Tag Archives: Stay
Stay Informed with Message Center notifications for Dynamics and PowerApps
I have been asked a few times recently how certain users or administrators can stay informed on important changes such as service updates and other major updates that may impact their environment. The Message Center available in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center gives you a high-level overview of planned changes, dates, and how this may affect your users.
Most Dynamics users will not have access to Message Center, unless they have been assigned one of the Admin Roles that gives you access. Not all Admin roles will have access to the Message Center. There is a list of roles that DO NOT have access to messages HERE
In regards to Dynamics, those that need access to this information may have the Dynamics 365 Admin or Power Platform Admin roles. However, there are others that will give access to these messages.
There are some new read-only roles, one of which provides access to Message Center messages without the additional access that comes with the admin roles.
One of these being the Message Center Reader role:
When a user is granted this role, they can navigate to https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/
Under the Health tab, they will see Message Center
It’s important to note, that they will also have read-only access to users, groups, domains and subscriptions.
From there, they can change their preferences for which messages they want to see. It will take up to 8 hours for changes to these settings to take effect.
You can also select the option to get a weekly digest of messages, including the ability to add two additional emails that can receive these notifications. Since the Admin roles may not be as granular as some would hope, you can create a distribution list to send to a specific group of people that may need these notifications to plan accordingly. This weekly digest goes out on Mondays only and you must be opted in by the prior Saturday to get the digest for that week
If the Message Center Reader role provides too much access, such as visibility to other service notifications, you can setup one user that is allowed to have visibility to these messages and configure their preferences to only show Dynamics messages and then add other user email addresses in their preferences or setup a forwarding rule within Outlook.
Since this is only weekly, it obviously does not provide real-time notifications as some would like. There are two options to configure real-time notifications, using either Power Automate or the Microsoft Office 365 Service Communications API.
There is a great blog post HERE from one of our Fast Track Solution Architects on how to use a Power Automate flow to configure and receive real-time notifications.
Additionally, another one of our Premier Field Engineers, Ali Youssefi, has a blog post HERE on using the Microsoft Office 365 Service Communications API to setup real-time notifications.
Thanks for reading!
Aaron Richards
Plant Tours In The 21st Century: How Procurement Executives Can Stay Connected
Part four of a six-part blog series based on 30+ years’ experience collaborating on innovation with complex, discrete machinery manufacturers.
In the third blog in this series, I discussed how Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) have facilitated greater insight for manufacturing executives. Now I want to spend some time examining how procurement executives can gain greater insight into internal operations and partner with suppliers to achieve true innovation.
If you’ve been following this series (thank you!), you know that my motivation for writing these blogs was an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why (and How) to Take a Plant Tour,” written by David M. Upton, professor of operations management at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. I found it fascinating to see how much things have changed since the time he wrote the article in May 1997.
Professor Upton wrote:
“Plant visits allow managers to review a supplier’s qualifications, to share best practices with a partner, or to benchmark performance and practices …. The main purpose of assessment tours is not to acquire new knowledge. Rather, it is to use what visitors already know to evaluate a plant. There are a number of different types of assessment tours. Some aim to determine whether a plant can fill a particular role. For example, a customer may visit a potential supplier to assess quality, or a corporate planner may visit a plant to decide if it could develop the ability to fill orders quickly enough to support the company’s new strategy. Other assessment tours focus less on a plant’s existing capabilities and more on how that plant might be changed to perform better or differently in the future.”
During the earliest days of industry, manufacturers found comfort in doing business with the shop across town. They believed that doing business with a long-time, trusted local source was the way to ensure both quality and cost, as well as to build a stronger community. In time, however, it became not only possible but financially desirable to procure supplies from around the globe, which in turn required those plant tours that Professor Upton was talking about.
In 1997, the term “procurement” was virtually synonymous with “purchasing,” and procurement managers generally worked under the direction of manufacturing engineers, supply chain executives, and finance officers. At the time, the best way to evaluate a supplier, as Professor Upton noted, was probably boots on the ground.
