movie in a cinema hall or having the luxury of watching from home in recent times, the audience is left with a lasting impression by the actors. Usually, the actors and directors are awarded, but there is much more to it than meets the eye. There is a huge team of people that supports and contributes to making a movie a success. Until we wrote this book, we didn't realize the amount of effort that goes into the making of a book. We are profoundly grateful for our incredibly supportive, respected, and diligent advisory team who made this dream possible. This book is theirs as much as ours.
The initial drafts of the book have passed multiple hands and undergone several revisions. Each revision provided us with invaluable feedback from the following reviewers. They have been relentless in their contributions, which enabled us to include additional concepts, refine ideas, increase our focus, add clarity, and continuously evolve.
We owe immense gratitude to all our reviewers, who are industry experts and leaders in their own professions and gave their time by providing great input and valuable suggestions, offering insights, and challenging the draft chapters constructively throughout the production of the book. Without their support our work would not have evolved into the book that you are reading now.
We are forever indebted to all of them:
1 Saurabh Nijhawan—Lead Consultant at Microsoft
2 Nick Brady—Senior Program Manager at Microsoft
3 Stefaan Lampaert—Enterprise Solution Architect at Microsoft
4 Fredrik Saetre—Technology Specialist Manager at Microsoft
5 Deepak Agarwal—Project Lead at KPMG, Microsoft MVP
6 Christopher Davis—Technical Strategist at Microsoft
7 Vadim Korepin—Functional Architect at Microsoft
8 Markus Turunen—CIO and Business Lead (Machine Learning and Intelligent Automation)
9 Monika Adams—D365 CE Enthusiast
10 Manali Tiwari—Technical Writer
11 Sneh Swaroop—Technical Consultant at Microsoft
12 Rajkiran Divekar—IT Manager
13 Fawad Khan—Digital Community and Social Leader for Dynamics 365 at Microsoft
14 Manish Rajput—AI/ML Practitioner
15 May Alhajri—Digital Analyst, Microsoft MVP
16 Anupama Natarajan—Data & AI Consultant, MCT, Microsoft AI MVP
About the Authors
AURELIEN CLERE was a Global Technical Architect in the Microsoft Business Application ecosystem for more than 12 years. Aurelien is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) with more than 15 Microsoft certifications. He started his career in Microsoft Business Applications with Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM. Following the strategy of pushing his knowledge to have a global overview on Microsoft applications, he joined the Azure side in 2013 with a French start‐up to develop an ISV with Dynamics CRM and all Azure components (Data Platform, Machine Learning).
Aurelien is now working for a French Dynamics Partner called Dynagile Consulting. He's been working for several years on the Architecture side with the conception, integration, and deployment of Dynamics 365 Finance Operations, Power Platform, Dynamics 365 CE, and Azure components (Azure Data Lake, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Machine Learning).
He is also known for organizing the Power Platform French Summit with more than 2,000 participants. With his blog (powerazure365.com) and his YouTube channel, and all his sessions in community events, he shares his knowledge to help with leveraging data in Dynamics 365.
His main focuses are:
Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations
Dynamics 365 AI: Customer Insights with Azure Machine Learning, Finance Insights
AI: All Azure Cognitive Services, Azure ML, AI Builder, Bot Service with PVA
Power Platform (PowerBI, Power Apps and Power Automate, PVA)
Azure Data Lake with Dynamics 365
Data Insights / ML Insights / Predictions / AI Builder in Dynamics365 projects with Azure components + Azure AI Services
Data Platform: Azure Synapse Analytics with Data Lake of Dynamics 365 Data – Azure Purview and PowerBI – Modern Data warehouse
VINNIE BANSAL has passion and expertise for envisioning the big picture by working with the customers of Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to assist the innovation process, end‐to‐end, and to empower enterprises to overcome their biggest hurdles, streamline complex “pain points,” realize their goals, and achieve business transformation.
His deep understanding of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 application and his exceptional professional relations skills have made him a valuable contributor to every customer he has had the privilege to support over the past 14 years.
Realization of functional fit/gap analysis takes on an active functional role during the discovery and implementation process: analyzing and optimizing business processes in order to provide the best functional and/or technical solutions; providing multiple solutions to a problem; and at the same time evaluating the business impact of the solutions.
To give back to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 community and industry, he regularly shares his experiences, customer solutions, and learning in his LinkedIn posts and articles. He believes in staying updated with industry best practices and keeping himself with the best in the domain.
CHAPTER 1 Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Machine Learning
INTRODUCTION TO DYNAMICS 365
There was a time when businesses used individual applications to perform several business functions like marketing, field service, project service, customer service, operations, and finance. No one ever imagined how difficult and time‐consuming it would be to navigate from one application to another and maintain large amounts of data that were growing every second.
For digital transformation to happen, we needed an intelligent system that can be molded to all businesses and has the agility to evolve and expand as the business changes. Such a system can consolidate individual apps that you use for customer service, sales, or field service; can be easily deployed and customized; and, most of all, can provide a unified experience.
Here comes Microsoft Dynamics 365. It is a set of cloud‐based business applications, such as components of customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), along with productive applications and artificial intelligence tools, all together in one platform. Dynamics 365 brought an end to information silos between the CRM and ERP, all because of a shared business database known as the Common Data Model, which helps you to overcome obstacles between critical business platforms and make your data work together.
Microsoft Business Applications
Who doesn't want to envision the future of their business? And what's better than relying on customers for the transformation of your business? Understanding what customers want is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses today. To understand what customers want requires focusing on these four transformational outcomes:
1 Empowering employees. Dynamics 365 empowers employees by giving them tools and actionable insights with the knowledge and information required to operate in real time.
2 Engaging customers. Dynamics 365 improves customer engagement by enabling employees to connect with potential customers proactively and regularly capture customer feedback to provide a personalized service