Accounts payable automation offers an opportunity Dynamics AX/365 customers to save money and increase efficiency ...read more![]()
Why now is the best time for Microsoft Dynamics AX/365 customers to automate
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Delete Async Plugin Logs if plugin succeeds, save D365 storage space
Let’s see how we can efficiently manage D365 storage without bloating the storage with data that you might not need.
In my opinion, we don’t really need to know that the background process was successful...(read more)![]()
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Consume Azure Machine Learning Services in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations
Today, every business in every industry is looking to take advantage of the Artificial Intelligence, or AI, as a mandatory step in their digital transformation journey. The broad definition of AI is any technique that enables computers to mimic human behavior by allowing computers to learn by example. On the other hand, Machine Learning, is a subset of AI that can be defined as the ability to learn without explicitly being programmed and its goal is to make predictions and detect patterns that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
AI undoubtedly is changing and influencing the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems. One key competitive advantage of D365FO compared to others ERP in the marked is the seamless integration with Azure Machine Learning in some scenarios like the Demand Forecasting. Demand Forecasting is used to predict demand from sales orders. To generate the baseline forecast, a summary of historical transactions is passed to a Microsoft Azure Machine Learning service that is hosted on Azure.
The following diagram shows the seamless integration between D365FO and Azure Machine Learning:
Demand forecasting setup in D365FO (For this example, we are using the standard demo data)
1. Demand forecasting parameters
To set up demand forecasting parameters, go to Master planning > Setup > Demand forecasting parameters. Because demand forecasting runs cross-company, the setup is global. In other words, the setup applies to all companies.
By clicking Forecast dimensions in the left pane of the Demand forecasting parameters page, you can also select the set of forecast dimensions to use when the demand forecast is generated. A forecast dimension indicates the level of detail that the forecast is defined for. Company, site, and item allocation key are mandatory forecast dimensions, but you can also generate forecasts at the warehouse, inventory status, customer group, customer account, country/region, state, and item plus all item dimension levels.
At any point, you can add forecast dimensions to the list of dimensions that are used for demand forecasting. You can also remove forecast dimensions from the list. However, manual adjustments are lost if you add or remove a forecast dimension:
Use the General tab to overwrite the parameters globally or use the Item allocation keys tab to overwrite the parameters per item allocation key. Parameters that are overwritten for an item allocation key affect only the forecast of items that are associated with that item allocation key.
Demand forecasting can be used to forecast both dependent and independent demand. For example, if only the Sales order check box is selected, and if all the items that are considered for demand forecasting are items that are sold, the system calculates independent demand. However, critical subcomponents can be added to item allocation keys and included in demand forecasting. In this case, if the Production line check box is selected, a dependent forecast is calculated.
There are two methods for creating a baseline forecast in Finance and Operations. You can use forecasting models on top of historical data, or you can just copy over the historical data to the forecast. The Forecast generation strategy field lets you select between these two methods. To use forecast models, select Azure Machine Learning.
Once set, the following warning will pop up:
Click on Message Details to reveal the remaining setup steps:
- Deploying an Azure Machine Learning experiment
To set up the experiment in Azure Machine Learning Studio, visit the Azure AI Gallery:
https://gallery.azure.ai/Experiment/d10ee4a5a4d041d7afed4d77e4092294
Click the “Open in Studio” button to continue.
Sign up for an account. The Free Workspace will work fine for this demo.
Once your account is active, you can deploy the experiment directly from the gallery and select an Azure region for deployment. Please note that if you are deploying D365FO one-box environment or on-premises you will also need an Azure storage account.
Now we can see the Demand Forecasting experiment. Machine Learning is a computing technique that has its origins in artificial intelligence (AI) and statistics. The most common Algorithms for Machine Learning include:
- Classification - Predicting a Boolean true/false value for an entity with a given set of features.
- Regression - Predicting a real numeric value for an entity with a given set of features.
- Clustering - Grouping entities with similar features.
