Microsoft’s continued commitment and development of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) has resulted in the release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017. Dynamics NAV is a robust business solution from Microsoft that continues to be enhanced which is quick to implement, easy to use and has the power to support your business ambitions with powerful functionality.  Key for Dynamics NAV 2017 is integration and simplicity. This latest ERP solution offers significant enhancements to the core application, new features, as well as deeper integration with Powerful Business Tools.

Embedded PowerBI:

Power BI is a suite of analytics tools that allows the ability to transforms your company’s data into rich visuals for you to collect and organize so that you can focus on what matters most to your business.  Introduced in NAV 2016 and now embedded in NAV 2017, Power BI allows your company to analyze your information, see all of your data everywhere, from on-premise to the cloud, together in one place.

Continuing on this latest release from Microsoft in including and developing powerful integrations is rich business intelligence through Microsoft’s Power BI. PowerBI is now embedded into NAV 2017 to provide relevant charts and graphs inside the user’s role center.  Employees can stay informed on Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that are visually stunning, such as Pie Charts, Bubble Charts, Geographic Maps, Data Tree Maps, Funnel Charts and importantly provide insights into operations plus interactive reporting. This business intelligence empower users to create self-serve reports from trusted data source for faster, more informed decision-making.

In-Office 365:

Stay connected and boost productivity with all the parts of your business by having both NAV ERP and Office 365 connected. Now dynamics NAV is directly linked with Office 365 which means you can easily manage business interactions with your customers and vendors directly within Outlook.

Outlook Ad In: From the Outlook App, the integration between NAV and Office 365 allows you to see dashboards for contacts, customers and vendors, which contain charts and cues for the record. The improved compatibility enables you to easily create customers, vendors, quotes, and invoices, all without leaving Outlook. There is also improved Word integration, to help you lay out your documents professionally. The seamless experience means that you can save time, increase accuracy, and offer your customers an improved experience by navigating effortlessly between NAV and Office 365.

Calendar: If your organization uses Office 365, Dynamics NAV 2017 includes an add-in so you can invoice your customers based on entries in your Outlook calendar. From a calendar appointment, you can open the Dynamics NAV add-in and get an overview for the customer associated with the appointment. Then, you can create and send an invoice for the services provided in the meeting – all of this happening right there in the Outlook calendar. You can work directly with attachments to the associated email. We’ve also made it easy to update the add-in – you’ll get notified that a new version is ready for you in Outlook.

Email: The add-in works for attachments in mail as well – you can send the email attachments directly to the Incoming Documents list and send the documents, such as PDF files, to an Optical Characters Recognition (OCR) service. Here the documents are turned into a machine-readable format so that the invoice information can be added automatically to Dynamics NAV – this reduces the risk of errors and as a result increases productivity.

Email Templates: You can now create beautiful, professional-looking email cover-letter templates that include images and invoice information, such as totals, due dates, and payment terms, to use when sending emails to customers.

Contacts: From the Contacts List in Dynamics NAV, you can manually synchronize your Dynamics NAV contacts to Office 365 People. The contacts from Office 365 will sync back to Dynamics NAV as well. There is a filter that can be applied to the synchronization process so users will only need to sync the contacts they use most often. This same filter is used during the automatic background sync as well. This synchronization process also works with Microsoft Outlook on the desktop.

Cortana Intelligence:

Built-in Cortana Intelligence takes advantage of historical data and improves your insights into your predicted sales, helping you manage your stock and respond to your customers. Based on the forecast, the Sales and Inventory extension helps create replenishment requests for vendors, saving you time.

You can be confident that you are working with the best predictions, because the system uses different machine learning algorithms and compares the results, returning the predictions with the highest quality.  Cortana Intelligence in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 can help your company:

  • Predict Potential Sales-Manage your business effectively using the potential sales predictions from historical data.
  • Be Prepared of Expected Stock-Outs-Gain a clear overview of expected stock-outs, based on current inventory and predicted sales.
  • Select the Best Choice-Get the best predictions, because the system uses different machine learning algorithms and compares the results, returning the predictions with the highest quality.
  • Gain Transparency-View the accuracy of each prediction and specify the quality you want, excluding the predictions that do not meet your specifications

Furthermore, Partners can help customers find business-critical information hidden in their database using the Time Series Library generic API, which enables Microsoft Dynamics NAV developers to create their own functionality and bring machine learning to their solutions.

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017