How to enhance your Microsoft Dynamics deployment
Businesses across various industries are unlocking new value and augmenting their existing solutions with Microsoft Dynamics. As a suite of intelligent business applications, Microsoft Dynamics, or Dynamics 365, has gained a reputation for boosting operational efficiency, enhancing agility and reducing complexity.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is increasingly being employed for enterprise digital transformation, employee engagement and productivity, and change management strategies. However, accessing the many benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is not always straightforward. Implementation challenges can prevent businesses from reaching their full potential.
Below, we’ve outlined some of the solutions to the most common Dynamics 365 implementation challenges affecting businesses. Don’t let your Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementation remain mired in frustration. Access its full potential - and yours - with these tips.
1. Create a detailed plan
Many enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools don’t deliver their desired outcomes, whether businesses decide to use NetSuite, SAP ERP or Microsoft Dynamics 365. In fact, as many as three-quarters of all ERP implementation initiatives fail. Often the main reason is poor planning.
At the outset of any Microsoft Dynamics project, it is essential to come up with a clear plan. Define your goals, principles, desired outcomes, resources, and project schedules. What is it you want to achieve from the project? Are you looking to improve productivity, agility, lower costs or something else? Whatever your goals, outline them clearly to give your Microsoft Dynamics implementation purpose.
Of course, the purpose of your project will differ based on the department, team and individual involved. Talk with your implementation partner to determine what success looks like for each of your goals. Decide how you are going to measure success, prospective time frames and align your project goals to broader organisational ones.
Remember, you don’t have to plan your Dynamics 365 project all by yourself. Change management strategies for successful ERP implementation can be collaborative affairs. Working with experienced Dynamics consultants and project managers can help you to structure, streamline and improve your Dynamics 365 implementation plan. Often a fresh set of eyes from outside the company can identify potential issues around customisation, resource allocation and skill requirements that are more difficult for internal personnel to notice.
Remember, the planning stage is a process - not an end-point. When you’ve designed a Microsoft Dynamics 365 plan, it’s time to not only execute the project but iterate it, undergoing analysis and making changes to your plan where relevant. That way, as you iterate, your plan improves and project execution is enhanced.
2. Make communication the basis for digital transformation
It’s no good having detailed plans and policies in place for your Dynamics 365 project if they aren’t communicated with all the relevant stakeholders. Communication always has to sit at the centre of digital transformation for enterprises. Poor communication can mean that any changes to a Dynamics 365 project are not shared between implementation teams and other employees - leading to misunderstanding, confusion and mistakes.
Don’t view communication in ad-hoc terms. Create a clear communication strategy that involves all relevant stakeholders. Communicate regularly regarding the concerns, challenges and benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365. Ensure any communication network you create is open for a two-way conversation. Use it for sharing updates from the leadership team but also as an opportunity for other stakeholders to ask questions.
Think carefully about the channels that might work best when discussing your Dynamics 365 projects. Successful change management requires clarity, discipline and buy-in. Your change management engagement model could utilise a combination of in-app announcements and weekly meetings depending on the type of information you are sharing and which stakeholders are involved.
3. Get your training right
It’s also not much good having a well-thought-out Microsoft Dynamics 365 plan if your employees don’t know how to implement it. That’s where training comes in. But training should be bespoke - for your aims, your project, and your staff. Did you know, for example, that not everyone learns in the same way?
In fact, it is usually agreed that there are four different types of learners: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, and reading/writing. As such, the most effective training programmes take these learner types into account. A Microsoft Dynamics training programmer for visual learners might focus more on maps, graphs, charts, patterns and shapes to educate employees. Auditory learners may learn better through group discussions. Reading/writing learners, meanwhile, could benefit from documents or even taking part in quizzes.
The fourth learner type is kinaesthetic learners, who learn best by performing actions themselves. Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) like Apty can help organisations create their own content such as walkthroughs and announcements that is well suited to the kinaesthetic learner.
With Apty, content suiting any type of learner can be easily converted and hosted within Microsoft Dynamics itself. Your employees don’t even have to leave the platform to learn more about related processes and applications.
4. Keep track of your progress
ERP implementation projects are resource heavy and known for running over budget. To ensure that you are getting ROI on your Microsoft Dynamics investment, you should determine what the key performance indicators (KPIs) of a successful implementation are and track them at regular intervals.
DAPs like Apty can be used to collect the metrics you need to track the progress of your implementation project. You should be able to measure engagement rates and productivity within the software, for example, the number of employees actively using the platform (segmented by function, region etc.), as well as how long it is taking them to carry out particular processes.
Managers can set up objective funnels to measure how long it takes for different user groups to complete each step of a process and see if and where they’re getting stuck. If the drop-off rate for a particular process is high, then more guidance can be provided via the DAP to help users to complete business processes correctly and efficiently.
The best DAPs not only provide detailed insights but also proactively help you to solve adoption and productivity problems, to ensure that you achieve your business objectives from the implementation.
5. Improve
DAPs can make the adoption and implementation of productivity tools like Dynamics 365 much more successful. By analysing user adoption, it suddenly becomes possible to make improvements and optimise processes.
Data represents a core part of the best DAPs. Apty, for example, provides data on usage patterns, efficiency, productivity and engagement. From here it becomes possible to optimise your Microsoft Dynamics processes. Without the right data, it is impossible to identify bottlenecks. It becomes impossible to make improvements.
Optimising your Microsoft Dynamics projects
Far too many Microsoft Dynamics projects look great on paper - only to fail in delivering the expected returns. This doesn’t have to be the case. DAPs like Apty can provide onboarding, training and actionable insights so you can identify challenges around your Microsoft Dynamics 365 usage and eliminate them.
