Enhanced Processes for Better Synchronization Among Sales, Operations and Accounting Teams

Synchronization is key to managing projects that deliver value to your customers while generating a profit for your business. Your sales, operations, and accounting teams all need to collaborate closely on projects to close more deals, deliver services on time, and cut invoices as soon as possible.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, you can empower and connect your internal teams to efficiently complete projects. Driven by the Microsoft Power Platform, the solution provides visibility and facilitates collaboration across project lifecycles while enabling everyone to analyze data, act on information, and automate processes.

You get everything you need to run your projects—from deal management to financials—in one application.

With the 2024 release wave 2 plan for Project Operations, Microsoft customers can expect expanded functionality and richer user experiences across several workflows:

• Increased tasks and dependencies in the work breakdown structure for projects.
• Usability and performance improvements for project invoicing.
• Improvements to time, expense, and material submission and approval processes.
• The ability to enable stocked and resource/non-stocked deployments in the same legal entity.
• Core operational workflows for project proposal generation.

In this blog, we cover some of the new functionality for Dynamics 365 Project Operations that Microsoft plans to deliver between October 2024 and March 2025.

Copilot AI: Expediting Project Workflows

With every new release wave of Dynamics 365 solutions, AI and automation through Microsoft Copilot empower consultants, sales personnel, project managers, and accountants. In the 2024 wave 2 fall release of Project Operations, Microsoft continues to hone intelligent, natural-language interactions so users can more easily tap into data resources and receive recommendations for action steps.

The AI enhancements also extend beyond Project Operations—so users can leverage productivity tools like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Excel. Power Platform and Copilot AI combine to essentially enable users to access data in Project Operations from any Microsoft application—helping users work more productively.

Copilot features in Project Operations streamline and expedite workflows from the frontline to the back office, optimizing operational efficiency for service delivery organizations. For example, with his latest release, users benefit from an enhanced quote experience where Copilot automatically generates quote summaries.

Enabling users to add or edit quote line details directly from a unified grid interface, this feature reduces manual effort and minimizes errors. In addition, customer schedules, margins, and budgets within quote lines offer deeper insights and better financial oversight. Plus, the advanced quote summary generated using language learning models ensures comprehensive overviews, aiding in informed decision-making and strategic planning.

Optimized Project Operations

Microsoft continues to enhance Project Operations to improve usability, performance, and scalability across key project components such as sales, planning, resourcing, budgeting, time entry tracking, invoicing, and core transaction process flows.

Here are some of the key new functions to look for in the 2024 release wave 2:

• Progress billing for resource and nonstock deployments.
• Cost-rate defaults for project estimations.
• Time-zone agnostic fields for project planning, tasks, and milestone dates.
• Financial dimensions for cost and revenue to analyze financial performance.
• Multiple deployment types in a single legal entity.
• Restrictions for users who access projects via embedded web pages.
• Time phasing for quotes and contract lines.

New functions in Project Operations will enhance your ability to copy quotes and contracts across legal entities and support for cost-plus pricing of resource time. There’s also an estimate grid for displaying cost and sales in one row along with a single grid view for material and expense estimates and to mark completed tasks.

Which New Features Make Sense for Your Business?

Not every new function in Project Operations will apply to every business that manages projects. There may also be some functions that will make sense to deploy further down the road. With Microsoft constantly rolling out new features, it can be a challenge to know which ones can most help your business today.

To navigate all the 2024 Release Wave 2 enhancements, Velosio is ready to assist. We are among the largest and most recognized Microsoft Dynamics partners, with thousands of active customers. Many years as a recognized leader in ERP, CRM, cloud productivity, and business intelligence solutions have repeatedly landed us in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics Partners worldwide.

We will be glad to advise you on when each Dynamics 365 Project Operations enhancement will be available, which enhancements make sense for your environment, and how to sync them with the financial functions you already rely on.

Contact us today to learn more.