Microsoft research completed last year found that 43% of IT Pros said that upgrading ERP systems was a top priority for their companies in the next 1-2 years.
What Is It?
Dynamics 365 combines CRM and ERP solutions into one product offering (available both on-premise and online) with applications for Sales, Field Service, Customer Service, Project Service Automation, Marketing, Financials, Customer Insights and Operations. There are two editions of Dynamics 365: Business (10-250 users) and Enterprise (250+ users), each with flexible tiered pricing and application plans.
Previously Dynamics CRM, Dynamics 365 offers functionality that stretches across traditional ERP, CRM, productivity software and other systems that are generally siloed in organizations. Now, Dynamics 365 pulls capabilities and features from Azure, CRM, ERP, Office 365, Power BI and Cortana AI all to help you better manage your business.
So, what does this all mean?
From customer insights to tracking and predicting customer interactions, Dynamics 365 creates a cohesive platform that pulls from multiple data sources to help you store, analyze and share data across teams.
Dynamics 365 allows you to:
- Enhance your view of the customer with both descriptive and predictive analytics
- Easily integrate across your systems, both existing on-prem and cloud products like Office 365
- Share information across teams using a common dashboard
- Improve your ability to make business decisions by making financial data and customer information more accessible
Check out some of the best features:
- Just last month, Microsoft announced that LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator will be integrated into Dynamics 365 for Sales. The integration will pull insights from LinkedIn data helping sales people tap into networks and relationships to improve their pipelines.
- Dynamics 365 partnered up with Adobe to help unify your sales and marketing through Adobe Marketing Cloud. From enhancing the web experience through targeted personalized marketing or providing a seamless campaign experience, Dynamics 365 and Adobe Marketing Cloud help you understand and track interactions with your customer, and track and measuring your marketing ROI—all on the same platform.
- Dynamics 365 uses Power BI features to pull in critical business information and customer analytics that you can share through interactive dashboards and reports. Automatic refreshes of the Dynamics 365 data keep you up to date with all your sales, marketing, and financial data.
- In a customer-first world, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights combines large customer data storage (through Azure), pre-built KPIs to help measure and track customer relationships, and business-specific solutions to help you customize the way you interact with your customers.
- In addition to providing customer insights, a unique Dynamics 365 feature is the Relationship Insights The Relationship Insights assistance tracks all available customer communications and interactions and suggests opportunities, follow-up tasks and helps manage your email to identify actionable messages.
- With Dynamics 365, use Outlook enhancements to track emails in CRM, find matching CRM records when composing emails, and schedule follow-up activities.
For more information, check out the resources listed below:
Dynamics 365 Pricing – Dynamics 365 approached licensing and pricing differently, with packaged plans to help companies tailor licenses for specific users (either full use or light use). Given that not all users in an organization are likely to be full users, the member pricing allows companies to add light users to their Dynamics 365 instance, allowing for the ability to purchase individual apps on a standalone basis.
Deploying Dynamics 365 for Outlook
Integrating Dynamics 365 with Office 365
Dynamics 365 Roadmap
Dynamics 365 On-Prem vs. Online - Dynamics 365 is available both on-premise and online; however, more features can be accessed with the online version. Check out the feature tables and FAQ’s to see what functionality each version has.
