Overview of using Dynamics 365 to introduce new services to your organization
Applies to: Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Guides, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Supply Chain Center
This article describes how organizations can use Dynamics 365 to introduce new services.
The ability for an organization to create new services in their offerings plays a pivotal role in the growth and innovation of the organization. The business process area involves strategic development, launch, and integration of fresh offerings into the market, ensuring that the organization remains competitive and responsive to the evolving needs of customers. The process of introducing new offerings into the market can vary drastically from industry to industry and geography to geography, among other factors. However, one certainty among all organizations is that the process can be costly, time consuming, and has a direct impact on the organization's bottom line. For this reason, having strong technology solutions such as Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform are essential to ensure that business decision makers have the right information to make the right decisions.
Organizations can diversify their portfolio, tap into new revenue streams, and strengthen market presence by introducing new services. The Dynamics 365 product suite offers various tools and products to help support this process across several industries. Here are some examples:
- Dynamics 365 Field Service offers capabilities to offer many types of services to organizations.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers capabilities to support services that are offered to customers.
- Dynamics 365 Commerce offers capabilities to track sales and services in the point of sale, online, in a call center, or with integrations from Dynamics 365 Sales or other solutions that help you manage your sales cycle.
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management supports the lifecycle of services.
With complex support for different types of services across the portfolio, it's important to select the right technologies to support your business needs.
When introducing new services, it's important to consider that careful execution of the market research, ideation, rigorous testing, and seamless coordination across departments is executed well. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys offers tools to help with many steps. When you use Customer Insights with productivity tools such as Microsoft Teams, Planner, and Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, for example, the organization can successfully implement solutions to support the process leading to increased customer satisfaction, increased brand reputation, and sustainable growth.
When organizations are looking to implement technological solutions to support the introduction of new service business processes, we recommend that these activities are prioritized and planned early in the process. The service data that is captured as part of the business process is critical to many of the downstream processes. A poor implementation might cause data quality issues that can lead to other issues later in the project and in the overall business cycle. Keep in mind that service data is considered master data and should be carefully planned and integrated into all downstream business processes. If you're planning to use a non-Microsoft solution for service master data, you can integrate your solution in the first phases of your service and you can look to replace the non-Microsoft solution in a later phase. However, careful considerations for the functionality needed should be taken early in the project to avoid reworking later.
Stakeholders
Many people across the organization should contribute to the decision-making process and design of the Introduce new services business process area. The following list provides examples of such stakeholders:
Product Managers: Lead the product development process, defining service features, specifications, and market positioning. They ensure that the new offerings align with customer needs and market trends.
Marketing: Develop marketing strategies, campaigns, and messaging to effectively introduce and promote new services to the target audience.
Sales: Provide insights into customer preferences, market trends, and competitive landscape. Collaborate to create sales strategies and training to effectively pitch and sell the new offerings.
Research and Development (R&D): Design and develop new services based on input from product managers and market research. They ensure technical feasibility and innovation.
Design: Create visual and user experience designs for the new offers, focusing on aesthetics, usability, and customer satisfaction.
Engineering: Develop and implement the necessary technology infrastructure to support the new services, including software, hardware, and any integration requirements.
Quality Assurance (QA): Test the new services rigorously to identify and rectify any issues before launch, ensuring a high-quality user experience.
Supply Chain and Operations: Coordinate logistics, production, and distribution of the new services, ensuring a seamless transition from development to market.
Legal and Compliance: Ensure that the new offerings comply with industry regulations, intellectual property rights, and any legal requirements.
Customer Support: Prepare for customer inquiries and assistance related to the new offers, ensuring a smooth onboarding experience for users.
Finance: Provide budgeting and financial analysis for the project, evaluating the projected costs and potential revenue streams associated with the new offerings.
Executive Leadership: Provide overall strategic direction and decision-making for the project, ensuring alignment with the organization's goals and objectives.
Project Manager: Oversee the entire project, coordinate between different teams, manage timelines, budgets, and resources, and ensure successful project execution.
Introduce new services process flow
The following diagram illustrates the Introduce new services business process area.
Start
Parallel branches connect to Plan to produce and Source to pay that both connect to Prototype and test offerings.
