Efficiency is a critical ingredient for the success of your business. Specifically, your teams must communicate, create, and collaborate seamlessly to ensure the effective implementation of projects. Providing access to a suite of productivity tools like Microsoft Dynamics allows your people to perform their tasks more efficiently – from anywhere – making your organization more agile and competitive.
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At a basic level, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a database that helps your business manage and organize its lead and customer data. Dynamics gives your employees a set of practical tools they require to make them more productive, improve their relationships with clients, and win more business. The application’s business intelligence platform offers project managers and account executives more significant insights into available opportunities and team performance.
Because Microsoft Dynamics combines ERP and CRM capabilities, your organization can streamline the way it communicates with employees and clients. Providing a set of seamlessly integrated and complementary tools, Dynamics is an invaluable tool for the success of business projects.
A Quick Guide to Microsoft Dynamics 365
What is Microsoft Dynamics?
What does it do?
How can it help project-centric businesses?
How can it help project managers in business decisions?
What is Microsoft Dynamics?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a set of modular and interconnected Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps and services that enable and transform your business, project management, and collaboration activities. Dynamics has both ERP and CRM capabilities, so you can integrate your processes, business logic, and data instead of having siloed, separate marketing and sales functions.
Dynamics CRM offers you an automated, intelligent, and integrated sales and marketing solution that efficiently connects, prioritizes, and converts leads into paying customers. On the other hand, Microsoft Dynamics AX offers you an advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) package. The application combines powerful financial and project management capabilities that help you manage the demands of your customers, stay compliant with industry regulations, and deliver projects on time and within your budget.
What does it do?
Microsoft Dynamics applications adapt to both your overall business and specific departmental requirements. The design of the Microsoft Dynamics apps allows each of them to work great in a standalone setting, but you expose a lot more functionality when they work together. You choose the app you would like to start with and add to it as your project team members need.
The suite is powered by Microsoft Azure, providing you with a broad service ecosystem backed by a trusted software platform. Besides, Dynamics has native integration with Microsoft 365, offering you unified user and service management capability.
In today’s business environment dominated by distributed project teams, you can access the suite’s browser-based applications from anywhere and on any device. Many mobile applications allow your team members to work on the move.
You could also use the included Microsoft Power platform to create customized and automated user experiences around your processes and data.
What’s more, dynamics comes with administrator tools out of the box, so you can ultimately maintain control over application and service configurations to meet your security and business needs.
Here’s the success story of a company that leveraged Microsoft Dynamics 365 to future-proof its scaling operations.
How can it help project-centric businesses?
Microsoft Dynamics ERP’s project management functionality gives you a robust set of tools and apps that you can use – regardless of industry or project type – to produce your product or achieve the results you want. The ERP streamlines and simplifies project management by offering an end-to-end financial overview, deep integration with your supply chain processes, and project controls.
All of these features mean that Dynamics offers the following benefits to your project-centric business:
Ease of use and deployment
You can choose to use Microsoft Dynamics in the cloud or within a hybrid cloud environment. Its design makes it incredibly simple to deploy and manage regardless of the operating environment, making it adaptable to your infrastructure and budget.
Dynamics is an excellent fit for businesses with a bring your own device (BYOD) policy. The company’s employees can easily access Dynamics applications from any web browser, Outlook, or mobile device.
Full integration with Microsoft products
Dynamics offers easy, native integration with other Microsoft products, such as the Office 365 suite. The app integrations allow company employees to move from Dynamics to Power BI for their data analytics, SharePoint for project documentation, or Outlook for communication.
The easier you can make it for your employees to move between the apps they need, the less time they need to transfer data from one application to another or learn how to work with new platforms.
Project templates
Depending on the project type, teams can pick from one of the six default project templates offered by Dynamics – fixed-price, cost, time, material, investment, and internal. Selecting the appropriate project template will help save time when setting roles and estimating completion time for a specific project.
Scalability
One of the most compelling reasons for project-centric businesses to use Dynamics is that it is easy to scale up or down depending on the project team’s size, workload, and the company budget. Like other Microsoft cloud solutions, Dynamics offers an easy-to-change subscription model.
Higher productivity
Project teams can access almost any type of data they need on Dynamics, which means they can work more efficiently. As a result, they do not have to waste time searching for information from various disconnected sources. Because they have all the relevant tools and insights at their fingertips, they can make better and more informed decisions.
How can it help project managers in making business decisions?
Microsoft Dynamics has everything managers need to handle their projects from start to finish. The suite makes it simple to optimize processes and helps project managers meet all their goals and targets. They can prioritize tasks or take action needed to resolve any issues to move forward.
Inbuilt business intelligence capabilities offer real-time insights into every project stage, giving managers the information, they need to make business decisions. If you are a project manager, here are some of the ways that Dynamics helps you make the best decisions:
Setting up project quotations
You can set up your project quotations by isolating tasks and specifying the load capacity. What’s more, you can manage budgets, schedule tasks, and monitor project status to help anticipate and avoid potential delays. The quotations you create could include basic contact information, possible taxes or surcharges, agreements and discounts, items and services, and special trade agreements.
Manage your project forecasts and budgets
To manage and control your project, you could use project forecasting to enter transactions into forecast forms for each of your transaction types. On the other hand, you can prepare a budget for the project by having a single-entry form to capture the original budget details and any revisions.
Create and manage breakdown structures
Depending on how accurate you want your tracking to be, you can describe the team’s work, the resources necessary to perform the job, and the completion timeframe. Create granular work breakdown structures (WBS) if your project has a low tolerance for deviation for diligent work progress tracking.
Manage resources
Dynamics helps you quickly identify the most qualified resources available to work on the project. You can also schedule your resources based on the specific project requirements or the skills and availability of team members for optimum deployment.
Analyze and review projects
Microsoft Dynamics gives you a quick overview of external and internal projects’ operational and financial performance. As a result, you can compare the resources consumed against the revenue earned for your project in real-time.
The application’s cash flow monitoring feature lets you review cash flow forecasts and compare them to the actual cash flows for the completed or in-progress project. All the information is centralized and accessible from each corner of your organization so that costs stay up to date and you can quickly generate invoices.
Project statements offer a quick snapshot of the project’s progress via dashboard view. They give you all the task, project, and activity data you need to analyze progress and create reports.
Microsoft Dynamics: The Project Management Game Changer
For your project to succeed, you need to have access to the best tools and technology. Microsoft Dynamics allows you to collaborate in real-time to complete tasks within budget and on time.
Are you ready to experience hassle-free project management?
