Latest updates to Project Operations in 2021

Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects sales, resourcing, project management, and finance teams within a single solution to drive project success for project-centric businesses. As with all Dynamics 365 applications, there are two release waves each year of new functionality and updates. Project Operations release wave 1, rolling out from April to September, adds three new features to improve the user experience. Below is a summary of the updates to Project Operations crafted by our team of experts.

Tracking the pricing and use of nonstocked materials, or materials that are not managed on an inventory basis, is a common need for project-based organizations. In wave 1 of updates to Project Operations, Microsoft released a feature for estimating and tracking the consumption of nonstocked materials. Key capabilities include:

• Estimating and pricing nonstocked materials during the sales cycle for a project
• Tracking the use of nonstocked materials during project delivery
• Integrating vendor costs from project-based vendor invoices for nonstocked items from Dynamics 365 Finance
• Invoicing nonstocked material costs from usage and from vendor invoices
• Accounting for material costs and revenue on projects

Updates to Project Operations includes significant enhancements to the deployment experience for resource and nonstocked-based scenario deployments. Improvements are as follows:

• A new onboarding provisioning questionnaire
• Reduced deployment steps in Dynamics 365 Lifecycle Services, with new support for automatically linked environments and enabling dual-write entity maps
• A new trials experience that guides customers to the correct deployment approach based upon their scenarios, and automatically deploys any of the three deployment types without any administrative setup

It is common to have different contractual agreements for different phases of work. For example, a company could negotiate a fixed-price billing setup for the prototype phase of a project but use a time-and-material arrangement for the implementation. With this new feature, Project Operations customers can associate project tasks with project contract lines, thereby subjecting them to the same billing method, invoice frequency, and customers as those on the contract line. This helps ensure accurate invoicing, accounting, revenue estimate, and recognition to work. For project managers, this feature allows them to mark specific tasks as chargeable, nonchargeable, or complimentary, which will be enforced when recording sales values and creating invoices.

Rand Group is your Dynamics 365 Project Operations support partner to help you to start utilizing this new wave of features. Our experts are knowledgeable on the latest updates to Project Operations and ready to answer any questions.

Looking to get your organization up and running with Dynamics 365 Project Operations? For more information, talk to our experts today.