Microsoft Gulf yesterday (Feb 1) hosted a First Look event to introduce UAE businesses to the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365, at the Waldorf Astoria, The Palm Jumeirah, Dubai.

Decision-makers from across the country gathered to witness Dynamics 365’s ground-breaking union of customer-relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource-planning (ERP).

Decades in the making, it is a combination designed to support organisations in their journeys towards digital transformation, enabling them to better engage with customers, empower employees, optimise operations, and reinvent products and business models, said a Microsoft statement.

UAE Vision 2021, launched in 2010 by HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, aims to promote strategic, sustainable, innovative growth across all sectors and disciplines in the country, and place it as a leader among nations by the time of its Golden Jubilee, in 2021.

 “With the UAE making its march towards 2021, industries will undergo an environment of intense competition and innovation,” said Samer Abu Ltaif, regional general manager, Microsoft Gulf. “Dynamics 365 will help businesses capitalise on these opportunities, by managing specific processes, and play a key role in the acceleration of digital transformations, which are vital in meeting the changing needs of customers and capturing new business opportunities.”

The Dubai launch demonstrated the industry-leading scope of Dynamics 365 to help organisations achieve more. Microsoft took attendees on a deep-dive tour of the Dynamics 365 world and held panel discussions on how Dynamics 365 could be leveraged by businesses everywhere to become an operational game-changer.

Dynamics 365 gives organisations, regardless of scale, access to the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools ever seen in a business application. It hosts a complete set of ERP tools that boost business productivity for enterprises, equipping departments such as operations, sales, customer service and finance with global scalability and digital intelligence to boost growth. The applications provide greater visibility across systems and allow operations to become more connected, and deliver strategic, data-driven insights that enable organisations to transform their business models, the company said.

“We were already making extensive use of Office 365, as well as Power BI and AX 2012,” said Richard Wingfield, chief information officer, Majid Al Futtaim Ventures. “We were just starting to discuss the need for a homogenised, but flexible, customer view when Dynamics 365 was announced, and its common data model was very attractive to us. Microsoft has built a living, breathing information-ecosystem, centred on a group-wide CRM platform, which will allow a 360 view of the customer, while enabling each business unit to engage with their own customers, in their own vertical, as they have always done. This will empower us to increase our top line, through transformation of our customer experiences, and to cross- and up-sell opportunities across our divisions.”

Powered by advanced analytics and machine learning, Dynamics 365 brings together a suite of AI capabilities that can be used to improve manufacturing and supply-chain execution; make field-service operations more efficient; sell more effectively; and create standout customer experiences.
“Our constant target to offer an extraordinary experience to our customers is now supported by the deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM bank-wide” said Harris Mygdalis, deputy CIO of Commercial Bank of Dubai.

“Dynamics platform is the proper solution addressing in a unified environment all of the major CRM pillar requirements, namely sales, marketing and service management. Dynamics is moreover offering a completely digital experience enabling us to provide to our digital oriented customers what they require at the right time as well as to control and further streamline the respective banking processes”. – TradeArabia News Service