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- Welcome to Dynamics 365 Essentials for IT.
In the next few minutes,
I'll look at how connected commerce supports you
in the way you're executing on your digital sales strategy
with unified, intelligent,
and personalized customer shopping experiences.
This includes streamlining your existing supply chain
and adding more resiliency.
Specifically, we'll show you how Dynamics 365 Commerce
provides that unified experience
between your organization and your customers
and how it enables centralized operations
and what it takes to set it up.
As a modern solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce
allows you to engage with your customers
however they choose to engage:
through a salesperson
using a mobile point of sale device in physical stores,
with an agent in your call center,
or directly on your eCommerce site.
Because timing and personalization is critical,
Dynamics 365 Commerce
shows intelligent product recommendations
when customers visit your eCommerce site.
In addition,
people can log into and get a personalized experience
by accessing their purchase history, shipping information,
provide feedback, ratings and reviews.
Across in-store or call center experiences,
your sales personnel have access
to the same customer information.
To protect your business,
Commerce also integrates with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection,
allowing you to run risk diagnostic reports
on your payment transaction data,
implement rules that leverage Microsoft's adaptive AI
to react to potential fraud in near real time,
and provides detailed insights
to your customer support team
when customer transactions are escalated for resolution.
Commerce's distributed order management system
takes customer orders wherever they come from
and determines the best location
from which to fulfill the order.
And of course Commerce comes with powerful analytics
that allow your business users
to review purchasing patterns
across online and in-store purchases
and see how different channels
or specific locations are performing.
So now let's look at the components
that make all of this possible.
First, Dynamics 365 Commerce
requires an ERP system to handle aspects
like your orders and inventory.
This can be Dynamics 365
Supply Chain Management and Finance,
which integrates natively,
or your current ERP system.
Commerce and its information is accessible
through Microsoft's Common Data Service,
which is a part of Microsoft's Power Platform.
The Common Data Service is a heterogeneous storage service
for both structured and unstructured data
and provides a foundation for data integration
across all Dynamics 365 applications and services,
as well as your in-house and even SaaS applications
and other clouds.
Microsoft also provides prebuilt connectors
to integrate your systems and business processes with CDS.
And of course you can always build your own.
If you want to know more about how this works,
we covered CDS in our overview episode,
which you can watch at aka.ms/Dynamics365ForIT.
Next, Dynamics 365 Commerce itself
consists of two core components and three key channels.
The two core components are Commerce headquarters,
which is where you manage all of the information
for your Commerce system,
such as products, prices, discounts, and so on.
Then there's the Nucleus of Commerce,
the API integration layer
that connects your backend data with your front end systems.
Think of this second component
as a headless Commerce engine.
This engine takes information from your ERP system
and the data entered through Commerce headquarters
and serves it up to your channels.
The three key channels that you can set up
and manage through Commerce are:
online channels such as eCommerce sites,
point of sale and mobile point of sale systems
used in your stores,
as well as your call centers.
Now, if you're using other channels like social media,
and emerging ones such as AI-driven chatbots,
the headless Commerce engine
also supports them through its APIs.
When you plan your rollout,
you'll need to familiarize yourself
with the elements and hierarchies in Commerce headquarters
and work with your stakeholders
to determine and document
how you organize and bring over data
like products and categories, catalogs and assortments,
pricing and discounts, employees and customers.
Transactional data such as purchases, returns,
feedback, reviews, and personalized recommendations,
flow through the Commerce engine to all of your channels,
ensuring consistent experiences
wherever customers and associates do business with you.
Your organization will probably also want to take advantage
of Commerce's clienteling feature,
which provides you with customer profiles and information
directly in the point of sale.
You can also surface next best customer actions
by leveraging Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
If you're not familiar with Customer Insights,
it's a service that pulls together customer information
from disparate sources
to build an actionable 360-degree profile of your customers
that enables more personalized experiences.
You can learn more at aka.ms/MechanicsCustomerInsights.
These insights can also be surfaced in your eCommerce site
as personalized recommendations
generated through built-in machine learning,
which also can be enriched through Customer Insights.
Dynamics 365 Commerce headquarters
allows you to easily and dynamically
update your eCommerce site in real time
by keeping your product information,
pricing and inventory centralized
so that you can map the live data
to the content in digital asset management system
of your eCommerce site.
This ensures no data is cached or duplicated.
The eCommerce website
available with Dynamics 365 Commerce
supports streamlined website authoring
and connected inventory management across channels.
And out of the box, Dynamics 365 Commerce
provides you with a plug-and-play template option
for page outlines,
which you set up through Lifecycle Services.
Authoring tools enable you to manage
your marketing pages, product pages, URLs,
templates, layouts, and media assets in a single location.
To further streamline website creation,
you can leverage templates
that reference this consolidated data stream
across product inventory, marketing, assets,
customers, and digital assets.
Product images defined in Dynamics Finance and Operations,
but are hosted in the eCommerce content management system
where they can be used across all of the retail channels
including physical store point-of-sale systems,
eCommerce, call center, kiosk, and mobile applications.
Now, another important channel of course
is the point-of-sale system, or POS for short.
With buy online and curbside pickup becoming common,
the POS is critical.
Commerce includes three POS experiences:
the Cloud POS, a browser-based system,
the Retail Modern POS,
an app that can be used on Windows-based devices,
and the POS Hybrid App for Android and iOS devices.
Now, you don't want anything to interrupt
a sale in your stores.
That's why the Modern POS client can run independently
in offline mode
even if connectivity to Commerce headquarters is lost.
In fact, it will dynamically switch
to the offline database on the device
so the sales transaction can continue.
You can also have multiple options
for your store deployment topology
to balance hardware footprint and costs
with your offline requirements in each store location.
These typologies make use of the Modern POS
and our Commerce Scale Units
available for you to run locally or as a SaaS service.
Commerce Scale Units
are in-store hardware that handled data
when the store loses internet connectivity.
These direct incoming and outgoing traffic intelligently
to target nearby data centers.
So now let's look at deploying and updating these systems.
These require both installation and activation.
The Channel deployment workspace in headquarters
provides a quick filterable view
of all of the devices across stores,
and also provides options for bulk deployment.
You can also use
your preferred software distribution method,
such as Intune or configuration manager
for silent installation of your POS software.
In addition to installing the software,
you'll need to activate each POS device.
This can be done manually at the device
or remotely through configuration file
during the installation process.
In terms of point-of-sale system security,
you'll use your Commerce headquarters
to create the worker's account
with an Azure Active Directory identity if you're using AAD,
or if not,
you'll provide them with a secure username and password
managed through Commerce.
So that's the point of sale.
But since we're in the topic of security,
let's end by taking a look
at another security capability: fraud protection.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection
protects your eCommerce business
and your customers against fraud,
helping to drive down costs
by setting thresholds that decrease wrongful rejections
and increase bank acceptance rates.
And you can use Fraud's loss prevention feature
to detect anomalies and patterns in transactions
that might be indicative of in-store fraud,
such as people using discount codes that have been leaked
or returning items to stores for refunds
when the authenticity of the purchase is in question.
Fraud Protection makes use of our machine learning models
which are trained regularly on anonymized data and signals
from millions of transactions
in our fraud protection network.
So that was an overview of Dynamics 365 Commerce
to enable intelligent and personalized interactions
across your sales channels
all while protecting against fraud
and ensuring increased resiliency.
Please keep checking back
with our Dynamics 365 Essentials for IT series
to learn more about
adopting specific Dynamics 365 applications and services
within your organization
and for a deeper dive on the Power Platform.
Thanks for watching.
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