"Microsoft Dynamics 365 - Got your head in the cloud yet?"

Running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Unified Operations in the Cloud is not just about having a modern ERP system hosted in the cloud, it’s much more than that. The past years Microsoft has made huge investments to the Dynamics family, the Power Platform as well as Azure.

As a partner it is sometimes hard to keep up with all changes published by Microsoft. Even our customers are facing the same challenges. It's hard to decide what to pick from the smorgasbord of features delivered by Microsoft. What if you miss the best part?

The most recent change when writing this blog is the fragmentation of Finance and Operations, which now are two separate apps; Finance and Supply Chain Management. To call a full-scale ERP-system an app feels wrong. But at the same time, this demonstrates Microsoft's vision which is that all apps can be connected allowing you as a customer to create a powerful cloud solution suiting your specific business needs.

In the back of my head I come to think about Best of Breed where you choose the best application for its particular purpose and then connect it to the other applications. In a way this is exactly what Microsoft is now offering. Let’s say that I'm currently using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, but I need to have better HR functionality in order to attract the best employees. Now I have the possible to connect Finance to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Talent, which gives me better tools for hiring and onboarding new employees.

We have already helped our customers to take advantages of the great tools that the cloud offers. The lowest hanging fruit is of course making use of the Power Platform where we have helped customer build apps within a day that solves a specific business demand. Earlier this would have resulted in a costly modification. But we also have customers using one of Microsoft business applications which are now starting to plan how they should expand the scope and add additional apps from the Dynamics family.

Another important aspect of the cloud is the connectivity. In October, Release Wave 2 was released. This release includes two new features for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management; Asset management and IoT. These are vital functions for realizing Industry 4.0 where connected machines sends near real time data back to the ERP-system. Of course, the huge amount of data needs to be analyzed and presented in an understandable way. And this is where Power BI comes up which provides out of the box embedded Power BI reports for Asset management, but also powerful tools for creating customized reports that can be shared within the organization.

To summarize this, Microsoft has invited us to take part of an interesting journey in the cloud that offers many new capabilities and possibilities. Sooner than later you realize that what you picked from the Microsoft smorgasbord became a new dish, your new favorite dish!