In this scenario, the experiment is using a Regression R script generates our forecast. Please select the Run button to execute the experiment:
Deploying the Web Service
To generate the forecast, Finance and Operations uses a Machine Learning web service. As a next step click in the Deploy Web Service button. To connect to the service, you must provide Finance and Operations the following information if you sign in to Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio:
- Web service application programming interface (API) key
- Web service endpoint URL
- Azure storage account name
- Azure storage account key
Click on the “API help page” for the REQUEST/RESPONSE to get the web service URL:
Note: The Azure storage account name and key are required only if you use a custom storage account. If you deploy the on-premises or One-box version, you must have a custom storage account on Azure, so that the Machine Learning service can access the historical data.
Parameter Update
Finally, we need to update the Demand Forecasting parameters from the Dynamics 365FO portal with our values obtained above:
- Generate the Forecast
From the Dynamics 365FO portal we can run demand forecasting from Master planning \ Forecasting \ Demand forecasting \ Generate statistical baseline forecast. In the parameters below, I selected to generate my forecast for the next three months.
This will take a couple of minutes:
Now that it’s executed successfully, we can view the Azure Machine Learning Predictions in Master planning \ Forecasting \ Demand forecasting \ Adjusted demand forecast. As a final step we can Authorize adjusted demand forecast.
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Keeping up with the MVP firehose
It’s January, which means we’re coming to the end of another contribution year for those of us Microsoft MVPs that are up for renewal on July 1st. By the end of March, we need to have submitted our contributions, and new this year, answered the four magic questions on the MVP site.
This is the first year where I feel like I’m getting things under control in terms of MVP contributions and handling the firehose of information we get on almost a daily basis from the MVP program itself and/or the various product groups we may be a part of. It could be that it’s just taken time to adjust to life as an MVP, and maybe now I’m finally settling into a rhythm, who knows?
Managing Contributions
I’ve made a change this year to how I’m recording my contributions. I don’t know if this is good or bad but I decided it’s WAY easier for me than what I did in the past.
I used to put in social media, blogs etc. in by month. My rationale was to break it into smaller chunks to keep on top of it. Reality check: I wasn’t keeping on top of it so I was merely creating more work for myself in the end.
Entering fewer contributions
The only thing I’m entering in detail are individual presentations and speaking engagements. I don’t do a *ton* of those so that’s no big deal for me to do in detail.
For everything else, this year I’m keeping a running tally post for each major contribution type I’m doing. I’m entering one contribution per thing, with a year-to-date tally of viewership/posts/whatever the metric is, assuming the thing covers 1 category (or up to the max 3 we can tag).
For example: blogging. My blog here has metrics which I capture but my blog is also syndicated on the Microsoft Dynamics community site, for which I get separate and distinct viewership metrics. I track those 2 things separately but for each one I’ve got a contribution item listed with the metrics for this contribution year to date. That will cover the # of articles I write + the viewership of my blog over the course of the same period of time. Many blogs from previous years are recurring favourites and thus by recording this way, I’m capturing more accurately (I think) my “reach” as well as my activity level.
I recently caught up to December 2018 on the community activities side of things so I’ve got a handful of items listed right now like Blogs Apr to Dec, Blog Syndication Apr to Dec, Twitter Apr to Dec etc. Next time I get a chance, whether that’s the end of January or the end of March, I’ll update the date, description and metrics but most of the rest of the details are already in there (URL, category etc.). That beats the heck out of doing it monthly, just by updating the same entries throughout the year. By putting “Dec” in the titles I know exactly where I left off and where I need to catch up to.
Use one of the apps instead of the website
The other thing I did last year and continue to this year is use one of the MVP apps that have been created. I prefer the “MVP Companion” app for Windows, as I like the way items you record are queued up, to submit all at once. It also has support for the additional categories on contributions if that applies to you. I find the apps faster and easier to use than the website interface.
Managing Emails
The other thing I feel I’ve finally got a handle on is managing the email flow better. The first while it was overwhelming and I think I’ve finally figured out a way that works for me to manage the influx, especially from the product group NDA email lists. Back in June, I wrote a blog about the amounts of email we get and started a new system. I’ve felt a lot less overwhelmed in the volume of emails since doing that.
Outlook Rules & Subfolders
For the NDA group email lists, I’ve created rules in Outlook that redirect all of those emails to different folders. Right now it actually all goes into one but I am going to tweak it further by creating folders per DL. I’m finding some DL’s I rarely read anything and others I read a lot so separating them will make that easier.
