Dynamics 365 Business Central is one of Microsoft’s newest and most modern business applications. It is embedded with intelligent features that help make the system more intuitive and your employees more productive.
In this article we discuss three examples of how Dynamics 365 Business Central improves your business processes with Artificial Intelligence. All of these examples come as standard as part of Business Central and over the next 12 months we expect to see more enhancements in this area. The artificial intelligence features are powered by Azure.
AI features in Dynamics 365 Business Central
Sales and Inventory forecasting
The sales and inventory forecast extension is available as a standard feature of Dynamics 365 Business Central. This will predict your future sales using historic data and will identify when you will need to order more inventory in order to meet these orders. For organisations this is invaluable insight that ensures you never run out of inventory and have a clear view of how your business will perform going forward.
This extension predicts potential sales using historical data and gives its predictions about inventory stock. First, check if you have Sales and Inventory Forecast extension; if it’s missing, download it from Extensions Marketplace. In Service Connections page check Sales and Inventory Forecast Setup. You can set the period that you want to see the forecast and with the help of horizon, you can choose how many periods you want the forecast to cover.
Predicting late payments with Business Central
Effectively managing receivables is important to the overall financial health of a business. The Late Payment Prediction extension can help you reduce outstanding receivables by predicting whether sales invoices will be paid on time.
The extension uses a machine learning classification model that gives you out-of-the-box benefits from Artificial Intelligence, without having to be a data scientist. If you are, though, you can swap out our model for yours in just a few steps.
The extension also lets you continue to train your model as you accumulate data that will sharpen predictions about the payment habits of your customers. The more you use Business Central and the more data you feed the model, the more accurate predictions become.
How, and when, you generate predictions is up to you:
- You can analyse all sales invoices in the Customer Ledger Entries window, where you can also dig deeper into each posted invoice. The Late Payment field shows the outcome of the prediction.
- You can predict late payments upfront. In the Sales Quotes, Sales Orders, and Sales Invoices windows, you can use the Predict Payment action to generate a prediction for the sales document you’re viewing.
Business Central add-on for Outlook
Let’s say that you get an email from a customer that wants to get a quote on some items. Directly in Outlook, you can open the Business Central add-in, which recognises the sender as a customer, and opens the customer card for his company. You can then look to generate a sales quote directly from Outlook.
The Business Central Outlook add-on will read the email from the customer and using AI it will automatically generate a sales quote for the corresponding items. Where it is possibly more than one item it will give you a choice of which one for that customer. This helps save valuable time not only switching between applications but fetching information.
Download our Dynamics 365 Business Central product guide to find out more.