Dynamics 365 2022 Wave 1 Release Highlights: ERP

Twice a year, Microsoft announces new features and updates across their Dynamics 365 platform. Here, Paul Sinnott, Adrian Johnson and Daniel Ibrahim – members of our ERP team – have picked out some highlights from the 2022 Wave 1 ERP release.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Core financials

With this year’s Wave 1 comes the addition of a comprehensive subscription billing solution, providing companies engaging in recurring revenue opportunities with an out-of-the-box solution to better handle:

• Recurring billing: automate billing with line-item level control and the ability to consolidate multiple schedules into a single invoice
• Revenue allocation: maintain accounting compliance by allocating revenue based upon standalone prices
• Revenue and expense deferral: advanced revenue recognition to maintain compliance with IFRS 15; this feature extends current revenue recognition capabilities beyond the sales order document to provide greater control over revenue

Significant improvements in the vendor invoice management and OCR space increases productivity and efficiency. A key example of this is the addition of the vendor invoice OCR hub, which will allow users to review, validate and enrich invoice OCR data before being converted into vendor invoices.

The micro-services offerings are extended further in this wave to optimise the year-end close process, in addition to providing accounting managers with greater control and enhanced visibility for analysing and recording closing transactions.

Globalisation

The existing tax audit and reporting services are being extended to leverage Azure solutions (e.g. Data Lake and Synapse Analytics) to provide an enterprise level offering, in addition to the extension of the many electronic reporting templates, broadening the low-code offerings in this space.

A brand-new Globalisation Studio will bring out-of-the-box, low-code tax compliance and globalisation capabilities with multi-country content. The Globalisation Studio will provide a single platform to configure, manage and extended current and future D365 Finance globalisation features.

More changes and improvements to the configurable business documents feature are also included in this release, including the ability to specify print destination settings at a document level, and support for configurable images to be added the document headers and footers.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Inventory and logistics

The inventory visibility service greatly increases a business’s order fulfilment capabilities with the available-to-promise functionality. Visibility of future stock levels, next available order dates and potential disruptions allows for more agile and cost-effective stock management reducing the risk of over/under stocking.

Building on the 2021 release of the landed cost features, the addition of transaction entities will allow integration with 3PLs, reducing manual data entry and improving processing time and accuracy.

Manufacturing

A modernised and enhanced production floor execution interface improves the user experience and provides greater capabilities for process manufacturing processes with the ability to manage reservations of inventory by batches and serial numbers

Further enhancements in the integration between manufacturing and warehouse process running on scale units enable autonomous end-to-end execution of production processes.

Planning

Further enhancements to the planning optimisation add-in are introduced in Wave 1, including support for resource scheduling with finite capacity, support for subcontracting processes and automated action message suggestions for based on requirement changes.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Microsoft 365 integration

Being part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 product stack, Business Central already benefits from rich integration with the wider Microsoft technologies. This year’s Wave 1 emphasises and builds on this integration, particularly in relation to Microsoft 365.

Two key areas introduced are:

• Enhanced Microsoft Teams integration – Now, when sharing records with users or groups, a compact card will be displayed that shows the key fields relating to the record shared without the need to open up Business Central.

• Enhancements to the Outlook add-in – The Outlook add-in now offers the option to copy email attachments to the record displayed in the add-in. Users will be able to review and choose some or all of the email attachments to add to the record. Once a file is attached, users can instantly download and view the file from the Attachments FactBox within Business Central, or open the attachment within OneDrive to share and collaborate further.

There are also improved administration features that enable Business Central security admins access to define default permission sets for different product licenses and plans, which is then automatically granted when new users sign up.

Application

Here’s a snapshot of the best features improvements coming to Business Central over the next few months:

• Controls to block deletion of G/L accounts on the general ledger setup
• Support for inventory pick and warehouse pick operations for jobs
• The ability to enable simpler contra of balances when an account is both a customer and a vendor within Business Central
• More details (including general ledger balance, outstanding payments and checks) for the posted bank reconciliation statement, for easier validation and audit

Reporting

• Excel layouts – Users will now be able to use Excel to create and edit layouts for Business Central reports. This change means you can add Excel features such as sliders, diagrams, charts, and pivot tables within your report.

• Account schedules – A powerful reporting tool for Business Central. Wave 1 allows for even greater control over how data is displayed both on the screen and when printed, such as controlling how zeros are displayed (0, -, blank) and how blank rows can be handled.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

Employee development

Microsoft’s latest updates will bring intelligent talent management capability to Dynamics 365 Human Resources, allowing users to carry out skills gap analysis between what the organisation needs and what the current workforce skills hold. This will help organisations ensure the right individuals are in the right jobs, while also focusing on future needs.

Other related updates include:

• Internal mobility: allows the matching of job postings to employees based on skills, certifications, and experience
• Coaching and mentoring: helps managers have meaningful career conversations based on skill insights
• Learning insights: provide recommendations for learning content and automatically adds to goals and course assignments for employees
• Recruiting: allows for skills to be added to recruiting requisitions based on job requirements

Simplified integrations with learning management system providers

Dynamics 365 Human Resources will now allow for more simplified integrations with learning management system providers. Wave 1 introduces a set of scenario-specific APIs within the integration platform. Based on the Microsoft Dataverse, the APIs are streamlined to enable partners like Tisski to quickly create tight integrations with Human Resources, for example, assigning online training to an employee for companies using a wide range of partner learning management systems.

Improved automation

A collection of new features, focusing on improved automation will be introduced, with highlights including:

• Auto-approvals for information such as skills and certifications, entered by Human Resources, saving time and ensuring accurate employee information
• The ability to set default values and select data that is important to hiring new employees
• Automatic assignment of onboarding guides based on job or position information
• Automatic employee enrolment in compensation, benefit, and leave plans based on certain criteria
• Automatic assignment of offboarding guides

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

This wave brings a number of enhancements to improve Project Operations processes, including:

• Further changes to the reimagined expenses UI, with the introduction of per diem expenses entry and processing
• Pay-when-paid support for project purchase orders
• Transfer of integration journal posting errors into a new journal for resolution without impacting validated transactions
• The ability to reconcile project-based vendor invoices with project related activities, specifically for subcontracted capabilities

Dynamics 365 Cross-App Capabilities

Finance and Operations

• Remote Server Administration Tools – A continuing focus area for Microsoft, their partners and their customers, the 2022 Wave 1 release features will improve the usability of RSAT and provide better integration between RSAT and Microsoft Azure DevOps.

• Workspaces – Continuing the alignment of the D365 product stacks, workspaces in Finance and Operations apps will be updated to provide vertical scrolling, with collapsible sections rather than the traditional horizontal panorama layout.

• Saved views – An easy, no-code feature to optimise the user experience, the saved views feature will be further extended to be applicable to more scenarios, such as the ability to save multiple workspace views, dialog views, and the ability to publish these views out to other users in the organisation.