Blog
Dynamics 365 - Better together
Part 1 - By: Tobias Lång
In the previous articles we talked about Dynamics 365 Commerce technology modernization and how one could gradually expand the Dynamics 365 Commerce footprint using headless commerce capabilities. In this article, we will elaborate on the business value of adopting a “best-of-suite” approach to scale the Commerce operations more efficiently.
When businesses use multiple software solutions from different vendors, it can lead to redundancy, inefficiencies, and increased costs due to conflicting data models and business logic. Adopting a single vendor’s suite of applications such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 can instead help businesses reduce these inefficiencies and streamline their operations.
Instead of building custom logic to communicate across different platforms, one could leverage pre-built patterns such as dual-write and virtual entities to expose relevant data and business logic across Dynamics 365 apps. But which Dynamics 365 apps are typically bundled together and why? Below is an examples provided by the FastTrack architecture team
Better together - Customer Sales Experience
Source: Microsoft: FastTrack Implementation Assets GitHub repository
In this example, Dynamics 365 Commerce is providing a digital sales channel through the Storefront capability. Retail customers can browse the assortment, add products to a cart and then finalize the checkout. In addition, Dynamics 365 Commerce could also cater to physical store sales using the Store Commerce App. Independent of sales channels utilized, the same business logic and master data could be applied where Dynamics 365 Commerce will store the retail transactions using a common data model format.
Supporting the customer journey is a Power Virtual Agent that is surfacing data across various data sources such as Dataverse and Azure Data Lake. With the recent announcements on Azure Open AI, one could easily think of embedding Large Language Models into the virtual agent, trained on the organizations data, and leveraging GPT-4 to enhance communication with the end-user.
All customer touchpoints, independent of sales channel, are continuously being fed to a customer data platform, in this case Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Here, one could leverage pre-build machine learning models to perform advanced customer segmentations which could later on be utilized by Dynamics 365 Marketing for personalized campaigns. Ideally, these campaigns will further drive customer sales and increase customer conversion.
Conclusion
In summary, bundling Dynamics 365 Commerce with other Dynamics 365 apps can help businesses stay agile and adaptable in a constantly evolving retail landscape. By having an integrated solution, businesses can respond quickly to changing market conditions, customer demands, and industry trends to remain competitive and drive growth in the long term.
In part 2 of the “Better Together”- series, we will elaborate on a Business-to-Business scenario using Dynamics 365 Commerce together with related Dynamics 365 workloads.
If you want to know more about Dynamics 365 Commerce and the benefits of a “best-of-suite” approach, please contact us at contact@engagenow.com
Written by:
Tobias Lång
CTO
Head of Advisory services
