Financial consolidation with Prophix – 2 minute overview
March 2nd, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »GESS Exhibition ( Global Educational Supplies & Solutions ) 2016
March 2nd, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »Gulf Educational Supplies and Solutions (GESS) opened yesterday and is being held under the patronage of his Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President of the UAE, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, GESS and Global Education Forum (GEF). In its 9th edition, GESS provides the ideal platform for education professional worldwide to meet, find new products and services, and discuss a range of topics about education and its future.
H.E. Hussain Ibrahim Al Hammadi, Minister of UAE Ministry of Education, UAE and Synergy Software Systems Account Manager Sudhakar Raman at yesterday’s exhibition in Dubai. The event continues today and tomorrow.
H.E. Hussain Ibrahim Al Hammadi was appointed Minister of Education in 2014 by His Highness Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. He is also CEO of the Emirates Advanced Investments Group of companies.
Synergy Software Systems is a Microsoft President’s Club member and implements solutions for the Education sector, such as: specialised Admissions and Billing in Dynamics Ax, library system, classroom scheduling, as well as traditional enterprise solutions for finance, HR, payroll, CRM , T@A and the Office 365 suite of applications.
Voice of the Customer (VoC), a new feature for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
March 1st, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »On Feb 19, 2016,the General Availability of Voice of the Customer (VoC), a new feature for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, was announced. VoC empowers organizations through feedback and survey tools that provide general sentiment, contextual insights and transactional understanding throughout the customer journey. The survey analytics included with the Voice of the Customer solution help you use customer feedback to identify gaps in service, run targeted marketing campaigns, and send offers to increase sales.
This robust solution will help businesses win more deals faster, particularly when there is an identified need to better understand individual customers, or to programmatically respond to market demands.
Most companies want to know what their customers’ want—but often than they have an incomplete view. The disconnect degrades product R&D, marketing communications, sales effectiveness, services delivery and customer experience (CX) objectives. The negative financial impact incurred in any one of these areas is a significant hidden loss than goes unrecognized by most business leaders.
Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs are a strategic tool for forward thinking customer-centric CEOs, CMOs and customer experience leaders. These programs improve the customer dialogue and tabulate what customers most want from their suppliers.
VoC program.
1. Assess your culture. Everyone claims to be customer focused -so why are there so many unhappy customers? In practice many companies are product-centric, not customer-centric. Its not enough to write a vision or a goal or even to listen – what you do is what matters. So the foundation of a VoC program has to be there already in the corporate culture. As a simple test email your own sales team, contact your own support centre, and review the QA complaints, be your won mystery shopper, try using your own products at home.
2. Assign a champion. Just as with an erp implementation, strategic business initiatives require executive sponsorship. Additionally, a designated resource must be tasked to design the VoC methods, data schema and use cases if its going to have any substance and be delivered in a reasonable time frame. Your customer data resides in multiple systems, a VOC business analyst has to understand business processes and build relationships that cut across functional departmental boundaries. .
3. Set measurable objectives, owners and time frames. VoC will capture, categorize and prioritize customer expectations and preferences (by customer segment, ) so that the company can orchestrate the right mix of culture, people, processes and technology in a coordinated effort to consistently satisfy their customers. It may be helpful to organize preferences in a hierarchy with related preferences linked together.
4. Business processes. VoC is not about technology, but its a lot easier with the right tools. Manual methods include: focus groups, customer interviews, mystery shoppers, or referral programs. Such methods deliver qualitative analysis, but are not so easy to scale across a group, nor are the outcomes easy to analyse. VoC automation can continuously gathers customer input so that it can be easily analyzed and acted upon and even predict future trends.
5. Segment your customers. Customers are seldom homogeneous. The dame customer may interact differently with different lines of business so VoC programs should define customer attributes and segmentation. B2B companies might segment customers using both explicit data e.g. demographics , and implicit data e.g.. transactions and complaints . B2C customers might include key performance indicators such as RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), loyalty program activities and social media behaviors. Solutions like Dynamics Ax Retail and Dynamics CRM Social monitoring incorporate such features..
