Your financial, customer-facing, and sales teams want tools that are easy to use and work the way they do—tools that help them provide good customer service, support operational efficiency, and respond appropriately to both positive and negative trends. To improve productivity and profitability, your teams need enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems that integrate with new and existing software and support collaboration both inside and outside of your organization.

Microsoft business management solutions are based on ERP, SCM, and CRM data management, communication, and collaboration technologies in Microsoft Dynamics, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Microsoft BizTalk Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft SQL Server.

These technologies can help improve productivity and increase people’s knowledge about their customers and business opportunities—especially because these technologies are more likely to be fully adopted across your company. Successful solutions can result in improved operational efficiency, easier and more accurate budget planning and reporting, and better customer service by supporting:

• Enhanced communication between coworkers and partners that facilitates the sharing of customer knowledge and in-house expertise.
• Automated business processes.
• Broad usage through relevant design and a familiar, easy-to-use interface.
• Adaptable tools that people can change as their needs change.

Microsoft Accounting and Financial solutions include the following technologies which enable:

• Access to Financial Data Across the Organization
• Management of the Budgeting Process

Access to Financial Data Across the Organization
Your executives require accurate and timely information on business performance to plan for the future, identify and correct negative trends, generate reports, and help ensure compliance with industry regulations. Today, most executive dashboard solutions typically provide sales, operations, and financial reports, but do not contain status and resource utilization trends across key enterprise projects. But with an IT governance executive dashboard solution built on the Microsoft Office system, your organization can align IT spending with your business strategies, and automate project management, resource management, and collaboration.

The Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Dynamics are ideal technology choices for an IT governance executive dashboard solution, because together they can help your teams:

• Reduce IT costs by saving personnel time. Microsoft Dynamics interoperates smoothly with Microsoft Office applications, which are designed to work together among themselves, so configuration and extensive customization isn’t necessary-even with third-party technologies and open standards. Also, Microsoft Office applications and Microsoft Dynamics work with the Microsoft .NET Framework and the open, extensible Web services architecture. With the .NET Framework, your IT staff can code once and use it multiple times-by coding a dashboard for a traditional desktop or laptop computer and porting that same code base to a pen-based Tablet PC, personal digital assistant, or other handheld device without modification. The Microsoft Office Access 2007 database management program offers an expanded ability to import, export, and work with XML data files.
• Know where your company stands and adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Identify new revenue opportunities and negative trends, with quick visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs). With the digital dashboard in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the data management functionality in Microsoft Dynamics, you can view your company’s real-time financial position, cash position, expenses by period, gross profit, and gross profit margin. With standard charts on the executive dashboard financials page, managers can view customer balances, general ledger cash account balances, and payables and receivables KPIs.
• Create simple, comprehensive financial reports that are easy to generate and share. Microsoft FRx combined with Microsoft Dynamics can provide the comprehensive, timely, and accurate information that your executives and managers need to make confident decisions. For easy sharing across systems, they can use the Microsoft FRx financial reporting add-on module to Microsoft Dynamics to export data to other formats, such as a Microsoft Office Excel worksheet or graph (PivotChart); an online analytical processing (OLAP) cube; an XML language document, such as an eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) instance document; HTML; or an ASCII text file. Microsoft FRx provides “drag-and-drop” functionality to create different roll-ups or reporting groups without changing the chart of accounts, losing historical information, or affecting comparative reporting.
• Help ensure regulatory compliance. Accounting intelligence built into Microsoft FRx recognizes accounting concepts such as beginning balances, YTD totals, debit and credit balances, positive and negative variances, and posted and unposted transactions. An audit trail makes it easy to identify missing or duplicate accounts. Ease the pain of regulatory compliance and financial reporting with accurate financial statements, support for Governmental Accounting Standards Board Statement No. 34 (GASB 34), and a detailed chart of accounts with the fund accounting and tracking capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics.
• Take advantage of your existing Microsoft software investment by using familiar business productivity applications such as Microsoft Office Visio 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, Office Word 2007, and Office Excel 2007.

