As we look ahead to 2021, companies are considering ways to improve and grow their business. One strategy that has a proven track record is digital transformation.
Dharmesh Godha, president and CTO of the technology consulting and implementation services company Advaiya, discussed his thoughts about how organizations should consider Microsoft technologies to achieve digital transformation and modernization.
1. Advaiya has been involved in the digital transformation field for some time. Briefly, can you tell us why a company should consider this strategy in the coming year?
Apart from increasing productivity, digital transformation focuses on overall business strategies that can be enabled by technology. With changes in the socio-economic environment and with the new ways of interaction, businesses need to look at the new ways for attracting customers, attracting talent, performing operations, and delivering value and these can be achieved through the process of digital transformation.
2. To help businesses achieve digital transformation and modernization you often rely on Microsoft technologies. Can you give us some examples of these technologies?
Well, there’s so many Microsoft platforms and tools that we use. One example that helps dramatically improve corporate decision-making is Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights 365.
With Insights, you can look into the endless amount of data across different sources. By getting a complete and actionable view of every customer across your different touch points, you can better understand customer needs and move from reactive to predictive. With unified data and intelligent insights in place, companies can drive targeted engagements across marketing, sales, and service to grow their business to outperform their competition.
When you run Insights with Microsoft Power BI you can really ramp up your analytics capabilities with interactive business intelligence and dynamic visualizations to create intuitive reports to share your actionable analytics on-premises or in the cloud.
When you tie this into Microsoft Azure you have the power of the cloud, where anyone with approved access can retrieve analytics from any location at any time. Furthermore, Azure helps a business improve productivity and substantially reduce computing costs.
3. You mention helping a business improve productivity with Microsoft technology. Can you elaborate?
Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online, which are part of Microsoft Office 365, allows you to automate workflows, improve business communications, and empower teamwork with its cloud-based content management and collaboration platform. It’s an ideal way to increase productivity as it enables employees to share and synchronize resources and communications in one central platform without extensive infrastructure requirements.
Another example is Microsoft Power Platform. With Power Platform, you can integrate business applications that have been developed from your data using Microsoft Power Apps to strengthen your insights and improve productivity. You can also embed tasks and workflow into the platform using Microsoft Power Automate.
In addition, using a unified ERP solution, you can get a complete picture of your organization by using integrated apps to improve productivity, manage and automate functions. For example, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation (PSA) manages your entire project lifecycle including planning, resources, collaboration, time, expenses, billing, and service, and if you’d like to organize your service chain you can utilize Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service. This uses AI, mixed reality, and IoT to deliver information about equipment, work orders, inventory, scheduling, dispatch, contracts, customers and more.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales provides tools like CRM and Sales Insights to help sales organizations operate efficiently and allowing the sales team to focus on value-added activities.
4. Looking at all these Microsoft technologies, do you have an example of them being put to use and how they made a difference?
Absolutely. Advaiya has worked on more than 1,000 projects and helped more than 100 companies over the years.
Recently, we helped a growing service-oriented business that ran its operations on paper for its billing to contracts to customer reports and other workflow. Work was manual, repetitive, and time consuming. Reports were hard to find. They attended one of our “Dashboards in a Day” Workshops and then asked us to help improve their business. The results were nothing short of spectacular.
Since it’s a growing service business, we started by rebuilding its field service operations with Dynamics 365 Field Service. This improved productivity, collaboration and insights from the field. We aggregated its information, implemented productivity solutions and moved processes to the cloud. We improved the company’s project management capabilities. Records storage and work orders were digitized, dispatch was optimized, and workflow was streamlined to improve billing and reporting, and field technicians were empowered with mobile technology and tablets.
Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint-based document management was integrated with Dynamics 365 and is now available for them on mobile apps. A Microsoft Dynamics 365-based solution now leverages Microsoft Dynamics Cloud allowing for scalability, users to connect to the solution remotely, and utilization of cloud-based services like Bing maps and permit-services.
We also modernized their accounting and financial infrastructure from paper to digital by uniting control systems between field service and finance. Here, we implemented a cloud-based ERP solution – Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Power BI for visualization. This upgrade improved time tracking and payroll systems and delivered a single platform for cohesive integration of data.
For sales and marketing, we implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as the CRM application and designed it as the same platform for the field services solution and workflows.
The digitization of business documentation has had such a strong impact on their overall business operations. Digital transformation has removed most paper dependency, redundancy of data entry, and provides one record of the truth to strengthen reporting and analysis.
5. Where can people find out more about Advaiya and digital transformation?
Businesses can visit Advaiya.com. We also host several workshops and webinars, many of which are co-hosted with Microsoft.
About Dharmesh Godha
Dharmesh Godha is President and CTO of Advaiya, a technology consulting and implementation services company that provides tailored digital transformation solutions with business applications and analytics. Dharmesh has more than 20 years’ experience identifying and leveraging innovation, and numerous technology platforms for various project implementations.