Customer segmentation should also have categories both for target prospects, and lapsed customers. The lapsed group may be a company’s single biggest customer segment and can offer some valuable insight; and a reactivation strategy can bring big addtional revenues.
6. Maser Data management. Leverage as much customer data as possible that si key to a VOC programme . Is yoru data split between many applications: ERP, CRM, billing, marketing, service management, email apps, survey tools, Excel , shadow systems and many more. Disparate data siloes need to be bridged to make sense of the customer relationships.
Consolidate, standardize, persist and distribute customer data throughout the business that is accurate, complete and consistent. Understand the data requirements and challenges. before you begin a VoC program.
7. VoC Tools. VOC Hubs are often differentiated by their preference for inbound or outbound methods, i.e. the ability to capture data either directly, or through third party systems, and integration capabilities. VoC applications use many techniques such as email or online surveys, web self-service, website analytics, chat, Quality Monitoring, EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management), text mining, speech analytics, case management insights and NLP (Natural Language Processing) Knowledge Management.
8. Integrate to CRM. Voice of the Customer software should integrates with your customer system of record, i.e. your CRM system which is now available with Dynamics CRM. Send VoC questionnaires or surveys from CRM and receive returns to the CRM application. Automate the process and personalise the correspondence based on the customer data (i.e. products purchased, prior VoC input, etc.)
More personalized surveys improve response rates and make the feedback actionable. CRM applications cantabulate VoC data from multiple data sources, append customer feedback directly to the company or contact record, update the account’s activity feed (i.e. Yammer), distribute notifications when customer problems or exceptions are identified, create and assign tasks for follow-up, roll the data up into KPIs and reports, and expose patterns and correlations among customer feedback and company attributes (people, products, departments, locations, day of the week, etc.)
9. Engage your customers. Whatever engagement method you use, use closed questions to confirm facts, and open ended questions designed to understand the customer’s vision, objectives, partnership preferences, frustrations and measures of success. Research shows that how you ask the question will affect the result. Askign which product do like most? and “Which product do you dislike most?’ may get the same answer. Ask “Which one would you buy? and the focus is on reasons to buy. Ask “Which would you not buy?” and the focus is on reasons not to buy and again the same answer may be given to both questions. So test.
What customer touch points (email correspondence, call center recordings, social media comments, marketing conversions, sales win/loss analysis, customer on-boarding, user group interactions) can contribute to a holistic view.
10. Measure the results. How will you know that your VOC programme delivers a payrback? . Customer satisfaction measures such as NPS, CSAT or customer loyalty, should translate into hard bottom line performance metrics sales revenues and ROI — that come from customer up-sell/cross-sell, customer retention, customer referral, reduced complaints, better product design, and enahnced Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Time stamp and baseline your key metrics so . Customers evolve, the get older- change jobs, move house, get ill, get married, and that affects their needs and preferences and income .
An accurate, complete and continuous Voice of the Customer may never be attainable but getting close supports strategic customer strategies rather than tactical ones. When you really know what your customers, your business strategy, messaging and products and services resonate with customers and increase marketing effectiveness, sales conversions, satisfied customers and ultimately Customer Lifetime Value.
What’s not to like about that?
ERP 2016 – what is new?
February 29th, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »According to a 2015 Gartner Research report on the growth of Enterprise ERP mobility, “…the proliferation of (today’s) mobile devices represents a real opportunity to increase the penetration of ERP for all types of workers — in healthcare, manufacturing, finance, even charity organizations — and overcome some of the resistance to ERP usability. However, deploying ERP on mobile devices presents many challenges, due to the rapidly evolving mobility device and app landscape.Mobility does not come free from the ERP vendors. It requires expensive upgrades to their newest technology platforms and constant patching as the vendors deliver functionality a little bit at a time.”
So, in this social media, always connected world of smart phones where does erp fit in?. User demand will drive it as will software vendors, but be clear why you need it – mobile technicians in the field, mobile workflow approvals – or just a lot of pretty pictures. If you are going down the road of mobile operation give some thought to mobile device management – patching, security, geo-fencing, mobile support logs etc.