By contrast, procurement today is a far more complex and dynamic process, and it’s corporate malfeasance to do business with someone just because they’re the shop across town, a fraternity brother, or a golfing buddy. Procurement managers now may have to work with hundreds of suppliers from around the world, adding the complexity of ever-shifting concerns of shipping, international law, tariffs, currency exchange, and more.
Procurement specialists no longer work at the direction of others, but rather with them to find the most suitable suppliers. It’s not uncommon for the procurement specialist to initiate an innovation and bring it to the attention of the engineers or supply chain executives.
Procurement managers are also crucial in a crisis. Whether it’s a product recall, a humanitarian crisis, civil unrest, or a natural disaster, it may be critical that procurement responds without flinching. It could be that a supplier is unexpectedly unable to fulfill orders, or there could be an unanticipated surge in demand that must be quickly accommodated. Procurement specialists may have to identify and contract with new suppliers urgently. Better yet, they can proactively identify the lowest risk suppliers, such as those with a resilient and sustainable infrastructure, to avoid a crisis in the first place. Being able to accommodate that level of procurement requires a truly connected intelligent enterprise, one that reaches out to engineering, supply chain, finance, manufacturing, legal, marketing, and the highest levels of management.
Another benefit of digital procurement is the ability to turn a profit. It’s ironic that a business division whose central purpose is to spend money could be profitable, but it’s true. Procurement can sell data back to suppliers, who could in turn use this additional information to create superior, cost-efficient products. While it’s intuitive that suppliers should seek the maximum amount of profit from their customers, smart suppliers understand that when their customers succeed, they succeed.
Without question, there are obvious risks and liabilities in sharing information with suppliers. Not only are there competitive concerns, but legal issues as well – for example, who actually owns the data? Nonetheless, most procurement executives agree that working closely with suppliers to share information and innovate may be well worth the risk.
However, as the old saying goes, if you want to have a good friend you need to be a good friend. According to the Deloitte Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey 2018:
“Last year, 86% of procurement leaders aspired to being ‘excellent’ as a strategic business partner in the future. In 2018, only 24% consider themselves as excellent: although this is a slight improvement from 2017, it highlights the need for further improvement in business partnering by procurement teams.”
Only the best-run businesses will be excellent strategic business partners, and the best way of winning the confidence of your suppliers is to have a thoroughly integrated procurement solution. It must have an efficient digital process for sourcing both indirect and direct materials, it must work for all spend categories, and it must manage the entire source-to-contract process from integrating new bills of materials from product lifecycle management systems through sourcing, contract management, and manufacturing execution integration. It is possible. To get a glimpse of how it works, take a look at this short video.
Back in 1997, Professor Upton could not have envisioned the strategic importance procurement plays today, but it’s remarkable that not long ago the most thorough way to assess a supplier was to take a quick tour of the plant. On the other hand, Professor Upton did foresee the challenge of hiring and retaining qualified industrial manufacturing talent, and that’s the topic of my next blog.
For more insight about plant tours in the 21st century, stay tuned to this six-part blog series based on my 30+ years’ experience collaborating on innovation with complex, discrete machinery manufacturers.
Feline Friends Stay Cozy
Buddies relax together.
“Let me… lemme just… yeah that’s better!”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/tNF0p3B.
Stay Connected with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portals
In its simplest expression, a customer relationship management system helps you connect better. To this end, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) puts at your disposal several tools: these include web-based, interactive portals allowing you to connect with your clients, partners or employees, depending on your specific needs.
Easy to set up without HTML or code, preconfigured Dynamics 365 portals allow you to connect, communicate and collaborate directly. In the case of client portals, they maximize customer engagement by providing them with a direct channel to your organization, facilitating processes and freeing up your service and support representatives.
Here are just a few ways Dynamics 365 portals can benefit your organization:
- Let clients create and follow up on incidents through a customer service portal. This alleviates some of the burden on your customer support team, allowing them to focus on resolving incidents by reducing the number of follow-up requests they need to answer. The information is also recorded automatically in the CRM, where it is easily accessible by users who need it.