Management of the Budgeting Process
It’s important for your CFO to understand how your organization is performing against budget, and to be able to share this data with managers, for better planning and profitability.

Microsoft budget management solutions can help your teams:

• Easily share information.Your company can use a solution built with Web parts to get automatically updated charts based on your account balances and department budgets. CFOs can review detailed financial statements published by their teams to SharePoint sites, which you can make accessible to your executives, employees, and board members through role-based Office SharePoint Server portal pages. You decide who gets access, and you can change users’ permissions, if necessary. Non-system users, such as board members, can receive lists of financial data compiled in Microsoft Dynamics and exported to Excel workbooks for easy sharing.
• Ensure that budgeting decisions are made in alignment with corporate objectives. With Microsoft Dynamics you can build a baseline budget by copying your current-year data into the new budget template and exporting it to Excel. After verifying users and permissions, your CFO can attach the Excel-based budget to an e-mail message and send it to budget managers and senior management to ensure all budgeting decisions follow corporate objectives. The approved budget can then be imported from Excel back into Microsoft Dynamics, to serve as the foundation for the following year’s financial measurements. This can mean more accurate planning and an improved bottom line.
• Automate and customize budget processes. Your teams can submit expense reports through SharePoint sites. Managers receive e-mail notification and can call up each expense report, to review and approve it. You can design input screens in Microsoft Forecaster budgeting and planning software to help you determine what users see and how they enter their financial data. Input screens can be designed to use the reporting periods and accounts that you specify.

Your operations manager must understand key metrics in your supply chain to make good operational decisions, remove barriers to productivity and efficiency, and help your business deliver products and services on time.

Microsoft SCM solutions include the following technologies that enable:

• Management of Your Supply Chain
• Productive Vendor Relationships
• More Efficient Distribution Processes

Management of Your Supply Chain
Visibility into the supply chain and operations is crucial for understanding how manufacturing processes and teams are affected by demand cycles and supplier performance. Microsoft technologies provide the following operational benefits:

• Better supply chain visibility. Your teams can post delivery information on SharePoint sites. From there, operations managers can generate reports and also use the integrated Microsoft MapPoint maps to see the spread of customers mapped against the warehouses in your supply chain. The reports can include specific products customers purchased. Maps can be populated with graphics displaying the distribution of the products and the degree to which specific products are being shipped on time.
• Reporting and analysis tools to help recognize and correct negative trends. With SQL Server Reporting Services tools, operations managers can look at the details of any products not meeting shipment deadlines, and compare them to inventory data over time. They can extract on-hand inventory averages and supplier fill rates to identify the sources of problems.

Productive Vendor Relationships
Help your employees improve relationships with vendors and trading partners. Give them access to vendor communications, agreements, and commitments-along with the tools to communicate efficiently with partner companies. Microsoft technologies provide the following benefits:

• Improved communication. With Microsoft Dynamics, you can bring supply chain functions online and make information available for team collaboration, wherever your employees, vendors, partners, and suppliers are. Business portal functionality helps you provide supply chain functions, documents, and information to people across the chain, both inside and outside your organization. Microsoft SQL Server functions with BizTalk Server as its real-time data store for document-tracking information. Executives can use business portal technology to review and augment performance-when, where, and how they need to.
• Partner self-service capabilities. Use Microsoft Dynamics, along with other Microsoft technologies that you may already have, to provide access to important business information and documents for your supply chain partners. Microsoft Dynamics supports electronic data interchange (EDI), so you can even collaborate with partners who use EDI-without having to incur the expense of implementing it in your own business.
• Performance monitoring. The supply chain functionality in Microsoft Dynamics can help your operations managers monitor and report on the actual productivity and business value of vendor and partner engagements, and implement appropriate course corrections. This empowers your team to practice consistent, efficient quality control over the fulfillment of vendor commitments to your company, and record their findings so business managers can easily evaluate vendor performance, negotiate terms, or initiate new business alliances. Reliable demand-planning capabilities also help to control costs and align vendors firmly behind your business goals.

