Unveiling the 2024 release wave 2 plans for Dynamics 365 Project Operations

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations includes several enhancements and new features focused on streamlining project management, improving collaboration, and leveraging advanced analytics to drive project success. This blog post highlights key features and updates that the 2024 release wave 2 brings to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations brings notable advancements to quote management leveraging Copilot. Copilot is an AI-powered assistant in Dynamics 365 Project Operations. It now includes capabilities designed to streamline the quote process. The new unified grid interface, supported by Copilot, enables users to directly add or edit quote line details, with real-time access to customer schedules, margins, and budgets. This enhancement reduces manual effort, minimizes errors, and provides deeper financial insights for better decision-making.

The advanced AI quote summary, powered by language learning models (LLM), offers comprehensive overviews and actionable insights. This feature highlights upcoming actions and delivers critical financial and operational data, supporting strategic decision-making and planning. These improvements ensure that users can manage quotes with greater accuracy and efficiency, enhancing overall project management capabilities.

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations introduces key advancements in progress billing, enhancing efficiency and accuracy for both resource and non-stock scenarios. Users can now maintain progress billing rules for these scenarios, allowing them to track and manage billing based on the progress of contracts. This update enables the creation of invoices reflecting the completed progress, improving financial oversight and streamlining billing processes. Additionally, the integration of progress-based billing with the Billing Hub optimizes invoice creation, reducing clicks and improving user efficiency.

Key Benefits:

• Progress billing for resource and non-stock scenarios: Manage and maintain progress billing rules, allowing for invoicing based on completed progress.
• Direct transaction entry on draft invoices: Streamline invoicing by creating transactions for time, expenses, and materials directly on draft invoices, enhancing accuracy and operational efficiency.
• Enhanced billing hub integration: Enable progress-based billing within the billing hub, reducing navigation, accelerating invoice creation, and minimizing the need for invoice corrections.

The latest release of Dynamics 365 Project Operations now allows users to enable multiple deployment types within a single legal entity. This feature leverages the modern architecture of the Dataverse platform, providing seamless integration between resource/non-stocked scenarios and stocked/production order deployment types. It enables users to benefit from advanced project planning with Microsoft Project for the Web and resource management through Unified Resource Management, all while maintaining their existing legal entity setup. Although this is a major development and not all functionalities will be available immediately, it represents a significant step towards greater flexibility and efficiency in project management.

Key changes include:

• Relaxed validation for legal entities: Existing global project management and accounting parameters will be adjusted to allow legal entities with project data to be enabled for resource/non-stock deployment types.
• Evaluation of business processes: Ensuring proper restrictions for different deployment types, such as allowing invoices for Dataverse-based projects only from Dataverse.
• Updated access controls: Legacy functions in both deployment types will be restricted or made read-only, including resource management and project work breakdown structures in the finance and operations user interface.
• Enhanced user experiences: Projects created in resource/non-stocked deployment mode will utilize Unified Resource Scheduling for resource management and Project for the Web for project planning.
• Potential changes in experience: Introduction of independent forms or combined list pages to manage projects from different deployment types, such as managing stocked and non-stocked projects within the same form.

Managing price changes in quotes and contracts can be complex, but the 2024 Release Wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations simplifies this process. This new feature ensures that price adjustments for labor, expenses, and materials are automatically updated based on their effective dates, eliminating the need for manual updates. By calculating prices using weighted averages, the system delivers accurate and reliable figures while significantly reducing manual tracking and minimizing errors.

In addition to automatic price updates, the new feature includes a comprehensive audit trail that records all changes made to quotes and contracts. This audit trail provides full transparency and traceability, reinforcing confidence in the accuracy and integrity of pricing information. Users can view exact totals at any point in time, reflecting both current and historical pricing data, which enhances contract management and ensures precise financial accounting.

The 2024 Release Wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations introduces greater flexibility for determining financial dimension defaults, particularly for resource-based and non-stocked scenarios. This enhancement allows users to assign financial dimensions for both cost and revenue, improving the analysis of financial performance and eliminating the need for manual reclassification. The new functionality provides more control over how financial dimensions default, streamlining the process and increasing reliability.

Key features include:

• Customizable configuration: Define how financial dimensions default based on criteria such as contract, project, or cost and revenue profile.
• Criteria-based defaults: Set criteria to determine if dimensions should default from contract lines or projects.
• Enhanced reliability: Improve the accuracy when saving financial dimensions and default values on projects.
• Time and material contract lines: Add the ability to set dimensions specifically for time and material contract lines.
• Revenue recognition: Use contract lines for revenue recognition, enhancing the alignment of financial reporting.
• Advanced logic: Apply specific rules for default dimensions, with a hierarchy that overrides defaults based on project or contract line specifics, as illustrated by the example grid logic.

In the latest release, Dynamics 365 Project Operations introduces time-zone agnostic fields for projects and project tasks, addressing issues related to time-zone conversions. Previously, start and end dates were converted to GMT before being saved, which sometimes led to errors when the conversion shifted dates. The new time-zone agnostic fields store start and end dates without converting to GMT, ensuring that date integrity is maintained even when only the date is extracted. This enhancement allows for accurate date management and integration, regardless of time zone discrepancies.

Key benefits include:

• Accurate date storage: Dates are saved in their original time zones without conversion to GMT, preserving date integrity.
• Consistency in integration: Avoid issues where date changes occur due to GMT conversion, improving reliability in data integrations.
• Flexible project planning: Time-zone agnostic fields facilitate better project planning by using fields that are not dependent on specific time zones, ensuring smoother extensibility and integration.
• Enhanced extensibility: Supports scenarios where time-zone differences might impact contract definitions or other time-bound activities, providing a more flexible and accurate project management experience.

The 2024 Release Wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations includes several additional updates and enhancements designed to improve user experience, functionality, and efficiency across various aspects of project management.

• Mark a task as complete from the grid view: This feature adds the ability to mark tasks as complete directly from the grid view, streamlining task completion for users who do not use time entries to track progress.
• Use one grid for material and expense estimates: The new grid experience consolidates material and expense estimates into a single, modern grid with enhanced filtering, deletion, and lookup capabilities for better performance and usability.
• Enable estimate grid to display cost and sales on one row: View and edit both cost and sales on a single line within the estimate grid, consolidating visibility and improving efficiency and accuracy in managing estimates.
• Copy quotes and contracts across legal entities: Facilitates the duplication of quotes and contracts to new legal entities, allowing for efficient replication and management across different business units.
• Support cost plus pricing for resource time: Allows organizations to derive bill rates based on associated cost rates directly in Project Operations, simplifying pricing and reducing the need for external tracking sheets.
• Implement access restrictions in Project for the Web iFrame: Adds security controls to manage what users can access and modify within the Project for the Web iFrame, enhancing administrative control and data integrity.
• Enable milestone date to be time zone independent: Aligns milestone dates across project contract lines and invoice entities, improving accuracy and efficiency in milestone invoicing and reducing administrative corrections.

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Project Operations introduces a suite of powerful updates and enhancements that refine project management, improve operational efficiency, and enhance user experience. Rand Group is your Dynamics 365 Project Operations support partner that can highlight new features that your organization should utilize, train your users on the new features, and perform system checks to ensure all modules are performing as expected after each release wave. Ready to start using these new features from the 2024 release wave 2? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.