- Give customers access to a knowledge base or FAQ. Suggested knowledge base articles based on keywords allow customers to find answers to their questions without having to submit a support request. This keeps the number of incidents down and speeds up the process, increasing customer satisfaction.
- Allow customers to get in touch with other customers or representatives easily. A moderated forum is a great way to promote customer engagement by providing them with a platform where they can share tips, ask questions, and discuss your products and services.
- Ensure that your customer contact information is always up to date. Customers can validate and update their contact details and other information themselves through the portal. Having up-to-date customer information in the CRM also allows you to touch base with them through various campaigns and increase long-term retention.
- Customize your portals based on your needs. Code and HTML can be used to modify portals as necessary: you can promote upcoming events, for instance, or add custom entities such as a product list that customers can scroll through. Knowledge base entries can be pulled up automatically depending on the product chosen, to name only a few possibilities.
With all these benefits, the portals provided by Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement provide a great tool for interaction and engagement by allowing your customers to interact with your organization, freeing up your employees to focus on their priorities and provide a higher level of customer service.
By JOVACO Solutions,
Love it or Hate It: Auto ML is Here to Stay
In the data and analytics world, trends come and go. A few years ago, the term “big data” was all the rave.Now, it is simply an implicit capability that many organizations possess. More recently, however, I’ve been in many meetings where terms like artificial intelligence (AI) and Auto ML (automated machine learning) have been making their way into the buzzword bingo cards.
For this blog, we’ll put AI aside for the moment and chat about Auto ML. Conceptually, Auto ML is an umbrella term used to describe a set of processes that are well, automatic and require little to no code. Essentially, these processes may involve automatic:
- Data prep and cleansing routines
- Creation of new features to be used in machine learning models
- Selection of which parameters are to be used in the model
- Model identification and selection
- Hyperparameter tuning
This automation is packed with promises. Some vendors claim that the intention of this technology is for it to be used by citizen data scientists (or non-experts) to address the skills shortage in the industry and that in some cases data scientists will no longer be needed. Quite simply, for a majority of use cases, it would extremely risky to deploy models without vetting and validation so we would not recommend this approach.
For organizations new to Auto ML, the thought of deploying algorithms into mission critical business systems without proper vetting and testing should throw up a red flag. In order for ML to work, data scientists are a crucial factor. There is still a use for Auto ML in many organizations, but it will not displace or replace our coveted data science unicorns.
Auto ML will augment the work of data scientists, not replace it Recently, I had the good fortune to chat with a group of experts on the topic. To sum up the conversations, we concluded that Auto ML is most useful to augment the work of data scientists and citizen data scientists. Auto ML will be most effective when organizations use it to quickly identify which areas or projects might be most valuable for further exploration by a data scientist. It can also be used as an aid to data scientists to increase their productivity. Auto ML may also help to increase the accuracy of their final solutions, by helping the data scientist quickly consider a wider range of analytic approaches.
But buyer beware, when looking at Auto ML, consider these questions:
- Is the Auto ML transparent? That is, can you explain why the model makes a particular recommendation? This is critical for many applications and is imperative for many regulations.
- Is the Auto ML extensible and flexible? Can you customize and extend the pipeline generated to suit your specific needs?
- What is the workflow and process to vet and deploy the models generated?
- After you deploy the machine learning pipelines, how will you monitor, manage, refresh, and govern the deployment?
To find out more about AutoML and how it can benefit your business, watch this YouTube tutorial video.
Next up, artificial intelligence. Stay tuned for my next blog as we discuss the growing importance of “thinking” computer systems.
How Supply Chain Companies Can Stay The Course In Uncertain Times
Part 2 in the series “Digital Manufacturing“
Benjamin Franklin once wrote that death and taxes are the only two certainties in life. But there’s another item we should add to that list: uncertainty.
Things like elections, immigration, and changes in trade policy profoundly impact the way companies conduct business. These issues affect marketplaces, supply, demand, shipping costs, and more.
For manufacturers to remain profitable in the face of uncertainty, they need to better understand their supply chains and adapt as issues start altering their operations.
