Directions EMEA 2018 Review

Tom wins an Xbox!

Anyone who has been to a conference in the last two years has probably had access to an app that allows them to view the available sessions, create an itinerary and even review the sessions. For Directions EMEA, a solution was built upon Business Central, to show the flexibility of the solution. All of those who entered used the app and left feedback were entered into a prize draw, which our director Tom won!

Other Technologies

Field Service

Field Service is part of the CRM suite, providing a solution for managing and operating field service engineers. Some of the key features are as follows:

• Contract management
  • Opportunity Management
  • Quote / Contract
  • Service Agreements
• Schedule / Dispatch
  • Balance Workloads
• Optimised Schedules
• Best Technician
• Inventory management
  • Write-off reduction
  • Remote Inventory access
  • Parts Management
• Connected Field Service
  • Issue detection – IoT
  • Predictive Maintenance
  • Work Order Creation
• Customer Centric Experience
  • 360 deg view
  • Outbound communications
  • Technician Visibility

Built on the common data model, integration with other Dynamics tools is part of the future of the product.

Powerapps

Powerapps had previously been limited by the need to build it on a single tenant. This meant that partners would have to build each one individually. You can now export and import a PowerApp into another tenant (currently in preview). This gives partners the ability to build “off the shelf” solutions and decreases the price per app.

You can add a PowerApp part to a PowerBI report and embed the PowerBI report into Business Central; the part can even use the same data source as the report. The reports are also record-aware so that you can provide a personalised report for the individual records that your users view. PowerApps can have a button that when pressed runs a flow, which opens a lot of functionality. 

Thoughts from the team

"Directions EMEA 2018 was an amazing experience. I was eager to network and make myself a familiar face in the industry. The number of people I met with the same passion for the product was overwhelming. I took away a lot of insight into how Microsoft wants us to work in the future and also what is truly possible with good business practice in this quickly changing industry. On day 3, Microsoft said ‘The world will never be the same’ - it’s true. We are currently on the edge of change. This SaaS model Microsoft has adopted and pushed is big. They have big goals and they are giving us the tools to match those goals." - Tom Harper, Support Consultant

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Jesse Lawrence

Jesse is our marketing manager, keeping an eye on the latest news in the market as well as having worked on the GDPR legislation.