Top new features in Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management in the 2022 release wave 2

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations applications, comprised of Finance and Supply Chain Management, are powerful cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Microsoft is committed to enhancing these powerful solutions and releases updates twice a year. In this post, we will highlight key updates and new features included in the Finance & Supply Chain Management 2022 release wave 2.

Enhancements to the subscription billing solution

In the 2022 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Finance received numerous updates to enhance the subscription billing solution with split billing, quotes, and project accounting integration.

• Split Billing – Split billing allows for multiple customers to be billed from a single contract with a single billing schedule for each customer. With this new feature, users of Recurring contract billing within Subscription billing can now select additional customers as responsible parties on a billing schedule.
• Quotes – In February 2023, users will now be able to generate sales quotations using the pre-existing quotation report from a billing schedule. Additionally, data from the quotation report will be stored in existing Sales quotation tables so users can reprint quotations as needed.
• Project Accounting – There has been an increasing trend for organizations to transform their business models to sell project-based work and subscription-based services in consolidated contracts. In the 2022 release wave 2, new features have been added to help organizations define and manage billing schedules, record unbilled revenue based on the contractual agreement, and to defer costs and revenue and then recognize them based on the required schedule.

General availability of vendor invoice OCR

Included in the latest release is the general availability of vendor invoice optical character recognition (OCR). These new OCR capabilities will automate the reading and recognition of vendor invoices to complete the full end-to-end automation of accounts payable.

• Advanced configurations – With advanced configuration settings, OCR data processing will be flexible enough to fulfill many business needs. Users will be able to define mandatory invoice data fields, configure confidence scores to detect errors, and determine if a manual review is needed for each invoice.
• Deployment wizard – The deployment wizard provides a step-by-step guide that helps users seamlessly deploy the new OCR solution.
• Image file management – The image files workspace allows users to check the image file’s state before sending it to staging. With this feature users can perform a pre-check before sending files to recognition services, schedule a batch process to send image files to the recognition service, identify the channel for each image file, and trace all the state changes of an image file.
• New OCR hub – Included with the new OCR solution is a central hub that can be used to track and process vendor invoice data entered through OCR. This features provides a staging area to let recognized invoice data be validated and preprocessed before being converted to a vendor invoice in Dynamics 365 Finance.

General ledger year-end enhancements

Microsoft continues improving the year-end closing process for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. In the 2022 release wave 2, Dynamics 365 Finance will receive more enhancements designed to improve performance during the year-end process. The enhancements to the year-end close process include the following:

• Users now have the ability to specify balance sheet financial dimensions in detail when they close the year. This functionality was already available for profit and loss accounts
• The overall performance was improved so the year-end close process would run more efficiently

Additionally, Dynamics 365 Finance received several year-end enhancements during the 2022 release wave 1.

Globalization studio enhancements

The globalization studio for Dynamics 365 Finance makes localization easy for users to create, extend, automate, and maintain. In the 2022 release wave 2, Microsoft continues to enhance the Globalization Studio to provide for more globalization breadth, depth, and scalability out of the box.

• Tax calculation service – A new feature was added to enable the batch input function of tax codes in tax group setup and item tax group setup. Additionally, users can add criteria to select multiple tax codes with advanced operators such as: is, is like, begins with, and ends with.
• Electronic reporting – A new feature was added to electronic reporting that empowers business users to change the base Electronic reporting (ER) data model. This functionality helps when a derived format or mapping is initially created based on an original data model and a custom data model is needed at some point later. Business users will be able to continue using modifications of a derived format or mapping along with using the derived data model.

Inventory Visibility enhancements

Businesses that use warehouse management processes (WHS) can now take advantage of new Inventory Visibility capabilities. Inventory Visibility is an independent and highly scalable micro-service that enables real-time on-hand inventory change posting and visibility racking across all your data sources and channels. With Inventory Visibility, users can make soft reservations and allocate inventory:

• Soft reservations – Soft reservations allow users to make a real-time temporary deduction of inventory based on the quantity and product dimensions specified in a sales order. These soft reservations occur before the order is released to the warehouse.
• Inventory allocation – This new feature allows channel sales planners or sales account managers to pre-allocate on-hand inventory to tailor channel demands or fulfill requests from key corporate customers. Allocation occurs before sales transactions and before any physical warehouse work. Inventory Visibility will associate each item and quantity being allocated with top warehouse-level information.

Track soft reserved quantities within allocations

Businesses often require the ability to track real-time consumption within allocated quantities for each store or web market. Previously, in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, users could plan the apportionment of available on-hand inventory, but obtaining the physical consumption data would take a long time. In the 2022 release wave 2, the ability to make soft reservations within allocations was added to help users track actual booked quantities by demand in real-time. This new feature helps organizations to:

• Avoid oversell – The new ability to make soft reservation requests against allocated inventory will prevent users from posting additional soft reservation requests when there isn’t enough allocated inventory left
• Monitor overstock situations – Users can easily compare soft-reserved quantities against what is left in inventory pools allocated to individual channels or B2B customers. Users can adjust the allocation plan to better manage inventory turnover.
• Better protect allocated inventory – By minimizing oversell situations within each allocation channel, group, or customer, businesses will be able to better protect allocated quantities.

Supply risk assessment dashboard

A new supply risk assessment dashboard was released as a part of the 2022 release wave 2. This dashboard can help materials managers understand the risk of encountering sourcing shortages and delays. This enables businesses to take proactive actions to balance cost and resilience as they optimize their supply chains.

New mobile packing experience

Traditionally, warehouse employees have performed packing activities at a specific packing station configured in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, using processes optimized for shipments of small to large-sized parcels. To increase efficiency and to better support the packing and shipment of larger items, Microsoft has added new packing capabilities within the Warehouse Management mobile app. The Warehouse Management mobile app now provides warehouse workers with the freedom to move around while performing their packing activities. Businesses that ship large items or have large packing areas will benefit from this new mobile packing experience.

Planning optimization for process manufacturers

In the 2022 release wave 2 planning optimization received several enhancements that now allow process manufacturers to get near real-time insights into requirement changes, made possible by in-memory processing. The solution enables master planning to include supply from processes that output co-products and by-products. Process manufacturers can benefit from the planning optimization enhancements to significantly improve performance scalability with in-memory processing as well as minimize system impact on other processes by running master planning as a separate service.

The enhancements to planning optimization allow process manufacturers to:

• Create planned batch orders using formulas
• Calculate component requirements based on formula measurement rules
• Cover demand with supply that originates from batch orders that output co-products and by-products.

Sensor Data Intelligence enhancements

The Sensor Data Intelligence add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enables organizations to drive business processes based on sensor data from machines and equipment on the production floor. Previously, this add-in covered use cases for monitoring machine status to mitigate potential delays, comparing sensor readings for the properties of each product batch to monitor deviations, and for comparing actual cycle time to planned cycle time to prevent production delays. The new version of Sensor Data Intelligence includes new functionality to cover a broader range of use cases. The new use cases supported in this release are:

• Predictive maintenance – The solution minimizes maintenance cost and extends asset life by improving maintenance plans based on sensor reading of critical control points for machine assets
• Asset downtime – Users can now accurately track the efficiency of machine assets by using sensor data to track machine downtime

Rand Group is your Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations support partner to highlight new Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management features that your organization could utilize, train your users on the new features, and perform system checks to ensure all modules are performing as planned after each release wave. Ready to start using these new features from the Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management 2022 release wave 2? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.