More Efficient Distribution Processes
Give your operations manager the integrated applications, tools, and capabilities to get strategic insight into your current distribution processes. Microsoft technologies provide the following benefits:

• Manage inventory more effectively. Reduce data entry time and errors with Microsoft Dynamics. Use it to set up automatic daily purchasing tasks, and to transfer quotes, orders, and back orders into fulfillment orders. Then transfer those fulfillment orders into invoices and shipping labels. Create automated substitution and priority stock lists that help keep inventory flowing. Microsoft Dynamics provides automatic pick and pack procedures, and generates warnings when stock falls below the minimum acceptable shelf-life rules that your operations managers set. Employees can trace lot numbers or serial numbers for warranty information. When they key in a sales order, they can get access to the latest information in your database about price and product specifications.
• Stay informed. Using digital dashboards within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, your executives can view up-to-the-minute information on all KPIs used in supply chain management, such as costs, customer satisfaction, and project management.

Your sales and marketing managers need tools to help them perform pipeline and sales analysis, troubleshoot deals, drive new leads, and direct your company’s marketing campaigns.

Microsoft sales and marketing solutions include the following technologies, which enable:

• Analysis of Sales Data
• Management of Leads and Deals
• Management of Marketing Campaigns

Analysis of Sales Data
With Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista, your sales managers can see the key measurements they set up in Microsoft Dynamics CRM to track daily and weekly sales and sales by product line by using the Windows Vista Gadgets they set up on their desktops and home pages. They can export this information to Excel and build PivotTable reports with data visualization for easy analysis and forecasting, and even upload this information to SharePoint sites to share it with their teams. The new BitLocker capability in Windows Vista helps protect confidential CRM data on laptops from being accessed by unauthorized individuals.

Management of Leads and Deals
With Microsoft sales and marketing solutions, your teams can:

• Easily identify and track sales opportunities. Because Microsoft Dynamics CRM is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office Outlook, sales managers can access all the sales operations and information they need directly from Outlook. For example, they can view their Microsoft CRM Opportunities pages through Outlook, and set reminders on leads to help ensure sales representatives follow up on each opportunity. Sales managers can create advanced searches to gain a complete view of all the leads that are expected to close during the month, including close percentages for each deal in the pipeline. When a lead is in trouble, the sales manager can view the history, and quickly schedule a follow-up call between the prospective customer and his or her account manager. In addition, customer phone calls can be logged in Microsoft CRM and set up to automatically remind telesales representatives when to follow up with specific customers, to help ensure good delivery service, product satisfaction, and a positive customer experience.
• Respond quickly from the field. Windows Mobile devices work with Outlook so that account managers on the road can receive notification to follow up with a prospective customer. After a customer meeting, they can set an estimated close rate for the opportunity in Microsoft CRM, and this information will be included in the sales forecast data available to the entire team. Account managers can also create orders in Microsoft CRM, which automatically places them in the Microsoft Dynamics ERP system. This automated process saves time by avoiding duplicate entries and minimizing risks for data entry errors. Orders can be approved and processed the same day.
• Capture customer data.When customers call in, your inbound telesales department can use Microsoft CRM to capture, track, and manage customer requests, buying preferences, and purchase history to accurately qualify the lead. The telesales team can then route these leads to the appropriate account managers. Using a Microsoft Office InfoPath form, the telesales team can record detailed customer information and publish it in Microsoft CRM using XML. They can also record notes in Microsoft CRM, to track each customer’s history with your company.

Management of Marketing Campaigns
Sales teams can record leads and opportunities in Microsoft Office documents, import them into Microsoft CRM marketing lists, and then follow up with targeted, personalized e-mail messages. With Microsoft Windows NetMeeting, teams can hold live meetings to discuss the e-mail campaign content, and use Microsoft Office Groove 2007 to capture meeting notes and content. They can then launch the e-mail campaign using Microsoft CRM.

Afterward, your managers can review a campaign report from Microsoft CRM and build a PowerPoint presentation to show how much revenue resulted from the campaign.