What's new in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations in service industries?

In a recent blog post, I highlighted three areas where Microsoft has enhanced Dynamics 365 for the service, maintenance and asset management industries. These improvements, in the areas of field service, rental fleet management, and consignment stock, mean that key service capabilities become accessible to a broader range of companies looking to improve their digital operations.

In this article, we will see how new and existing features of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations can be deployed to these industries to take service to a new level.

Power BI

We manage assets and fleets in ERP systems for a reason: the sheer amount of data and transactions involved. Data hoarding is not the ultimate goal here. The goal is data summaries, KPIs, and intelligence into how well your asset, service or fleet management system is performing.

There are a few "out of the box" Power BI dashboards embedded in Dynamics 365 workspaces, but that's only a sample of what can be achieved with this powerful tool. It is common knowledge now that pre-configured reports will always be customised. This is Microsoft's philosophy in expanding the reporting tool with the capabilities of Power BI, which can also join static and dynamic data from other sources like your offline Excel, Access or legacy system databases. That is, of course, if you don't decide to migrate them into Dynamics 365 as extended data entities.

Machine learning

There are three levels of maintenance: corrective after the event, preventative based on some schedule, and then there is ...