Microsoft Dynamics Customer Event EMEA, November 2006, Munich
Microsoft holds an annual event - available for ALL Dynamics customers to attend - in both the US and EMEA.
M4 Systems recently attended the latest EMEA event in Munich, held 6-8 November 2006, with several of our customers. All attendees confirmed that they found the whole event extremely valuable and enjoyable.
One of the highlights of the conference was Bill Gates' keynote speech. His theme was The last mile of business productivity - how to help companies maximise productivity by helping them bridge 'the last mile' between personal productivity software and their back-end business systems - analogy
with the Telecoms industry which has millions of miles of super- fast fibre optic cable, laid around the globe, but has to switch to ancient copper wiring for the last mile of connection to the vast majority of users.
A large proportion of the huge research Microsoft has been committing to Dynamics over the past 5 years has been spent observing how various types of workers, in different types of businesses, spend their time
in getting their day to day jobs done.
From this research it is apparent that traditional ERP and CRM systems - do not fit - the way that most people operate, in their daily activities. Much of their time is spent dealing with unstructured, ad-hoc information: in meetings, on the phone and at their desks they use tools, such as Outlook, Excel and Word, to help manage their activities.
Much of their time is spent re-keying data between systems and large effort is required to move data between the unstructured world they spend most of their time in and the highly rigid structures of their Enterprise ERP and CRM
systems. Many business processes are still handled verbally or by shuffling pieces of paper around, exposing organisations to errors and a much higher risk of failing to meet modern compliance standards. Also a disproportionate amount of time is spent on dealing with exceptions, which significantly reduces productivity.
Bill Gates demonstrated how the latest versions of Dynamics such as GP 10, CRM 3.0 and Office 2007 have been designed to overcome these problems, showing how the software is very flexible and designed around roles, so that it is much more relevant to the way users work, showing the deep integration with Office 2007 - enabling the exchange of data, in both directions, very easily, showing how workflow from the new Windows Workflow Engine significantly improves authorisation processes and enables users to handle exceptions
far more easily and effectively.
If you would like to view the whole keynote, the following link will take you to a
web-cast.
Convergence 2006: Where it all comes together