Enterprise Business Strategies

Enterprise Business Strategies is an organizational daily planning process managed by the organization board and corporate executives. It is established to control alignment of productivity performance with planned objectives. Integration of such planning into the daily operations of a typical healthcare model can be seen by the following figure.

Such implementation requires a monitored application to allow for such management and control. It tightly integrates with the business processes and is regularly monitored by the board through the performance alignment control cycle, as shown.

Enterprise Performance Management

Once you have established performance alignment control with organization strategies, as described by the previous blog, the business processes logistics KPI’s can be calculated and monitored. Values like efficiency, reliability, usability and latency, as shown by the figure, for a typical sales cycle process. Definitions of those KPI’s are found in a previous article I published in this blog.

Streamlining Business Logistics

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When designing system infrastructure and business logic it is important to consider Business Processes Flow in conjunction with Data Flow. Take the following figure for example:

and superimpose the data flow upon the business processes. 

D365 Dataverse

You can use MS SQL Server Management Studio to fully access Dynamics 365 Dataverse database on Azure, as below:

D365 UO Integration

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Depending on the required integration patterns, there are multiple ways to conduct integration with Dynamics 365 Unified Operations UO (Finance, SCM, Retail and Talent). Those can be categorized into two main streams:

1. Power: with any system, legacy or not, through utilizing Power Platform tools like Power Automate, Logic Apps, Azure Functions and Restful API.
2. Specific: with Microsoft specific systems like Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement CE utilizing available integration built-in structure like Import/Export, UO Dual-Write and CE Virtual Entities.

This article will present the best practices of each of those methods, simplicity of implementations and potential productivity gained from them.

Power

Power Automate

This can be used from the Power Platform for Cloud flows to conduct development, debugging and implementation. 

You can also download the desktop version for desktop flows as shown below:

 

Logic Apps

Azure Durable Orchestration

Restful API

Specific

Import/Export

Dual Writes

Virtual Entities

D365 FO SCM

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) Finance & Operations (FO) Supply Chain Management (SCM) is a powerful application that enables business firms, employees and related organizations to obtain a unified view of inventory, warehouse, manufacturing, service, and logistics with predictive analytics that turn data into insights to support better strategic decisions. 

SCM systems allow companies to manage their requirements for supply chain trade and distributions of raw materials, products and services. It is part of a larger D365 financial system called Finance and Operations. SCM contains various modules organized as role-based workspaces with daily tasks related to the assigned role. One of these is role-based security which helps keep FO data safe.

Business Bots

Bots are AI-Powered programmed applications that are created by businesses to handle interactions with their customers in an automated manner. They are very useful, especially when put on social engines like WhatsApp and Telegram, to name few. They provide services, info and transfer of requests to different sites, FAQ, Web API's and customer services personnel depending on the requirements of the customer making the request.

Most of these Bots can be created in a straightforward manner, and programmed to conduct what it is supposed to do either through low level programming, or through simplified user interface. They are supposed to provide information that are already in the public domain but in a rather organized and concentrated manner. It is a big mistake to make them provide sensitive government or general public specific information, even if unintentional.

Most of these engines will provide you with a way to create business bots in a matter of couple of hours as even their programming is relatively simple and readily available, if not templated through a well-designed user interface. You can easily integrate them with a long list of Web API available for different sort of thing from the weather to search engines to historical data if needed. Business bots are usually specialized, and not general like the case with ChatGPT, although the principle is the same.

D365 FO SCM Implementation

There are several ways to implement and conduct systems upgrade from financial and supply chain legacy systems to Microsoft Dynamics 365 FO SCM. One of the solutions that I suggested recently to one of my clients is shown in the schematic diagram below. Their business scope was to gradually replace their legacy system (they have been using ServiceNow for several years) for finance and operations in dealing with their suppliers and multiple business franchises globally.

As shown, the new system will be based on D365 Finance and Operations Supply Chain Management to handle the:

• Procurements and Vendors Invoices
• Sales and customers billings
• Inventory Management
• Warehouses Management
• Transportation and shipments
• General Ledger
• Accounts Payable
• Accounts Receivable
• Bank Accounts Management

The request includes also establishing two customer type Power Pages portals, namely:

1. Vendors portal to automate their procurements from suppliers, browsing variety of products, and handle invoices and payments.
2. Franchises portal to automate their sales to their customers.

As shown, that required that an integration between Dynamics 365 CE and FO SCM be established. The reason is that Power Pages portals are fed from the D365 CE Dataverse. The integration and dual sync made here is with a combination of:

• Dual Writes
• Virtual Entities

depending on the type of connected entities and whether they are fixed or variable in nature. For entities to be viewed with no update on the portals, virtual entities will suffice. For all others, dual writes methods are used.

Azure Integration Services include several methods with different difficulty of development requirements to establish the initial integration and migration of legacy systems. These include Power Automate, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and API Management, to name just few. The selection of any method really depends on the business requirements, design patterns, and availability of resources involved in the development.