Dynamics 365 & IoT | Microsoft Dynamics 365, ERP Solution, Internet of Things

What is IoT about?

First of all the Internet-of-Things is about smart assets and the way to use them to transform your business into higher profitability and deliver up-to-date and state-of-the-art customer services around these assets.
Today it is quite normal that machines and devices are filled with sensors. Take a modern car, a heating system or a scanner, all these devices already uses sensor technology to save energy, make diagnostics easier for Field service technicians or to remind user that a maintenance is necessary. In the past all this was normally build into the asset, so a service engineer hat to plugin a diagnostic device to analyze the machine or the device communicated with an internal interface.
Imagine a milk cow with an implant that permanently delivers health care data to the farmers IoT database. Now he can separate sick cows easily and avoid polluting his milk. The same system now optimizes the food-mix and adds medicals, if necessary, for that cow.

Imagine that smart devices are hooked up to the cloud and all included sensors inside the device deliver their data to a smart IT backend that gathers these data and uses them to initiate the right processes. This will enable the devices to be an active part in your future business. Let it be for service delivery or cross-selling or sales of consumables. This would have a big impact into your business, because you might predict a problem or a demand, a customer might have before he even recognized it. All this based on data gathered directly during runtime of the devices.

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The Good News Here

This is no longer science fiction but already running. Microsoft Dynamics 365 together with the Microsoft IoT-Suite enables high-end asset management with an easy-to-start and scalable approach.
IoT collects a huge amount of data. Besides getting information in nearby real-time, which enables you to drive remote monitoring and define processes to be executed when threshold values are reached, this allows you to drive intelligent analytics on big data to predict events. Microsoft IoT Suite uses Azure Intelligent Machine learning to find patterns inside your assets data. If a given combination of different sensor values from a device in the past had a 98% chance that a component will fail in short time. You are now in a position to switch that component in time.

Where does Dynamics 365 fit into that picture?

Azure IoT Suite and Dynamics 365 comes with connectors that enables you to configure the integration between your LOB Applications and your device data. This could be very helpful to your business in many ways.

Imagine a beautician for cold drinks that measures the outside temperature and automatically adjust the prices as temperature changes and the overall demand on cooled drinks changes, the same beautician also measures the fuel level of the different brands offered. So now you can quickly recognize if a special brand fits the markets taste or if a change is needed or a campaign should be started. On the other hand, when the demand of a drink exceeds heavily, the system could add additional production orders in the ERP module of Dynamics 365 (Operations).

Imagine a device you are servicing already informed you about issues before the customer recognized it. Be sure your customer will be satisfied when he no longer has to report problems through hotlines or service portals, but instead your field service engineer proactive fits the problem remotely or your system propose a service appointment inside the customers preferred service window, scheduled to the customers preferred field engineer with automatic route optimization.

The intelligent business cloud including Dynamics 365 means a complete solution that integrates all data relevant to drive your business. Covering sales, marketing, service, finance, logistics, production, purchasing, resource management, strategy and more. But even if this sounds like a big cake the solution architecture is fully scalable on several dimensions. First the Azure cloud is scalable in behalf of CPU, RAM and storage needed, second Dynamics 365 is build by independent modules, so if you use another ERP and don’t need sales and marketing you can easily reduce the system to only use field service if this suites your needs, third there is a smart way to license different user roles in your company at different cost level.

Why is the IoT such a hype

Industry 4.0 with Microsoft Dynamics & IoT Sensor technology today can be used in so many relations like chemical, light, temperature, seismic and many more to analyse. At the same time we are able to transmit data wireless and last but not least we are able to handle big data with an acceptable performance. All this together opens opportunities across all markets and technologies. No matter if you are manufacturing medical systems, having a truck-fleet, running a facility management, planning public infrastructure or acting as a security company. Every area will be affected by the internet of things and some of them will change dramatically.

In many modern devices manufactures already have sensors and gateways ready and Microsoft IoT-Suite offers a wide range of compatible devices already designed to be used together with the Azure cloud. So the first wave of IoT-usage in combination with Dynamics 365 mainly covers the service area accorded to these devices. But the second wave is already starting and this will combine the device data from different sources to a bigger picture and with that open new doors to predictive behaviour of devices and customers.

So in the future you can imagine scenarios like managing production quantities and -mix, depending on weather prognosis combined with disposition data from social media and live inventory data from the beautician.

