Dynamics 365 & Power Platform - Better Together
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are two leading Microsoft business solutions. This article explores how integrating these solutions can deliver enhanced business value.
)
Two leading Microsoft business solutions, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are empowering organisations across the globe to optimise and automate business processes to deliver benefits like time savings, deeper business insight and increased security. One key differentiator of Microsoft's business technology is its ability to integrate seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions to create an end-to-end Microsoft eco-system with all necessary business solutions. Today’s article will shed a light on just two of the common Microsoft business solutions that easily integrate and work well together.
As a standalone, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a well-known solution from Microsoft, particularly in the CRM space. A collection of cloud-based applications, the main CRM applications within Dynamics 365 include Sales, Customer Service and Marketing but Microsoft also offers applications for HR, Field Service and Project Operations. Across the board, these applications help organisations to centralise and secure business data, boost productivity, and improve customer experiences and engagement with a single solution. The solution is customisable and scalable ensuring users can tailor the solution to their needs and scale in line with business needs.
A newer solution for Microsoft, Power Platform is a suite of low-code/no-code solutions comprised of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Pages. Each of these components supports your organisation in different ways from designing business applications and portals to creating workflows and chatbots for automating tasks and generating data dashboards. As a low-code platform, Power Platform empowers business users to create business applications with little to no coding knowledge inspiring innovation and lessening the burden on IT departments.
Below we explore some examples of where Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform integrations can provide the best business value.
Dynamics 365 & Power Apps
Power Apps allows business users to build and design custom business apps to help solve a particular business challenge rather than searching for an off-the-shelf solution. Users can quickly connect to stored business data from an underlying data platform for example within the Microsoft Dataverse or data stored within an on-premise/online data source such as Dynamics 365.
Benefits of this integration include cost efficiency; Power Apps is used on a subscription basis allowing users to get more applications while still costing less than traditional development. Power Apps can be accessed anywhere from any device and can leverage smartphone functionality such as capturing pictures of signatures. Overall, one of the biggest benefits is empowering business users to solve their own business problems saving the time and effort it would take to find an external product or vendor. Some examples of how this could be applied are a scheduling app for customer meetings and lead capture apps for field service.
Dynamics 365 & Power Automate
Power Automate allows users to create custom workflows to help automate repetitive business processes. Power Automate can automate tasks across your Dynamics 365 application along with other key business systems.
Key benefits of this integration include time savings and an increase in productivity when repetitive tasks are automated with workflows. Further, users can automate tasks across numerous business applications, Microsoft solutions and 3rd party solutions. Popular integrations include SharePoint, MS Teams, Outlook, Google Drive and Docusign. There is a template library that has several predefined templates that can help streamline the process with the option to build from scratch too. Some examples of automatons include email automation or approval requests.
Dynamics 365 & Power BI
Integrating Dynamics 365 with Power BI allows users to create powerful data visualisations and dashboards to drill down into data for deeper insights to inspire more informed business decisions.
Key benefits of this integration include powerful dashboards and charts with real-time business insight ensuring everyone is working off up-to-date data in an engaging way. Power BI reports can be embedded into Dynamics 365 to ensure the data is presented within the application meaning users don’t have to leave the application. Power BI reports can be easily shared across the departments by granting different permissions. Examples of this include using Power BI to track and analyse your sales performance. Similarly, you can track marketing performance, tracking different results against different campaigns. Power Bi can also help track customer service performance through tracking response time on queries, case resolution times and customer satisfaction rates.
Dynamics 365 & Power Pages
Power Pages, previously known as Power Apps Portals, allows users to create low-code personalised portals and websites that allow both internal and external users to interact with certain Dynamics 365 data sets and capabilities.
Some benefits of this integration include improved security, data shared between customers and clients can be securely stored within the portal ensuring a secure way of sharing while also improving collaboration and accessibility. It can also improve efficiency as it eliminates the need for constant data sharing with all data in a secure space which reduced the risk of data loss too. Examples of this include customer support portals, community portals and booking portals.
If you would like to learn more about how Dynamics 365 and Power Platform could help your organisation thrive, get in touch today to speak to one of our specialists.
)
)
)