Business Central 2020 Release Wave 2 Overview

Hundreds of new features

The 2020 Release Wave 2 upgrade wave for all the business applications that make up Dynamics 365, including Business Central, brings new opportunities and technology that together enable you to develop and transform your business. The upgrade wave comes with hundreds of new features across the many applications, which includes marketing, sales, customer service, field service, finance, supply chain management, human resources, commerce, fraud protection and business center.

Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing improves the customer journey, that is the journey your customers go through from the time they first interact with your company to the time they stop being your customer, and also adds direct integration to Microsoft Teams for virtual events. Customer segmentation is enhanced through a new natural and intuitive language experience to create and use segments, eliminating the need to use specialized skills to build complex segments.

In response to increasing digital demand for users, Microsoft is developing and investing in:

• Microsoft Teams integration into virtual events
• Improved social posts and analysis

Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales continues to focus on simple user experiences, direct integration with apps, gamification (gameification, adding game elements in a non-game context), a new and improved mobile experience that provides fast access to customer information and new forecast improvements, which through a natural flow lets you create and manage bottom-up (from specific to general) sales forecasting processes.

Dynamics 365 Sales Insights

Insights continue to improve across multiple areas such as: Sales acceleration, conversational intelligence, relational intelligence and advanced forecasting, as well as pipeline intelligence with predictable lead and opportunity scoring. The purpose is to help companies' sales teams uncover the best deals.

With the Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 2 upgrades to Sales Insights, Microsoft continues to focus on large-scale sales, relationship building, time savings through data automation, and an overall improvement in usability.

Focus areas in 2020 Release Wave 2:

• Sales acceleration
• Conversation intelligence
• Advanced forecasting and pipeline intelligence
• Relationship information

Dynamics 365 Product Visualize

With this product visualization application, the company's sales staff have the opportunity to streamline and accelerate otherwise complex sales processes by presenting and customizing products to customers in a real-world environment. For example, a salesperson can place a 3D copy of a product in a customer's environment and add detailed notes and comments about the customer's requirements and wishes.

Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

With Customer Service, service employees expand their productivity capabilities so that they can participate in multiple sessions at the same time. Omnichannel (cross-channel content strategy) for Customer Service is enhanced with additional expansion options that enable integration with mobile apps, Microsoft's bot framework and outbound messaging channels.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights

2020 Release Wave 2 for Customer Service Insights adds new functionality to help agents who, by using similar case proposals, resolve various customer issues quickly and easily, thus contributing to fast and efficient support.

With the update also comes a new analytical view specifically for customer service managers, which helps them focus on key support areas that need their attention. These features are also included directly in the core Customer Service Hub app. In this way, the users of the solution can gain insight into context and connections without having to switch between applications.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

With 2020 Release Wave 2, Microsoft continues to add smart features, including a new Field Service dashboard that monitors key KPIs as well as work order completion metrics. The user experience is also improved in many ways, enabling proactive service delivery.

With brand new features such as push notifications and real-time placement, the Field Service mobile app has also been improved. 2020 Release Wave 2 also includes scheduling improvements as well as improved skill-based matching.

Dynamics 365 Remote Assist

With 2020 Release Wave 2, the range of scenarios beyond calls is expanded, allowing technicians to perform activities such as capturing service and repairing data, conducting surveys and reviewing independently and deriving service insights from their service functions.

Finance and operations

Dynamics 365 Finance

With the upgrades in 2020 Release Wave 2 to Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft continues their focus on automating routine tasks and thus reducing the amount of manual and time-consuming work processes, while adding additional insight and intelligence to to the application.

The intelligent cash flow forecast, already unveiled in 2020 Release Wave 1, will be released in this upgrade wave so the feature will now be available to all users along with additional intelligence and vendor billing automation.

The core finance part of Finance is improved with the addition of the asset leasing feature. The ongoing updates in the upgrade waves help to ensure that Finance remains in line with changed accounting rules.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

In the 2020 Release Wave 2 upgrade wave, scheduling optimization management is extended to the production part of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to perform supply and production scheduling almost in real time with in-memory services.

There will also be improvements to product information management, which includes capacity for technical change and production versioning. Cost management includes completely new functionality that, by allowing dual currency and dual valuation, enables global companies to manage and maintain multiple cost accounting books. As part of the upgrade wave, there will also be improvements in the job card device, which means that a new and improved user experience has been added as well as a new feature that enables reporting of serial numbers.

Dynamics 365 Guides

In 2020 Release Wave 2, the focus is on optimizing the intelligent workflows. By taking advantage of data and new innovative AI technology, work instructions can be configured to be continuously adapted based on the operator's input.

In addition, data insights will make it easier to use time tracking data and connect these to your specific business. For example, you will be able to determine if the operators have performed all the individual steps in a guide before sending a final signal.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

In 2020 Release Wave 2, Microsoft launches a new Dynamics 365 business application called Dynamics 365 Project Operations, which aims to unify operational workflows and thus create the visibility, collaboration and insight necessary for the company to create success across work teams and departments from sales to finance.

With Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Microsoft has developed an app that connects the administration of sales, resource, project management and finance in a single application and which will help you win more orders, speed up your deliveries, strengthen your employees and not least maximize profitability.

Human Resources / HR

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

With 2020 Release Wave 2, leave and absence are expanded and Dynamics 365 Human Resources further strengthens management competencies to transform and improve the employee experience. Both employees and managers will be able to manage leave and absence directly from Microsoft Teams. The release wave also enables a streamlined integration to 3rd party recruitment and payroll partners, thereby building a Human Capital Management (HCM) ecosystem.

Commerce

Dynamics 365 Commerce

In the upcoming upgrade of Dynamics 365 Commerce, the capacity will be further expanded, so that even users without programming skills can easily design and manage the experience with digital commerce.

Dynamics 365 Connected Store

Release Wave 2 2020 adds a number of new features and capabilities, such as integration with Dynamics 365 Commerce, front-line task assignment and tracking with Microsoft Teams, integrated workflows with Power Platform applications, intelligent command center, store analysis and solutions that provide insight into the store as for example detection of anomalies, inventory recommendations and shift management recommendations.

Fraud Protection

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection

The upgrade wave adds integration to Dynamics 365 Commerce and a new "manual review" feature, which allows users to mark transactions for review and then allow human agents to rate those transactions.

SMB (Small and Midsize Business)

Dynamics 365 Business Central

The improvements of Business Central, include service improvements, so that the solution meets the requirements of a rapidly growing customer base, optimized performance, easier handling of file storage, support for group VAT, closer integration to Microsoft Teams. In addition, functionality has been added, which is the most in demand by the user of the solution. Read much more about 2020 Release Wave 2 for Business Central and Business Central 17.

Customer data platform

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

This app enables the company to combine different types of data from different sources, whether they are transactional, observational or behavioral sources, and thus achieve a simple and unified view of customers and thus derive intelligent insights that help to run the key business.

Dynamics 365 Product Insights

Enables the company to understand their customers' journey, consumption and overall shopping experience across all channels for it's products (webstore, mobile and connected devices).

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

Microsoft Forms Pro has changed its name and the next solution in the product evolution has been named Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. The solution still provides management functionality for handling feedback, which collects and operates simple but also reliable feedback, an integrated customer data platform and built-in insight tools, which enables timely follow-ups in order to close the loop with the customers.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, you get out-of-the-box ready-to-use feedback templates that presets survey questions, workflows and reports, including a customer feedback solution template which is based on customer experience (CX) best practices from Forrester Research.