dynamics 365 customer service increases agent productivity and customer satisfaction through omnichannel, customer insights, personalized customer experience, and more.

• Project Operations: A key component to deliver successful projects. Project operations help optimize resource utilization, track projects efficiently, streamline project financials, and overall deal management experience.

• Field Service: Extend customer service to your field team. Field service provides enhanced scheduling capabilities, and connected experience integrated with IoT.

Why Dynamics 365

1. Rich Out-of-the-Box Function and Capabilities

Out of the box, Dynamics 365 provides a native experience to improve user productivity. With pre-defined sales and customer service processes, your team will quickly start adopting the CRM as is.

As a Dynamics 365 consultant, in some cases - we always invite stakeholders and leadership to an enhanced out-of-the-box product walkthrough so they can identify customization needs rather than reinventing the wheel. This helps accelerates user adoption and deployment.

Highlights - Dynamics 365 out-of-the-box (OOB) functions:

• Enhanced customer management tools
• Pre-defined sales and opportunity management processes
• Role-based dashboards
• Quotes and orders management system
• Pre-build entity forms and views
• Data management capabilities such as Excel and SharePoint integration

2. AI-Powered Insights

One of the ways through which Dynamics can accelerate your business is by helping everyone involved in your business double up their performance and productivity with the power of AI.

Whether your goal is to accelerate a single business process or bring changes to your entire industry, you can succeed by utilizing AI throughout your business. With Dynamics 365, your team can gain in-depth insights by making every touchpoint more relevant and effective with data-driven ideas that respond to customer behaviors and needs.

3. Flexible Licensing Model

D365 is a monthly subscription-based service. The ability to license based on user role and function in Dynamics 365 makes it attractive to many SMBs. For example, users who only need read access to the system can be licensed with a Team Member license rather than a full license. You also have the ability to license based on the applications you need.

4. Rapid Planning and Implementation

Microsoft partner eco-system is massive and that is an advantage to businesses who like to implement CRM solutions. Access to Dynamics 365 consultants has never been easier or cost-effective. There are some Dynamics 365 partners who specialize in licensing only. But others like GOBI Technologies can help with licensing, implementation, and management.

Thanks to the growing app store, organizations can find a pre-built app that fits their industry and or operational needs. This reduces the implementation timeline and helps reduce implementation costs.

5. Integration with Microsoft Ecosystem

What makes Dynamics 365 unique, is its native deep integration with Microsoft products such as Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote, Form (Customer Voice), Power Bi, and more. This integration coupled with AI brings true collaboration and enhanced productivity for your users.

With Outlook, you can track emails and meetings with a single click. While in SharePoint, you can have a centralized data repository connected to any CRM record.

There is also Teams integration which allows your team to make calls right from the CRM window as well as collaborate through dedicated channels.