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I have been exposed to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service for over six years. Our typical client is a hundred-billion-dollar company with 10,000 to 20,000 agents who use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a ticketing system. As you can imagine, nothing involving 10,000 people is easy or something that one person can do. At an enterprise level with 10,000-plus agents or a few thousands of agents, implementation takes approximately six months. All of them have private cloud.

It is very good because you can activate this and integrate it across any channel. Because of its integration, it can seamlessly adapt to any kind of channel up front.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is quite easy to use. It is very well integrated with Microsoft Teams and 365 as an overall platform. You can integrate it easily with AI, Microsoft Copilot and Power Automate. The call logs, the history, the data structures, and the visuals are simple and intuitive enough.

The benefit is the purpose that ticketing serves. All these organizations need ticketing as a functionality with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. They need to create tickets or issues that then get tracked through the organization as it flows. Ticketing is used whenever a customer has an issue that you want to take a record of and track through till closure.

The place where you can define the rules is at the back end. That module, where you write the assignment rules or the skill set rules or prioritization rules, has very limited flexibility in these rules engines. More flexible rule-defining back ends that you can customize to your business context more closely than you can right now would be better.

Customization for the information design in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is needed. The foundational information that goes into service management comes as foundational information that you need to program into or load into the service management platform. Right now, you need to change the rules to load them in the format that is required, and this should not be happening.

AI capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service are more focused on the productivity aspects and the backend aspects. It is not personalizing interactions. The CRM part is more where these kinds of front-end customer personalizations take place.

Implementation is not done by one person. The companies and scale that we are talking about are deployments covering thousands of agents and users. When somebody is doing a ticketing system transition at an enterprise level, it is obviously a complex affair involving hundreds of people and tens of teams at various points in the transition or implementation life cycle.

For a 200-member company with 10 people in customer support, it is probably the same as a Freshworks or ServiceNow. It does not matter what you use.

There is a whole team of specialists to plan for it, deploy, change management, technology, business, and everything.

The choice between Microsoft Dynamics or something else depends on the scale at which you are going to use these tools and the customization with which you need to define your workflows. The pricing of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is on par with other enterprise-grade tools. Compared to ServiceNow, Dynamics is priced similarly. Freshworks is on par with Zendesk and slightly less expensive than Dynamics and ServiceNow. Below Freshworks or Zendesk are Zoho and other cheap ticketing tools for small and medium businesses.

There is no challenge specific to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a platform, but any company that is adopting a new ticketing system will have multiple challenges that they face, which is why consultants exist to help them through it. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers standard dashboards that report the number of cases, the number of tickets created, aging analysis, how old each ticket is, how many collaborator hands it has been to, and how many times it has been assigned. You can pull out all of this information or see it easily. It integrates well into Power BI, Microsoft's business intelligence tool, so you can create whatever dashboard you want on Power BI with these data points.

The benefit is the purpose that ticketing serves. If it is a software company, you are paying for their customer support. If it is any kind of company, whether an electronics goods company or a retail company or a consumer goods company that is selling clothes, everybody calls in to get exchanges done, repairs done, or whatever else. It is important to do that work in a structured manner.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is enterprise-grade. If you have 5,000, 10,000, or 20,000 employees who are involved in the business of resolving tickets and providing customer support or who are part of these kinds of processes, that is when Dynamics really shines. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

I can highlight a couple of other scenarios regarding my main use case or how I've implemented Infor CloudSuite. One is Infor Document Management, which I've seen in the past with other ERP systems that haven't involved as much, but Infor CloudSuite does give you an extra edge when it comes to managing customer invoicing, purchase orders, or customer order acknowledgements. Infor Document can be configured by your IT or super key users, so whenever you produce these documents, they automatically get attached to the actual orders. If it's a customer order verification, as soon as you produce that document, it is attached to that particular customer order, and anybody who wants to retrieve that document can easily access it from the customer order form. It is easily configured and appears as a widget. That's a great feature to have.

Another great feature in Infor CloudSuite is the in-built workflows, which can produce user alerts. For instance, if there is a purchase order that needs workflows, they can be set in place and configured to send alerts to the approvers. These are a couple of examples that I can highlight, which enhance the user experience in my opinion.

Infor CloudSuite is a kind of ERP that is suitable for a medium or small discrete manufacturer, especially in the health sector, life sciences, and biotechnologies. My experience with Infor CloudSuite is that it provides the basic features for any manufacturer who is looking into implementing an ERP solution out of the box and has a system that works. There are no defects or bugs, and it comes with implementation accelerators. So, if any company is interested in getting a good investment, Infor CloudSuite with implementation accelerator could be a better option. Any organization that is a discrete manufacturer finds Infor CloudSuite to be a good fit for the requirements that manufacturers usually have.