Agility, flexibility, simplicity, scalability, are typical buzz words but first worry about stability and security – whether on cloud or on premise. When you do that think about your own Internal IT skills and staff turn over, and those of your implementation and support partner. Moving to the cloud may offer a whole load of costs and benefits- but who is managing and supporting your end -do they have the skills? Citing research from IDC, a recent TechTarget report explained that by 2020, approximately 30 percent of tech suppliers currently in the market will have either failed, been acquired or changed dramatically. As businesses become dependent on these service providers for everything from virtualization functions to core cloud systems, they must be prepared to handle the operational disruption that will come when different vendors go out of the market.
IDC projects that the global Internet of Things (IoT) market will be worth $1.7 trillion by 2020, and enterprises from all sectors are embracing the opportunity to deliver and take advantage of the connected economy. Gartner describes a “digital mesh,” which it defines as “an expanding series of devices, services, platforms, informational networks and individuals that integrate together and provide contextual intelligence and enable greater collaboration.The connected economy is now wide open to midsize companies. Leveraging cloud technologies to connect employees, customers, partners and devices together is fast creating new ways of doing business. The changing market for products and services means businesses will move from a single SKU per product to a bundled product with affiliated services (warranty, monitoring) and subscriptions. Organizations’ existing back-office systems, including ERP, need to adapt to this new business model and support effective management and monetization of bundled and multi-modal products. An ERP that has integrated configure, price, quote (CPQ) capabilities will enable customers to easily order products, and for businesses to let the customer know when to expect delivery.
Forget the technology – there is emotional effort needed to successfully get a full-fledged ERP system adopted into a company culture. These days people even try to pay lip service to BPR and change management, or senior management ownership and leadership. Just demand the lowest costs and fastest time, oh and by the way we would like a lot of extras thrown in. Out of the box will do as long as it works exactly the way we want. Why do we need to test – it should work. Training – ‘train the trainer’ is often close to the bling leading the blind. And the consultant who comes at half price is the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
Such factors have produced more ERP failures than Apple sells phones. ERP selection and implementation failures whose fault is it. If every lesson ever learned is ignored if cut price costs and unrealistic timelines are more important than success then where does Corporate leadership responsibility come in to get the ball across the goal line.
Technology and project documents alone will never ensure a successful ERP selection outcome. The enterprise culture has to commit whatever needs to be done, whenever it comes time to do it. Whether in the cloud or on premise out of the box or bespoke, mobile or at your desk does not change the need for two hands to clap. A joint team means shoulder to shoulder.
Microsoft Social Engagement 2016
February 22nd, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »
Drive customer issues from reporting to resolution with the new Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 release. In this video you’ll see how to escalate a social media post from an unhappy customer directly to a customer service rep by linking social posts to CRM. And how posts are automatically prioritized with the new intention analysis and automation rules. You’ll also learn how author lookup, direct publishing, and Office Groups work to help you engage with your customers on many new levels.
Include pictures when replying to posts
When you reply to a post from within Social Engagement, add pictures to your replies on Facebook and Twitter. Quick and easy accessibility to your social profiles is very important in Social Engagement, as a result we’ve made the social profile page more prominent in the Settings area. Go to Settings > Social Profiles to add, share or remove social profiles
Search Setupavailable on all devices
Review or tweak your search topics while you’re on the go – dor example, update your search terms to include the latest hashtag of the conference you’re attending. If you have a Power Analyst or Administrator user role then you can create and edit search topics and search rules on your mobile device.
Improvements to user experience
When you review the organization of you search topics in the category list, the search rules in a search topic are represented with the icons of the corresponding rules. The post list in Analytics and the wide view of streams separate information about the author from the post’s content for improved readability.
Improvements to Analytics widgets
Great user experience is a key aspect of for Social Engagement. The Sources widget now comes with a full-screen view to show the entire list of sources and their number of posts. Authors by Source not only shows the five most active sources, but also summarizes how many authors posted in the other sources. Last but not least, there is improved highlighting on the Sources History widget. It’s now much easier to read the data points in the chart.
