As part of its biannual release cycle, Microsoft just published the 2022 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365. This wave features new capabilities and enhancements that will launch between April 2022 and September 2022.
Here’s a preview of what’s coming in the first wave of the year.
Dynamics 365 Finance 2022 Release Wave 1
In the new bundle of features and enhancement for Finance, expect:
Intelligent automation for vendor invoicing: OCR capabilities automate the reading and recognition of vendor invoices to support end-to-end AP automation. Leveraging Azure Form Recognizer, AI Builder and Power Platform, Dynamics 365 Finance will create out-of-the-box vendor invoice models and a framework for continuous learning for invoice exceptions.
Financial analytical data model that is denormalized, reliable, scalable and extensible: Power Finance users will have analytical insights into their financial and operating data using their preferred tool, Excel or Power BI.
Enhanced globalization offerings for Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations and Commerce, including Tax Calculation and Electronic Invoicing: Businesses must meet complex, country-specific globalization requirements in the areas of tax compliance and adoption of local business practices. These offerings and out-of-the-box content are available for 44 countries and regions, available for any first- and third-party app and extended by ISV solutions.
Public Preview of Tax Audit and Reporting Service as part of Globalization Studio: The new release will enhance and scale the existing tax audit and reporting content and capabilities of Electronic Reporting to the enterprise level. This service evolves Electronic Reporting into a low-code microservice and leverages capabilities of Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Synapse Analytics.
General availability of comprehensive subscription billing: This covers recurring subscription revenue opportunities, including handling complex pricing, consumption and milestone billing; managing large volume customer contracts; and automating the complexity around recurring revenue.
Enhanced Configurable Business Documents and Electronic Reporting offerings
Supply Chain Management 2022 Release Wave 1
Updates to Supply Chain Management focus on building agility and resilience in the supply chain to ensure business continuity. In the new bundle of features and enhancements, expect:
Enhanced warehouse and manufacturing execution workloads: The enhanced workloads for cloud and edge scale units means support for more warehouse processes, including those for packing stations, manufacturing operations and material handling systems. The result: helping businesses scale mission-critical operations.
New manufacturing scenarios and planning strategies for Planning Optimization: Shorten planning cycles, reduce inventory levels and improve customer service. Use Planning Optimization for production planning and take advantage of the shortened planning cycles to increase manufacturing agility. Native Demand Driven Material Requirements Planning (DDMRP) support reduces inventory levels while improving customer service.
Global Inventory Accounting: Updated functionality helps businesses comply with local and global accounting standards, simplifying operations for businesses in multiple currencies or facing local and global accounting standards. It provides the ability to account for inventory in multiple representations by applying the appropriate valuation method and accounting currency per instance.
New inventory allocation and available-to-promise (ATP) capabilities in the Inventory Visibility add-in helps businesses increase order fulfillment rates by pre-allocating available inventory for key channels and accounts, and by providing visibility into future stock levels.
Other releases that affect Finance and Supply Chain Management
Improvements to integration between Finance and Operations apps and Azure Data Lake Storage: This enables you to add computing resources when Microsoft Power Platform processing needs increase. This also adds functionality in the Regression Suite Automation Tool (RSAT) in the areas of improved usability and better integration with Azure DevOps.
Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management: The latest release wave brings a new returns and exchange management service integrated into ecommerce solutions. This service minimizes operational costs related to getting merchandise back on shelves and drives clear communication with their consumers.
Learn more about Intelligent Order Management: How to Master Digital Channels with Intelligent Order Management
Dynamics 365 Project Operations: The new release enhances onboarding, estimating and using resources from external talent pools, boosting efficiencies in project planning and delivery. Upgrade from Project Service Automation to Project Operations and integrate with leading project management tools like Microsoft Project Desktop to increase adoption. Another enhancement allows companies to bring their own project management tools through a generic API where task scheduling can happen in the project management tool of choice and then integrate to Project Operations, becoming available in a read-only manner.
At the end of January 2022, Dynamics 365 users and partners started validating the latest features in a non-production environment. Certain features will be automatically enabled for users in production in April 2022. View early-access features for Finance and Supply Chain Management here.
Want to know more? Reach out today to talk with Columbus’s experts to see how the newest features and enhancements can help your business.