Infor CloudSuite made a difference for a manufacturer I worked with through an end-to-end implementation. One example is that once there is a customer order on SyteLine, that customer order gets picked up by advanced planning and scheduling. This is a firm demand, and there can also be soft demand based on parameters such as safety stock and reorder point. Infor CloudSuite has a smart, advanced planning and scheduling system that takes into account both types of demand, processes those demands, and comes up with supply suggestions. These suggestions are reviewed by the planners, and once they are happy, they release the plan for production or the shop. Then, once the plan is released, the job order at the shop floor gets completed, and if we have established a link with the customer order, the customer order gets automatically updated with the status to be shipped, eligible for shipping. By integrating the upstream processes with the downstream, that has really helped one of the organizations I implemented this process in their overall process efficiencies. That's a great example of an end-to-end integrated solution.

I have seen specific improvements after implementing Infor CloudSuite, such as reduced processing time and better visibility. In terms of the previous legacy system, it did not have the modern technology that the latest ERP system provides. The processes were clunky, requiring downloading and sending documents to customers or suppliers. With Infor CloudSuite, you can manage and maintain document profiles. With this feature, you can automate the dispatch of your documents either to customers or suppliers, significantly cutting down the admin time for your order processing team or procurement team. Previously, they would spend ages retrieving documents from emails and trying to find the relevant third party to send them to. But now, this is completely automated, enhancing the overall processing time and user experience.

I can provide rough estimates on time saved after implementing Infor CloudSuite. Users can generate documents in a matter of seconds now, compared to the previous minutes they took. If we imagine creating ten orders, and previously the legacy system required spending five minutes per order, that totals fifty minutes. However, in the new system, with properly automated document management, it only takes about one minute for each order. Therefore, you end up saving around forty minutes for ten orders raised.

There are areas where Infor CloudSuite can improve. I have touched on the pros and key strengths of Infor CloudSuite, but end-user feedback indicates that there are several areas where the user experience can improve. For instance, when it comes to reporting, it comes with a very limited number of reports, and the standard reports are clunky, requiring a technical resource or developer to enhance or make them presentable. Another area is user experience; it takes several clicks to get to the information, and the user interface isn't that intuitive. Compared to other solutions, such as top-tier options such as Oracle or SAP, this stands out as an area needing improvement.

When it comes to integration, Infor CloudSuite does offer a great deal of flexibility. It comes with APIs, so you can integrate with any third-party systems you may use. On that front, it's sufficient; however, it does require some specialized resources, as it's not a layman's job, and developers need to help with the integration. This is generally the case for any ERP.

The user interface could indeed be better, and there is a steep learning curve for users; it takes time for them to get accustomed to Infor CloudSuite's interface and forms. However, once users adapt, it becomes easier and smoother to navigate. There are great features associated with Infor CloudSuite, such as DataViews and Birst as a business intelligence tool, which can be integrated with the basic product. Implementing Birst isn't plug-and-play; it requires a team of technical resources to execute. Additionally, there is a feature that allows integration with Excel, which can be installed by your IT team.

As a part of Infor CloudSuite implementation, I think at the end of the day, it is a tool, but it gives the best results if we have robust processes implemented. For instance, if we are talking about planning, then the results or outcomes we get from APS or production are totally dependent on how accurately we maintain data in CloudSuite. It's data-hungry, and we have to have robust and rigorous processes in place to support master data management because this feeds into your planning and processes since it's a highly integrated solution. One wrong data point can jeopardize the outcome, and users can spend hours trying to fix that. In my opinion, it's a great tool, but any organization looking to implement Infor CloudSuite or any other ERP needs to ensure they have defined roles, responsibilities, and processes around master data to feed good, accurate, and quality data into the system. When I implement Infor CloudSuite as a project manager, I overemphasize this and reiterate to the main sponsors and stakeholders that this is paramount to getting the best results out of Infor CloudSuite implementation.

It's difficult to rate Infor CloudSuite precisely; it depends on each organization's requirements. If you are a mid-size or small to medium-sized manufacturer with discrete processes to implement, I would rate it a six out of ten. It provides out-of-the-box, ready-to-use processes.

The main reason I give a six out of ten rating is primarily due to the strengths we've discussed earlier. The implementation accelerators provide an easier and faster way to implement Infor CloudSuite and obtain a quick return on investment for organizations. It has a depth of features for discrete manufacturing. However, if you are looking for complex scenarios or processes, Infor CloudSuite might require some customization, which can become expensive. While it caters well for out-of-the-box solutions with foundational processes, it may necessitate exploring other Infor products if you need to automate factories or warehouses.

My advice for anyone considering Infor CloudSuite is to focus on a few key areas during their implementation. This is a solid and robust product, but it's essential to look closely at the design phase. Ensure you have your SMEs identified and dedicated, documenting the blueprint properly to understand what works out of the box and what the gaps are. Set the right expectations; you should enter the construction phase of the solution with a clear understanding of what is standard and what requires customization. It's also crucial to conduct thorough research when selecting the right partner, as not everyone in the market has full knowledge of how Infor CloudSuite works. I would rate Infor CloudSuite a six out of ten overall.