Here are three ways manufacturers can prevent uncertainty from becoming a nuisance:
1. Gain total supply-chain visibility
Innovative technologies, like the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital twins, provide manufacturers with real-time insight into their products, processes, and partners.
Total visibility helps organizations determine if a flawed product is behind lackluster sales or if poor economic conditions are to blame. It helps them identify shortcomings in planning and production. And it gives them insight around labor shortages that could complicate their operations.
With a complete picture of the supply chain, manufacturers can also simulate different scenarios and figure out the best way to handle the potential challenges.
For instance, if new tariffs are expected to increase the cost of raw materials from China, a business could proactively plan to source its materials from Mexico instead. This ensures the manufacturer remains as profitable as possible.
2. Increase customer collaboration
We’re living in an age of increasing customer-centricity. Manufacturers that fail to anticipate and fulfill their customers’ elevated expectations with high-quality personalized products delivered at breakneck speed – even within the hour – risk losing their competitive edge.
One way to achieve this is by developing smart products equipped with IoT-enabled sensors.
Smart products enable manufacturers to stay closely connected to their customers. They allow companies to see how buyers interact with their goods, which enables them to collaborate with consumers.
By placing IoT sensors in its running shoes, for example, a manufacturer can track an athlete’s speed, distance, and cadence. Best of all, it can assess the workout and recommend the perfect pair of personalized sneakers through a mobile app. This won’t only improve the athletic performance – it’ll improve the customer experience, too.
3. Embrace distributed manufacturing
Distributed manufacturing is all about localization. It involves working with a variety of partners around the globe to produce products precisely where they’re most in demand.
If the market for VR headsets starts heating up in Paris or the demand for parkas begins growing in Oslo, manufacturers could produce those items in those specific cities.
3D printing is one method that makes distributed manufacturing possible. Today, companies can leverage the technology to create products wherever they’re needed – including at the site of delivery.
Say new-home development starts booming in Tokyo. Instead of a construction company ordering the nails, lumber, and plaster normally required to build the walls of a house, a 3D printer could produce the fully assembled walls. This eliminates shipping costs and delivery times and increases efficiency.
Solve your uncertainty issues with confidence
Circumstances can change in an instant. And it’s impossible to predict what future events will impact your company and how. That’s why flexibility is key.
Innovative technology empowers manufacturers to stay agile in the face of constant change and uncertainty. And in today’s ever-evolving world, staying agile means staying successful.
In the digital era, manufacturers must transform or be left behind. As the pace of change accelerates and competition increases through blurring of industry lines and new entrants to the market. For more Information on the five stages to digital maturity, register to download this MPI white paper.
Dog And Human Stay Together
Enduring love.
“I have just met you and I love you.”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/yEzljjf.
Miller Heiman CEO Byron Matthews: Stay Tuned for the CRM 4.0 Revolution
Byron Matthews is the president and CEO of
Miller Heiman Group, a global provider of sales methodology and sales technology solutions.
In this exclusive interview, Matthews shares some secrets to enabling sales success.
Miller Heiman CEO
Byron Matthews
CRM Buyer: What is sales enablement, and why is it important?
Byron Matthews: There’s a gap in performance across B2B selling, because buyers are innovating faster than sellers are getting better at selling. Sales enablement’s function is to try to close that gap. It’s not sales operation, like territory plans or comp plans. It’s more strategic, in terms of trying to drive sales performance by getting better content and coaching services for salespeople.
Selling models are changing. It used to be acceptable that you’d show up and ask good questions to get an understanding of a customer’s needs. Then you’d go back and find a solution. Today, that’s not good enough, because buyers are not going to sellers for information. They’re more informed, so the time you spend with a customer cannot be based just on getting an understanding of their needs. You need to provide insight and inspire and educate them. A lot of firms aren’t built that way.
Sales enablement provides content to sellers who have the situational fluency to know what information they need in order to make the conversations they have with buyers more sophisticated.
CRM Buyer: What does it mean to have a holistic approach to developing, managing and sustaining long-term customer relationships?