For MVP Award official emails, I don’t have rules set up because I don’t want them redirected. I don’t look at my NDA folders every day so I wouldn’t want to miss an important general email applicable to the program overall.
Lastly I have been trying to figure out a proper rule to identify emails initiated by the product groups (vs. questions to the NDA list from the MVPs themselves). No offence to my fellow MVPs but the emails from the product group tend to be “what do you think of this feature?” and the questions from the MVPs are more like “this isn’t working, can you fix it?”. Both are going to the same list but I don’t want to miss actual announcements from the product teams themselves when they are all piled in the same inbox folder. This is far from perfect but for now my simple rule is basically the following:
- The email comes to the NDA DL URL (same as other rules)
- The sender’s email contains microsoft.com
- The subject doesn’t contain the words “RE:” to hopefully weed out replies to the MVP questions!
Those emails are flagged in a category because the entire thread of emails (responses to it) are important and I don’t want to lose the thread, but I want to have better awareness of those threads vs. others, if you know what I mean.
Finally, in these subfolders, I have the Group By turned on, by Subject so that each thread is more or less self-contained and it’s sorted by subject. I found sorting by date, which is my preference in my primary email, results in too random a list of emails on the MVP side to make sense. Every few days or whenever I get a chance to look, I scan the subject lines, look for the category flag (red, in my case) to alert me to new product group emails, and otherwise scan the subject lines to see if any topics are relevant to me. If they are not relevant, I delete the entire thread. No more wading through emails one at a time or missing ones that I really wanted to read.
New questions for renewal
I don’t know if this part is NDA or not, so I won’t go into detail on the actual questions. I see a few people asking about this on social media and there seems to be a mixed reaction. From my point of view, I like that we have the ability to enter some free-form text on what we’ve done and what we want to do. I find too much of the award & renewal process is focused on numbers, there is no place to put things that don’t have a distinct measurement to it. Long story short: I like it.
That’s it for this post… I thought I would share some of how I manage the contributions and emails in hopes it helps someone else out a bit. Like anything, over time you find better ways to deal with things and learn new tricks. These are the tricks I’ve got so far!
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Top stories for US partners the week of January 14
Find resources that help you build and sustain a profitable cloud business, connect with customers and prospects, and differentiate your business. Read previous issues of the newsletter and get real-time updates about partner-related news and information on our US Partner Community Twitter channel.
Looking for partner training courses, community calls, and events? Refer to the Hot Sheet training schedule for a six-week outlook that’s updated regularly as we learn about new offerings. To stay in touch with us and connect with other partners and Microsoft sales, marketing, and product experts, join our US Partner Community on Yammer.
New posts on the US Partner Community blog
- How to drive successful Modern Workplace engagement through Microsoft Teams
- January 2019 Hot Sheet partner training schedule
- How (and why) to bring your customers into the cloud
- Find out what’s new with Microsoft Teams for US Government Community Cloud
- Maximize the resources included in your Microsoft Partner Network membership
- Bring in the new year with savings on Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Business
- SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 end of support: What you need to know
- What to know about updates to the Microsoft P-Seller Community
Upcoming US Partner Community calls
- Applications &Infrastructure Partner Community call, January 18, 10:00 am PT
- US Partner Investments Office Hours, January 16, 11 am PT
- Marketing SureStep Office Hours: New Year's Resolutions, January 17, 12:30 pm PT
- Modern Workplace Security Partner Community call - Azure AD Privileged Identity Management Part II, January 15, 10 am PT
Microsoft Partner Network news
New events and webcasts this winter
- GovBytes – Public Sector Partner Enablement Series
- Next Gen PPE Training Series
- StepUp Technical
- The Leading Edge
Learning news
- FY19 H2 Learning Partner Incentive Program details
- Complete your MVA courses before they retire on January 31, 2019
- Containerize Your Apps with Docker and Kubernetes e-book
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Item Attributes in D365 Business Central
Item Attributes are user-defined classifications that can be assigned to your items for ease of searching, filtering, and reporting. For example, a Marketing team could use attributes to help with classifying...(read more)![]()
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Delete those records which were imported by mistake
Introduction:
One of the most common blunders often made in Data Import are importing whole lot of records without finalizing.
