Every employee is a potential thought leader – unlock that potential with Dynamics 365

Improving employee effectiveness is a multiplier across your entire business
Employees are the heart of any business. They’re the boots on the ground interacting with customers, suppliers, and partners every day, making them integral to evangelizing the brand. They see and understand business processes intimately, and they’re a vital asset no matter how much you automate or digitize.

The technology that manufacturers invest in should empower and benefit their staff, whether in the sales office, on the factory floor, or in the field. Manufacturers need to equip employees to achieve three main outcomes: improve worker visibility across production and customer engagement; enhance collaboration between locations and across teams; and build agility into everyday operations.

 
Visibility, collaboration, and agility
Empowering employees starts with improving their visibility across processes and teams. At a high level, improved visibility helps employees generate the insight needed for thought leadership. Tactically, employees can better serve customers and mitigate potential problems with a 360° view across sales, supply chain, and production processes. Employees with access to company-wide data and interactive visualizations are better equipped to do everything from answer customer questions to identify inefficiencies in the production process. Moreover, when employees from one functional area start to understand how different business processes intersect, they can speed up service delivery, capture more opportunities, and deepen their thought leadership.

Visibility and collaboration go hand in hand, empowering employees to contribute to all aspects of the business. For example, a field technician may provide valuable insights into the design of an asset, identifying an opportunity to reengineer a product to lower costs and improve performance. Another example of collaboration involves connecting employees: imagine the return on customer satisfaction when field service technicians collaborate with experts from across the world – remotely or through virtual and mixed reality – to quickly solve complex repairs. Employees get the opportunity to learn and work in different ways, adding value across the supply chain, sales, or production. Beyond the productivity benefits, collaboration helps manufacturers cross-train employees and develop talent faster.

The final piece of the puzzle is creating agility in your organization. There are many ways a company can promote agility, from supporting robust mobile technology to providing dynamic persona-switching within CRM and ERP. The latter strategy is especially innovative when it comes to transforming the way a manufacturer supports its employees. A technician could seamlessly switch between roles on a mobile-friendly platform, creating new leads to pursue or identifying competitors in an account. An inside sales rep could switch into a customer service role, instantly accessing support options, machine learning-assisted troubleshooting steps, and a rich customer profile to understand and address customer needs. This kind of cross-pollination throughout organizations eliminates inefficiencies by putting all the tools and knowledge employees need at their fingertips.

The easiest way to improve employee performance is by streamlining everyday tasks and complex projects through a single platform – Microsoft Dynamics 365 delivers on this
By unifying CRM and ERP capabilities seamlessly, Dynamics 365 empowers every employee to be a potential thought leader who can seamlessly switch personas within the software. No matter their role, employees can powerfully assist customers by handling a service request, tip off the sales team to a cross-sell opportunity, or share insight based on product performance and IoT-enabled supply chain data. By integrating with investments you’ve already made and scaling on-demand, Microsoft Dynamics 365 accelerates your digital transformation to ensure that every employee can generate maximum value. A digitally empowered workforce sets up your business to anticipate, adapt, and thrive given changing customer needs and new opportunities.

Bill Moffett

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