Considering the professional atmosphere, every organization aspires to grow, be unique, and be productive to thrive. The key to achieving such feats is found in efficiency which is derived from out-of-the-box thinking, innovative solutions, and in today’s business landscape, the digital transformation journey. Do mundane, cumbersome, and the same outdated processes offer that? Definitely not.
Mundane tasks are born due to legacy systems. Legacy systems in the organization’s technological infrastructures once used to be what digital transformation is for businesses today. But such systems were complex and not at all built to interface with different tech elements, hence giving birth to many challenges. Businesses that still run-on legacy systems confront the following challenges due to the mundane and repetitive nature of tasks that come with said systems.
Declining Sales Productivity
Sales are the pivotal drivers of any business as they are the critical channels in bringing the offerings to the business to the end customers. With the legacy systems in place, multiple processes create mundane tasks and processes in the following areas:
- Hindered lead nurturing: Lack of effective communication between the concerned competencies and operations that help deliver the product to the end customer cause potential customers to churn.
- Lack of unified platforms: There is not a single platform where all the competencies could keep track of everything that leads to a successful culmination of a sale, time-to-market, and greater revenue generation. The complex communication structure often results in wasted leads.
- Cumbersome data entry activities: Manual entries are time-intensive and of course, the chances of inaccuracy increase with manual entries.
- Menial follow-ups: Regular menial follow-ups on customers divert the sales rep’s focus from the customer to administrative things. Hence, this is a major contributor to the productivity decline.
Limited Resource Accessibility and Flexibility
If the employees keep busy with tedious tasks, the organization will certainly be subject to poor utilization of skilled resources. For instance, a compliance officer manually needs to go through the documents to ensure the prospects, partners, and resources of the organization are fully credible and that there has been no liability being entertained from either the organization’s or the stakeholder’s end.
Asynchronous Operations Management
The quality of operations under the legacy systems renders the following consequences:
- Lack of streamlined operational mechanism: With no platform to ensure alignment among all the competencies, there will be ambiguity and the operation team would have to conduct physical check-ups on everything, which is quite draining. This also causes issues for the management to make informed decisions quickly.
Complex Financial Management
While other departments are performing to their maximum potential, if the financial competency collapses, everything goes into peril. The said circumstances cause the following problems:
- Limited data for financial analysis: Financial analysts require real-time data to make future decisions while considering the associated risks. All of this must be done with limited data which is fetched from piles of files and folders.
- No audit trails: There are no audit trails that can help the auditors track the historical data of the organization in conducting focused audits and no mechanisms to rule out redundant data either. In addition, there is countless paperwork to conduct audits of and that takes months, plus leaves space for inaccuracy.
- Barred strategic decision making: With no relevant and real-time data insights, the management cannot make informed decisions to foster a healthy bottom line for the organization.
Compliance Headaches
The compliance management criteria get more stringent day by day and some businesses are having a hard time coping with them. Here’s a pertinent case of day-to-day tiring compliance management practice:
- Discrepancies in traditional compliance management in banking: The directives of the regulatory bodies demand scrutiny of processes and activities compatible with modern tasks. For instance, the FATF regulations to tackle money laundering cannot be complied with in legacy financial systems.
Draining Human Capital Management
Human Resource Management is pivotal in ensuring the enterprise is functioning adequately with the right resources deployed. The conventional and time-intensive HR practices include:
- Unnecessary delays in recruitment and selection processes: Recruiters receive countless resumes for advertised and non-advertised positions, they must go through all of them, which keeps them occupied and delays the recruitment process. Similarly, it passes on to the selection stage where resource selection goes wrong. Why? Human capabilities are only limited to dealing with piles of resumes single-handedly.
- Complex performance appraisal tasks: The Performance Appraisal Managers use cards under separate tabs to conduct evaluations of employees. This complex process is time-consuming and requires manual effort.
- Inconvenient payroll processing: The workforce dynamics have evolved and there are freelancers, contractual employees, and others that make payroll processing more haphazard. It leads to higher chances of erroneous payroll processing and the cumbersome resolution process elongates the process which causes employee discontent.
Data Stuck in Silos
The traditional data repositories are scattered and remain inaccessible to every resource, not forgetting the redundant data. Hence, forming data silos. The competencies must spend extensive cost and time in figuring out the data that is useful for them and then use the fetched data that has greater possibilities of inaccuracy to conduct forecasts.