Matthews: Today it’s not just about initial sales, but a much larger relationship. It’s about the entire buyer journey, from how they connect with you to sales to service. All of those touchpoints need to be connected and coordinated. You need to manage the entire buyer’s journey.
CRM Buyer: What can be done to improve the adoption of CRM by sales reps?
Matthews: CRM has never been designed for the seller. It’s been designed for sales managers and sales operations. Find me a seller that would say, ” I would never have won that deal if it weren’t for my CRM system.” You can’t, because that comment doesn’t exist.
We believe that we’re on a verge of CRM 4.0.There’s a massive explosion of new technology, all trying to solve the what’s-in-it-for-me for the salesperson.
CRM 4.0 will be AI-driven, insight-led, and powered by sales processes and methodology. The way I engage my CRM system will be based on what I need to do, and defined by that methodology. The time of having a generic CRM interface is going to end.
AI-driven and insight-led engagement is what is everything will be about. What do I need to do? What meetings do I need to have? You’ll look toward the technology to help you answer those questions.
CRM Buyer: How do you see AI helping salespeople?
Matthews: If I’m chasing a deal, I have to figure out who are all the people who are making decisions, what role they’re in. There’s a whole series of behaviors I need to think about.
A methodology organizes all of that, and the behavior turns into action. It tells you that these are the next three things I need to do: I should meet with this person, get this information, send this email.
Imagine if that was the way that I interfaced with a CRM system. As I have more and more deals, it starts to learn my behaviors. It might learn, for instance, that I don’t get to the person who signs the contract in time. I use the people below them, and I don’t fight hard enough for the meeting with the economic buyer. It shows over time that I’m less successful when I don’t get to the economic buyer.
The system would say something like this: You’re losing 72 percent of the time when you don’t get to the economic buyer, so you need to consider leveraging the person who works for the economic buyer to get a meeting, and here’s the content you should use, because the last two times you did, it was successful. That would drastically increase the likelihood of me using the system.
It’s not about me filling out a form, but it’s a way for me to think, over time, about what I can do differently. That’s how the whole game’s going to get changed.
CRM Buyer: What role does gamification play in sales success, and in encouraging the adoption and use of CRM?
Matthews: We believe that the adoption of CRM will be way past 80 percent as we see more automated insights. After that, you can add in gamification, in the sense that you get badges and points. There are things you get for accuracy of forecast. There’s transparency around results.
But none of that’s going to happen until you turn a CRM system into something that adds value for a salesperson. It has to augment their thinking about what they should be doing in a day, and until that switch happens, you’ll never get above 70 percent adoption.
CRM Buyer: Why is it important to automate mundane selling tasks?
Matthews: There’s not a lot of value in them. Many really good sellers spend way too much time on those tasks, and time with buyers is decreasing. Buyer engagement is lower, because buyers don’t look to sellers for information anymore. If you have less time with buyers, the time you do have with them has to inspire and educate and provide insights. It takes time to do all of that.
If you are stuck in non-selling activity, you are spending less time preparing for those critical moments that matter. The most important thing is to prepare for client interactions. You cannot be stuck in tedious tasks.
CRM Buyer: How is CRM evolving and changing? What’s in the future?
Matthews: I think the whole thing’s going to change. CRM 4.0 is finally going to be about the user experience and about value to the user. It will be AI-driven, insight-led, and powered by methodology. It’s going to be a massive revolution.
Vivian Wagner has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. Her main areas of focus are technology, business, CRM, e-commerce, privacy, security, arts, culture and diversity. She has extensive experience reporting on business and technology for a variety
of outlets, including The Atlantic, The Establishment and O, The Oprah Magazine. She holds a PhD in English with a specialty in modern American literature and culture. She received a first-place feature reporting award from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists.
Email Vivian.
Stay Safe Online with These 5 Tips (Video)
For many years, bank fraud teams have had to worry not only about tackling fraud but also about the impact that security and fraud prevention measures have on their customers. We just completed a survey to ask thousands of consumers in the UK and US exactly what they think about those security measures and fraud processes that are designed to help them stay safe online.