Management Reporter – Updated budget control integration for AX2012 in CU14
February 22nd, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »(This capability is also available for AX 2012 R2 and requires a hotfix KB 3091042 similarly there will be a hotfix for Ax 2012 RTM)
Management Reporter CU14, introduced a new method of integration for budget control related data. Previously budget control category data was integrated as book codes; for instance, FY2015 – ConfirmedEncumbrances or FY2015 – ConfirmedPreencubrances.
Management Reporter CU14, has a single budget control book code per budget model (ex. FY2015-BudgetControl) and the budget control categories (ex. Original budget, Draft Encumbrances, Encumbrances, etc) integrate as attributes allowing for greater flexibility and consistency in regards to report design.
Budget reservations for draft actual expenditures is incorporated into the new design.
Below is an example of how to create a budget funds available column definition using a single budget control related scenario (book code) and filtering columns for specific budget control categories. Notice that the Book code = FY2015BudgetControl (where FY2015 is the name of the budget model). The attribute filter is set to the budget control category to display in this column.
BudgetFundsAvailCol1A
Addi columns for actual expenditures, encumbrances, and Pre-encumbrances in the same manner:
BudgetFundsAvailCol2
When using this column definition within a report definition, mark “Posted and unposted activity” in the Provisional field if to include any draft amounts for budget control categories.
BudgetFundsAvailReportDef
Future CUs will provide a budget funds available report by default to use as a starting point for your report designs.
Dynamics CRM 2016 – The new light-weight CRM App for Outlook
February 22nd, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »What’s the difference between the new CRM App for Outlook and the existing CRM for Outlook Add-in?
The new CRM App for Outlook is a light-weight app directed to accomplish a limited set of specific tasks like tracking and converting emails, and reviewing selective details about the specific contacts and leads from the email.
The CRM for Outlook add-in is a full client for Dynamics CRM that gives complete access to all of Dynamics CRM’s functionality, including dashboards and full grids, and even allows you to work offline
The new app requires no installation, no configuration, and no additional log-in steps, Track your important customer emails directly within Outlook, whether on your PC or Mac running the desktop version of Outlook, or on the go through Outlook Web Access on your laptop or phone (Windows, Android, or iOS).
See relevant information from Dynamics CRM Online about who sent you the email, and pop open the full form directly from within the new CRM App for Outlook.?
Note: The CRM App for Outlook is rolling out over the next few weeks to CRM Online organizations independently following the CRM 2016 release. If you don’t see the below options, your organization hasn’t yet received the feature. This app requires Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Online and Exchange Online. Dynamics CRM Online users can easily add the app to their Outlook directly from within Dynamics CRM Online. Simply click on the gear icon and choose Apps for Dynamics CRM. Then choose Add app to Outlook under the CRM App for Outlook heading. The app will show up in the user’s Outlook interface when reading or composing emails anywhere they use Outlook.
Dynamics CRM Online administrators can push the app to user’s Outlook interfaces through the newly added CRM App for Outlook settings page.
Keep in mind that for both cases, in order for users to be eligible to get the app, they will need to have their Exchange mailbox configured with Server-Side Synchronization for incoming emails as well as have the Use CRM App for Outlook user role privilege.
Dynamics CRM 2016 Marketing Update 0.1
February 22nd, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2016 Update 0.1. As usual, the update will be applied automatically, but your local administrator can control when your organization will be updated. This is an incremental update that delivers a few new features, plus scalability and performance enhancements. The online help will be updated very soon.
Option to treat upcoming (not ready to start) tasks as active or inactive
All tasks in Dynamics Marketing include a Status field, to track a task as it travels from creation to completion. One special status is Not Ready to Start. Use this status to mark a task that is part of a series of tasks to be completed in sequence (as part of a job), and which should wait for a previous task to complete before starting. When the previous task in a sequence is marked as completed (or canceled), then the next task is automatically updated from Not Ready to Start to Not Started, which means that task’s prerequisites are complete and the task is ready to start.