A Synthesized Solution for All Business Challenges
Progressive businesses always look for solutions that help them scale their operations ensure such as Microsoft Dynamics 365. The distinct features of Dynamics 365 help organizations achieve ever-needed agility with lesser costs incurred and time spent and of course, let the organizations utilize their human capital for more productive tasks. Furthermore, Dynamics 365 is split into two categories discussed below.
The D365 Split: CRM and ERP categories
Microsoft Dynamics 365 has two core categories; CRM and ERPs. The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is concerned with the front-office operations while the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is dedicated to assisting the back-office competencies.
The CRM solutions are focused more; on marketing, sales, customer service, field service, project services automation, and more. On the other hand, ERP facilitates; finance, accounts, auditing, operations, supply chain, production/manufacturing, retail, talent management/HR, strategic planning, and more.
To get a deeper understanding of the extensive solution pack of D365 for businesses, let’s discover how Dynamics 365 deployment helps resolve the challenges for businesses discussed earlier in this blog.
End-Product of Automated Workflows
With the deployment of Dynamics 365 full-fledged solution your entire organization will experience the following results:
Frictionless Operations Department
With the introduction of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, your Operation Managers will be able to:
- Keep track of all day-to-day tasks performed within the organization
- Fetch historical data about the previous operational processes
- Omnichannel connectivity and a unified inter-departmental communication platform
- Ensure transparent and complete reporting of operations
- A holistic 360-degree view of the activities performed in every competency
Moreover, the management can also utilize the AI-powered tools of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations for effective and timely decision-making.
Surging Sales Performance
To boost productivity among sales and marketing competencies, Dynamics 365 Sales offers:
- Sales dashboards that enable the sales competencies to stay relevant with real-time information on their prospects
- Real-time updates on the delivery statuses of offerings till the conversion
- Resolute as well as uninterrupted communication with the concerned competencies omnichannel connectivity
- Automated email responses to conduct periodic follow-ups
- AI-powered chatbots to resolve basic queries of prospects
- Sales funnels through which both cold and warm leads progress through various stages
- Automated database management
Fully Integrated and High-Paced Supply Chain
It’s high time to infuse resilience in your supply chain with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. With its predictive features, you can allow your supply chains to effectively:
- Maintain their inventories
- Ensure barrier-free delivery of raw materials to the facilities for production, and then deliver the end-product to the intended customers.
- Utilize data analytics features through Power Apps integration to help supply chains maintain productive forward as well as reverse logistics competencies.
- Make decisions in real time through the dashboards.
A 360-Degree Overview of Employees and Business Growth
As discussed above, recruitment, KPI, employee growth management, and payroll processing are the gray areas that should be plucked out of legacy systems. When automated, these faucets bear more critical value for the organization. Dynamics 365 HR:
- Caters to the advanced HR needs by automating the recruitment processes, such as filtering resumes using keyword filters, etc.
- Enables talent managers to get a 360-degree overview of employees’ profiles, along with KPI tracking
- Prompts payroll management
- Makes the employee experience seamless by providing self-servicing platforms
Unified, Automated, and Less Complexed Financial Operations
Businesses do not need to go through multiple documents and extract information for audit and financial health assessments. With Dynamics 365 Finance, you can benefit from the following features:
- Intuitive dashboards that entail well-segregated data.
- Real-time updates about pending tasks and transactions.
- E-invoices simplify and fast-forward the sales recording processes.
- Guided chart of accounts with no-code configuration to simplify the global payment systems.
- Effective decision-making empowered by embedded analytics.
- Filters to ensure financially compliant processes.
Highly Fortified and Tailored IT Competencies
With the increasing aggression in the market, IT teams need to be adaptive and agile. Dynamics 365 helps in achieving the desired agility through periodic updates. business needs.
Conclusion
Microsoft Dynamics 365 has never-ending capabilities; it’ll help you remove barriers and drive your business to profitability, efficiency, and productivity. Enterprises can innovate, excel in a hyper-connected world, and provide their resources with the freedom to thrive by leveraging these intelligent business applications. Find out more about the features of Dynamics 365 and identify the solution best suited to your business needs here.