The short answer? They’re frustrated.
You probably knew that already, but the extent of the frustration is interesting:
- 77% think that security measures are unnecessarily complicated
- When opening a bank account, only 23% are prepared to wait for access for more than an hour
- When opening an account online, if asked to take a phone call, post a document or visit a branch, 22% would give up altogether or take their business to another bank
You can read more of the results in this story in the Mirror.
Part of the answer to frustration is education. With that in mind, we made this short video, with quick tips on how to stay safe online.
Today I’m back to my day job, working with our banking customers. I’ll be using the statistics from our research to highlight the areas where we can partner to enhance the fine balance between good fraud protection and poor customer experience.
We’ll be publishing more detailed data in the coming days and weeks, to help businesses understand and address potential pain points within their mobile and online experiences. If you’re interested in digging into the results, give us a call.
There’s more about the solutions businesses use to manage fraud successfully and keep their customers happy on our website.
2017 Mainframe Trends that are Here to Stay for 2018: Docker, Blockchain, z14 and Beyond
Mainframes are still going strong as 2018 begins. Need proof? Keep reading for a look at the biggest innovations and developments to hit the mainframe world in the past year. These five mainframe trends are expected to continue to impact the mainframe community in 2018.
Ask an everyman to tell you about mainframes, and you’ll likely hear that they went out of fashion decades ago.
In fact, however, as these mainframe trends show, the ecosystem remains alive and well, and continues to see new ideas and trends on par with innovations that stretch across the IT world as a whole.
Docker Containers Come to Mainframes
Technically, it has been possible to run Docker on mainframes using a DIY approach since Docker debuted in 2013. Docker works on any Linux-based operating system, and Linux can run on mainframes.
In August 2017, however, Docker support for mainframes became official. Mainframes are now a bona fide part of the Docker ecosystem, benefitting from the agility and efficiency advantages that containers offer.
IBM z14 Announced
Mainframe hardware continues to evolve, as IBM showed when it announced the z14 system in July 2017.
Z14 is the latest, greatest version in IBM’s z family of mainframes. It expands upon the features of z13, which debuted in 2015.
Z14 offers a number of innovations in the security realm in particular.
Z Systems Sales Decline
Notwithstanding the z14 announcement, sales of z Systems overall declined in 2017.
Is this a sign of the impending collapse of the mainframe industry and the irrelevance of mainframe skillsets? Hardly.
The z Systems sales decline was due in part to the fact that previous quarters saw high z Systems sales rates. Maintaining that pace indefinitely was not feasible.
Plus, even if mainframe sales were to decline, people with the skills to migrate mainframe workloads to other types of servers will be in high demand. Any company that chooses to divest itself from mainframes will need to embark on a complicated journey, which will only succeed with the help of seasoned mainframe admins.
Blockchain Comes to Mainframes
The world of blockchain technology evolved significantly in 2017, and mainframes have been a part of the picture. Over the course of the year, vendors like IBM have been increasingly active in promoting mainframes for hosting blockchain workloads.
Expect this trend to continue as blockchain technology — which includes but is certainly not limited to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency platform — continues to expand.
More Interest in Software-Defined Mainframe Environments
One of the biggest trends in the IT world over the past several years has been the shift toward software-defined everything.
Rather than running applications and storing data directly on hardware, organizations are increasingly using virtual environments that abstract the underlying hardware away. This provides more flexibility.
The software-defined everything trend is impacting mainframes, too, by enabling companies to move workloads from physical mainframes to software-defined mainframe environments — as Swisscom started doing in 2017, to cite one prominent example.
Such moves don’t mean the mainframes are going away. You still need to understand mainframe applications and architectures in order to administer these workloads. But the way that mainframe hardware and software interact is becoming more flexible.
Want to learn more about current mainframe trends? Check out our 2018 State of the Mainframe report to see key trends to watch for in 2018 as well as IT professionals’ top objectives for improving performance and saving money over the next 12 months.