By default, Not Ready to Start tasks are considered inactive, which means those are hidden in the standard list view unless you choose to view inactive tasks. When the status gets changed to Not Started, the task is then considered active and is visible by default. This makes it easy to find your most important and relevant task. Configure your site so that Not Ready to Start tasks are considered active (and thus visible by default in your task list). Your choice for this setting should be based on how your organization uses the tasks feature.
Administrators set this option in the Task Options section of the Site Settings page. ( Configure site settings, Manage tasks)
Note: This new setting also affects new-task alerts, which can be sent to users when a task assigned to them becomes active (or is created in an active state). If you set Not Ready to Start tasks as active, then users who have a new-task alert configured could receive alerts for tasks with start dates that are actually days, weeks, or even months into the future.
Customized landing page category values
For landing page fields that display as drop-down lists (categories), choose which of the available values to include for each drop-down list on the page. This lets you fine-tune each of landing pages by removing drop-down values that are not appropriate for a given context. All values are included by default.
Option to restrict permission to delete contacts
Administrators can configure Dynamics Marketing to prevent most users from deleting contacts, even when they have Edit-Contact privileges. In previous versions, and still the default setting, all users who can edit contacts can also delete. (Edit Marketing privileges enable this for marketing contacts, while Edit Site Contacts privileges enable this for site, vendor, and client contacts). Administrators can now set an option that prevents all users (other than administrators) from deleting contacts. Administrators with Edit-Contact privileges can always delete contacts. Regardless of this setting, Dynamics Marketing contacts are always soft deleted, never hard deleted. This means that deleted contacts are always kept in the database, but are marked as inactive and hidden by default.
Administrators can set this option in the Contact Options section of the Site Settings page.
New OData feeds
Dynamics Marketing now publishes even more types of data as OData feeds for use in Power BI reports, custom applications, and other OData consumers. New OData feeds available in this version include the Status field for the company and components tables, and component-related fields for several related tables.
Updated Features
Improved query logic for custom contact fields
In previous versions of Dynamics Marketing, you could not create queries (dynamic marketing lists) to find records with an empty or null value in a custom contact field. For example, if you created a custom contact field called “blood type” and created a query to find contacts where “blood type equals null”, then no results would be returned. In Dynamics Marketing 2016 Update 0.1, querying contacts where “blood type equals null” now returns all contacts that have not yet registered a blood type. This means that queries based on custom contact fields now work the same way as they do for standard contact fields.
To make sure all existing queries continue to work as expected, the new query logic will only apply to queries created after you update to Dynamics Marketing 2016 Update 0.1. Queries created in previous versions will continue to use the logic that doesn’t return results for null values.
· Custom contact fields will never be “empty”—those can only be “null”. This means you should not use the “is empty” operator to find fields without values.
· The “does not contain” operator does not return null values. When you query for contacts where “blood type does not contain ‘B’”, then you would find contacts with blood type A+, A-, O+, and O-, but you would not find contacts where the blood type is not registered. To include these, add an extra clause to create a query, such as “blood type does not contain ‘B’” or “blood type is null”. This logic is similar for the “does not equal” operator.
Azure requirements
Both the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector and the SDK use Microsoft Azure to facilitate communication to and from Dynamics Marketing. Depending on your scenario, you may be able to use built-in managed queues (which are included with your Dynamics Marketing subscription), or you may need to purchase your own Azure subscription
To connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM (on-premises), you must provide a service bus from your own Microsoft Azure subscription. The Azure subscription that you use does not necessarily need to be in the same Microsoft Office 365 tenant as Dynamics Marketing.
Browser
Dynamics Marketing is a cloud-based service that requires no special software running on users’ computers, other than an up-to-date web browser.
Pop-Ups: You must configure your browser to allow all pop-up windows from your Dynamics Marketing domain (see your browser’s documentation for instructions). Most modern web browsers block all pop-ups by default. Some browsers alert you when they block a pop-up window (for example by showing an icon in the address bar), but others do not. Some, but not all, of Dynamics Marketing print and file-upload features use a pop-up window of a type sometimes blocked by pop-up blockers.