Dynamics 365 and Microsoft IoT Suite empowers your business to use new datasources to optimize processes, maximize Revenue and push your customer satisfaction to a new level. This solution scales with your business needs and your data is secured in one of the most secure cloud systems of the world.

Build a competitive edge: By putting the Internet of Things to work against the competition, companies can gain an edge that allows them to become leaders in their industry.
When you harness your data and connect your people and infrastructure, you can unlock new opportunities, increase efficiency, delight customers, and gain a real advantage over the competition.
Open new business opportunities: By harnessing and analyzing data, organizations can more quickly spot trends, identify, and prepare for new opportunities, open new revenue streams, predict customer and partner behavior, and innovate faster.
Redefine customer service: When you build the Internet of Your Things for your business, you gain greater insight into your customers’ wants and needs, allowing you to provide what they want—sometimes before they know they want it.

DYnamics 365 with IOT gives you freedom to work

IoT Maturity – Operational Efficiency

IoT-Operational-Efficiency IoT starts with organizations hunting for operational efficiency. Subsequently, they begin by connecting devices and capturing data. The cloud means that traditional concerns about “too much data” are much less prevalent and getting started does not require a large amount of investment. Customers will be monitoring the IoT devices themselves and the things they they’re connected to, providing insights and opportunties for digital transformation.

Often customers will be using real time rules and alerting to make decisions in an ad hoc fashion about their things and action can be initiated through Dynamics 365 for Customer Service or Dynamics 365 for Field Service.

IoT Maturity – Business Intelligence

IoT - Business Intelligence Organizations start to develop some business intelligence around the huge streams of available data. Once they’ve built a data set customers will start to derive insight from this. This moves from experimentation and exploration of data to insight, often using machine learning and other statistical and predictive models.

The cloud and predictive analytics work really well together. This is because predictive analytics requires a lot of computing power, which is “on tap” in the cloud.

IoT Maturity – Business Transformation

IoT Maturity - Business Transformation Customers can then integrate IoT into their broader business and explore new areas in which to deploy IoT solutions. Data and devices in the field unlock new opportunities to partner with other organizations who are also interested in the hardware platforms and data streams or develop new products and services with-in your own organization.

Digital Transformation requires connectivity like never before, utilizing the Azure IoT Hub in order to collect, analyze and action data insights — you can provide a level of service to stay ahead of the competition. Combined with Dynamics 365, this data collection becomes actionable in your operational systems.

Real-Time – Remote Monitoring

Remotely monitor your devices in real-time, gaining visibility into what’s happening including actionable triggers to your Dynamics 365 line of business applications to resolve any issues.

Azure IoT Suite is a complete solution that can be deployed via cloud or locally and can be modified to suit custom scenarios.

Command and Control your devices remotely as well as the ability to define rules and actions based on the data you are monitoring.

Predictive Maintenance

Monitor your IoT devices for predictive maintenance. Know when something is likely to breakdown before it does. Create actions to send out a technician to services the device and prevent downtime of your monitored devices. With pre-build models and Machine Learning, you can define the rules and actions that take place associated to your devices. Collect the information in real-time and generate alerts to field technicians to resolve the issues before they become bigger problems.

Continually create new business opportunities with IoT technology

Analysts, providers and users agree on one thing: the targeted use of modern technologies will increasingly be the key to the success of future business strategies. This goes for the traditional small or medium-sized entrepreneur, as well as ‘hidden champions’, and even big corporations. Whether it’s the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent supply chains, Industry 4.0 or smart products, essentially the process is one of digitalisation, these days often termed ‘digital transformation’. Technology is the basis and the driver of innovation. As there is no single recipe for businesses to follow, there is a need for strong partnerships.

Greater efficiency through networked processes

In the view of Routeget Technologies, the extent of integration of IoT applications into business processes will be a significant factor in determining success in the future. In the end it’s a question of transferring the knowledge gained from data, ideally automated, into value creation processes.

Interested in learning how Microsoft Dynamics 365 with Internet of Things (IoT) can help you? Contact our teamof ERP experts at Routeget Technologies to learn more and be sure to follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook or connect with us on LinkedIn.

Routeget Technologies is a global provider of the Microsoft Dynamics ERP solution for mid-to-large and enterprise corporations. We specialize in the manufacturing, distribution, and retail industries, and vertically focused on consumer packaged goods (textiles, apparel, footwear, and furniture). Be sure to visit us at www.routeget.com for more information.

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