Artificial Intelligence Continues to Drive Greater Efficiencies Across Financial and Warehouse Process

For manufacturers, distributors, and other companies that operate warehouses, Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provide a powerful combination. Dynamics 365 Finance, a modern ERP platform, delivers comprehensive functionality to manage financials. By leveraging advanced analytics, AI, and seamless integration, the solution also allows your business to make informed decisions, optimize workflows, and scale growth.

As a complementary solution, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management integrates various functions such as inventory management, production planning, procurement, logistics, and demand forecasting. This gives customers a unified platform to enhance efficiency, visibility, and decision-making in their warehouses.

The operations management platform integrated with supply chain management creates seamless, complex workflows. Running in perfect sync, the two solutions ensure customers receive products and services when expected while also enabling companies to operate profitably.

With both Finance and Supply Chain Management running in the cloud, Microsoft releases new features in two waves throughout the year. This blog provides a rundown of the key functions to look for in the 2025 Release Wave 1, which will arrive throughout the months between April and September.

Dynamics 365 Finance Functional Updates

Microsoft continues to strengthen autonomous financial workflows by embedding additional Microsoft Copilot AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance. For example, this release will include the continued preview of an account reconciliation agent, moving the process from end-of-period to a systematic, real-time experience.

Users can also look for a new journal framework that offers additional control, hyper-scale performance, multicompany management capabilities, and a more modern bank reconciliation process. Here are other key capabilities coming your way:

• Business performance analysis—Finance will feature enhancements for analytics, planning, and insights as well as data refreshes. Templates will make it easier to continuously plan, act, and analyze financial and operational data.

• Core financials—improvements in this area focus on additional end-to-end business process enhancements and automation across resource planning, reporting, and reducing financial close times at the end of each month.

• Localizations—The no-code/low-code Globalization Studio feature in Finance is used by customers in more than 210 countries. This toolset helps meet tax compliance and local regulation requirements. Customers will also find it easier to automate tax scenarios and extend localizations.

Microsoft has designed these features and user enhancements with advanced AI capabilities. Copilot automatically provides users with analytics across Finance documents to gain insights into fixed asset books, automate bank reconciliation, and reduce the manual work for managing taxes and applying regulatory updates.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Updates

The inventory and logistics capabilities of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enable businesses to manage their sales and fulfillment processes efficiently. They also help ensure inventory availability matches desired service levels.

These capabilities help businesses gain more visibility, efficiency, and resiliency in their supply chain operations. And just like Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to leverage Copilot AI forecast models to improve various warehouse processes:

• Demand planning—AI generative insights and cell-level explainability will improve forecasting accuracy. In-memory supply planning will offer near real-time insights into requirements changes with material requirements planning and production scheduling.

• Procurement—Customers can configure procurement and sourcing processes toward specific needs by defining purchasing policies and workflows. This includes covering all steps from identifying a need for products and services, through procurement, receipt, invoicing, and processing payments with vendors.

• Manufacturing—New features include optimized testing strategies and digitized records for quality management. In addition, AI-assisted updates will also enhance manufacturing planning data for more accurate production processes.

• Planning optimization—This feature integrates lean manufacturing principles, catch weight, and step consumption for better material use management.

• Contract lifecycle management—Customers can integrate Supply Chain Management with external systems for more efficient supplier contract management.

• Vendor rebate management—Reconciliation and resubmission workflows allow for more flexible vendor transactions.

The enhanced manufacturing and asset management features in Supply Chain Management will improve efficiency and visibility in manufacturing and maintenance operations while maximizing asset uptime and productivity. Concurrently, Microsoft investments will focus on helping manufacturers and distributors meet compliance requirements with multiple inventory accounting practices across multiple currencies. Other process improvements will include material picking and handling last-minute manufacturing changes.

Assessing and Integrating All the New Features

Application administrators who manage Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management should review all the 2025 Release Wave 1 features in advance. This is especially important for the user-impacting features Microsoft enables automatically. Checking them ahead of time will streamline change management and enable the successful onboarding of the new capabilities as they are released by Microsoft.

This and all Dynamics 365 release waves also contain features that system administrators must enable or configure to be available for users. With Microsoft constantly rolling out new features for Dynamics 365 solutions, it can be a challenge to know which ones can most help your business.

To navigate all the enhancements, Velosio is here to help. In addition to determining which new Finance and Supply Chain Management functions will help you, we can integrate them across the two solutions, other Microsoft technologies, and third-party add-on applications.

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 enhancement will be available, which enhancements make sense for your environment, and how to sync them with the financial and supply chain management functions you already rely on. Contact us today to learn more.