Allow JavaScript from Dynamics Marketing; JavaScript must be enabled for your browser, at least for your Dynamics Marketing domain. Most browsers enable JavaScript by default.
·Allow cookies from Dynamics Marketing: Cookies must be enabled for your browser, at least for your Dynamics Marketing domain. Most browsers enable cookies by default.
‘Delve’ into Office 365
February 11th, 2016 by Stephen Jones 1 comment »At convergence in Orlando last year Delve was part of of demonstrations featuring Gigjam and Cortana Analytics but what does it do? In Microsoft Office 365, Delve is the app that tracks and stores your activity.
One of the benefits of having a Microsoft Office 365 subscription is that the suite of available apps is periodically updated with new features. Many times these updates and upgrades are l incremental changes that your employees may not even notice. However, sometimes these updates are completely new application features.On January 7, 2016,Microsoft released a new feature for Office 365 Delve to simplify organized team collaboration
The new feature for Delve is called ‘boards‘. The boards concept gives employees a new way both to organize and to share content with fellow employees and the enterprise in general.
Delve can now also be the app that lets you organize your activity. For example, when working on a specific project create a board dedicated to that project, and attach every document, video, meeting, and image your team creates. From that board, share everything with some or all of the entire enterprise and potentially let everyone in the enterprise add to the board for the project, depending on what permissions you establish. Enterprise wide collaboration and document sharing .
Is this useful? There other collaborative tools from SharePoint to to Yammer, to Skype Business.
Microsoft’s vision of a global mobile workforce, means collaboration comes in the form of sharing documents and easy Skype meetings, Delve boards shared amongst team members makes sense. But sharing that collaboration, with all its rest of the enterprise seems like more of a distraction and much less useful. Much like Facebook can be full of random junk or be a targeted focus group similarly Yammer can invite constructive feedback or just be a mass waste of time with uninformed contributors making ill informed comment or reading such comments out of context. We have all suffered the email tsunami of being copied on endless minor updates on trivial matters more driven by office politics than business sense.
From the rest of the enterprise’s point of view, do we really need or want to know what every small team from finance to marketing is working on for a particular client? Most of us have enough trouble tracking our own activity, let alone worrying about everyone else’s. Will all employees will be willing to share their work with the rest of the enterprise using Delve and the boards system – what if a project is not going well? Some policy guidelines and monitoring need to be thought about before adoption.
The new mobile, always connected, social media focused, collaborative workforce of today are looking for similar features to support their work effort. But does it really help when people who sit next to each other above to communicate by email; or sit around a dinner table communicating by text messages?
Collaboration between and amongst small groups working in teams is the backbone of any enterprise. However, vast dissemination of that small group collaboration sounds like noise. Where such a tool helos is that you can self serve to find information without it having to be pushed. Users can read what they want when they need, and not have their email boxes filled multiple attachments they don’t need to read. Its easier to mass communicate when users opt in. Security policies and controls need to be considered.
Microsoft Office 365 Delve is an interesting application. Like all tools in needs training and experience/expertise to get best use. It will be particularly helpful for those teams that are part of a mobile workforce. The addition of boards gives teams a different tool to help organize and to coordinate their collaborative activity.
So well done Microsoft for keeping Office 365 fresh with new features and just as with any other office products use it when appropriate.
New Dynamics Ax launch and Dubai Summit – March 2016 – meet Synergy Software Systems
February 10th, 2016 by Stephen Jones No comments »Envision – Middle East Dynamics Summit which will be organized by Microsoft on 23rd of March, in Dubai meet Synergy Software Systems there as a Gold Sponsor
Let us show you the new web based Dynamics Ax which will be launched in March.
If you can’t wait – then call us now for a preview – Synergy’s consultants are already hands on with the beta release.
There will be a global launch event – Synergy customers who wish to tune in please contact us and we will register you. During this exciting event, to show you the new Dynamics AX hear from early adopter customers who will share how they are using the new Dynamics AX cloud service to speed up their business.
Note the time zone is PST
Theme: Increase the Speed of Doing Business
When:
March 8, 2016 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm PST APAC
March 9, 2016 8:00 am – 9:00 am PST ROW