Concept to market
Categorize services
Introduce new services
Generate offering ideas and concepts
Assess offering feasibility and viability
Define offering requirements
Prototype and test offerings
Plan offerings implementation
Parallel branches connect to the following business process areas under Concept to market:
- Define service costing
- Manage service pricing
- Prospect to quote
A parallel branch connects to the business process area under Source to pay:
- Manage vendor relationships
Ensure regulatory compliance of offerings
Secure final offering design approval
Is approved?
The Yes branch connects to Prepare offerings for launch
The No branch connects to Plan offerings implementation
Prepare offerings for launch
Release offerings to market
A parallel branch connects to the Run marketing campaigns business process area under the Prospect to quote end-to-end process.
Evaluate and monitor offering performance
End
Note
Each of the following processes have a parallel branch that connects to End: Define service costing, Manage service pricing, Manage vendor relationships, and Run marketing campaigns.
Introduce new services benefits
There are many key benefits that can be used to monitor and measure the success of implementing technology to support the business processes for introducing new services. The following sections outline the key benefits that an organization might monitor and measure for introducing new services.
Streamline collaboration and concept development
With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, you can efficiently capture and categorize new service ideas, ensuring no valuable concepts are overlooked and manage the entire lifecycle of introducing new services. When you use Supply Chain Management with Project Operations and Finance, you can track the costs associated with your projects to introduce new offerings giving you better visibility into the overall process and costs.
Because Dynamics 365 is built on Power Platform, you can easily connect your data to anywhere and out-of-the-box integrations with Microsoft Teams. With Microsoft Outlook, you can streamline collaboration between teams during concept development, allowing stakeholders to refine and shape ideas into viable concepts seamlessly.
Whether you want to use simple tools in the Microsoft 365 suite such as Planner or Microsoft Project, or rich integrated tools like Dynamics 365 Project Operations, you can facilitate coordinated efforts and smooth communication between the departments that are involved in introducing new services. This way, you reduce the risk of delays and miscommunication.
Efficiently monitor prototyping and testing
With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, you can efficiently monitor the progress of prototype creation, testing, and feedback gathering, ensuring key stages are managed effectively. With tools to manage projects, and work orders to test service work, it's easy to prototype and test any services that you want to launch.
Improved service launch
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management includes features to support the service lifecycle. This allows you to plan and execute service launch activities seamlessly, ensuring all necessary steps, including marketing and distribution, are carried out effectively.
When you use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys together with the rich product management features in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, you can easily create your marketing campaigns to align with your expected customer journeys and track your marketing costs.
Evaluate real-time service performance analytics
Because Dynamics 365 is built on Dataverse, you can effectively use market research insights integrated into the platform, guiding the development of offerings aligned with customer preferences and trends. When you use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can funnel data from Dynamics 365 or other systems to integrate the data with Azure Synapse Link and get performance data about your services in easy-to-use Power BI dashboards.
With Dynamics 365 Sales, Commerce, or Supply Chain Management, you can evaluate real-time performance analytics on new services, enabling data-driven adjustments based on market reception. This includes optimizing resource allocation by gaining insights into resource availability, enabling effective use for timely development.
Drive iterative improvement and satisfaction
When you use Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, you can intentionally collect and incorporate customer feedback directly into the development cycle, ensuring that customer input shapes enhancements and iterations.
When you use Dynamics 365 Customer Service, you can drive iterative improvement by refining services based on customer feedback, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction from the analytics you receive from cases and use of the knowledge base.
Next steps
If you would like to implement Dynamics 365 solutions to assist with your introduction of new service business processes, you can use the following resources and steps to learn more. (Links are added, when the articles are ready.)
Introduce new services (the article that you're currently reading)
Manage service pricing
Manage service lifecycle
Related information
You can use the following resources to learn more about the Introduce new services process in Dynamics 365.
- Create Item Cards for Goods or Services - Business Central
- Product information overview - Commerce
- Product information overview - Supply Chain Management
- Overview of inventory, purchasing, and returns in Dynamics 365 Field Service
- Project Operations for resource/non-stocked based scenarios deployment overview
- Set up a product catalog - Sales
- Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Functional Consultant Associate - Certifications
- Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Functional Consultant Expert - Certifications
Contributors
This article is maintained by Microsoft. It was originally written by the following contributors.
Principal author:
- Rachel Profitt | Principal FastTrack Solution Architect, Microsoft
Other contributors:
- Michael Herold | Delivery Architect, Microsoft