And when you import, you realize you needed to add something more to the...(read more)![]()
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Ability to send to Unresolved Email Address in D365 Email
Most new users get stuck with issues saying ‘Email address of the recipient was not resolved’. Like in case you want to send out an email from D365 but you don’t have the same saved in the system as a...(read more)![]()
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Formatting Address Data seperated by delimiter in the single field
Introduction:
Whenever the a single field in NAV contains Name, Address and other values seperated by delimiter such as ‘,’. But this field cannot formated in SSRS to look appropriate as...(read more)![]()
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Time entry using model driven PowerApps
Introduction:
Managers and employees need a good time entry application to record worked hours for billing, payroll, or operations. That information is used to automate payroll, invoice clients, and...(read more)![]()
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Set Your Microsoft Dynamics New Year’s Resolutions with the Experts!
Are you ready to set your Microsoft Dynamics New Year’s Resolutions in 2019?
Whether you already have set your goals and are thinking about re-shaping them, haven’t and want to learn more about how to benefit from the system’s latest updates, or are just looking for another perspective, this webinar will be a great one for you and your team to sit down for.
Join Ledgeview on Wed. Jan. 23, 2019 as we cover the topic in-depth.
Our Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM User Groups are a customer-favorite at Ledgeview Partners.
Each month, we offer free webinars to educate users and admins on the system to help drive user adoption and use of the functionality.
If you want to discover new possibilities with your system in the New Year, now is a great time to start, refine, or revisit!
Setting goals are one thing, but sticking to them is what really drives organizational success.
Get the expert insight and ideas you need to fly with Microsoft Dynamics in 2019.
As always, you don’t need to be a Ledgeview Partners customer to attend. All are welcome and encouraged to join.
Register below.
WEBINAR: Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM User Group
TOPIC: Dynamics New Year’s Resolutions
DATE: Wed. Jan. 23, 2019
TIME: 11:00 – 11:30 a.m. CT
We look forward to having you join us.
Before you watch live, press replay on recent past webinars from us here.
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Dynamics 365 Saturday Glasgow 26th January
Join me in Glasgow on January 26th at Dynamics 365 Saturday Scotland to see my session on creating better Dynamics 365 solutions for users with Azure
Limited FREE tickets – https://www.eventbrite...(read more)![]()
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Filter Knowledge Based Articles With Content Access Levels
If you are using a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portal for your business, chances are you are displaying some kind of FAQ or information to provide answers to your customers. Knowledge Articles (KA) are created...(read more)![]()
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D365 For Outlook 2016: There is a Problem communication with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM server for D365 v9
One of the recent and most frequent issues faced while upgrade is that of the existing Dynamics 365 For Outlook 2016 setup which doesn’t connect to D365 v9.
Right after the environment upgrades...(read more)![]()
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Bulk delete allocations in CRM
There have been instances where we feel the need of deleting some records in bulk. I was looking at options of doing advanced search and saw that there were 500+ records showing up. Also, at a time Advanced...(read more)![]()
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MB6-898 Design a new welcome guide template
In the Onboarding Application you can create Templates to make it easier for the new manager or hiring team to onboard a new employee.
To create a new template you click on the big + sign under my...(read more)![]()
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Scribe Online – Working with Upsert Block in Dynamics 365 CE
Continuing our previous posts on Scribe Online, let us look at the Upsert block for Dynamics 365 CRM Connector. The way it works is à The Upsert block will have a field called alternatekeyname where we...(read more)![]()
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Idle Session Management
To be released on 10/10/2016!
With Idle Session Management inside NAV, you can specify Idle Client Timeout, Total Sessions for each user, and allocate Concurrent Client Access Licenses (CCALs) to group...(read more)![]()
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Using Angular in Dynamics 365 CRM – Part II
Introduction
In our previous blog, we have seen how to create and deploy a simple hello world Angular application in Dynamics 365. In this blog, we will see how to work with CRM Client API, CRM Web API...(read more)![]()
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Web Services – Business Central Part- 2
Today in this post we will continue from where we left our previous post, if you missed or wish to have a look you can find her in this link. Web Services – Business Central Part- 1 We saw in our previous...(read more)![]()
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More Pages to Explore .....
