Overview of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations April '19 release

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations unifies global financials and operations to empower people to make fast, informed decisions. Finance and Operations helps businesses adapt quickly to changing market demands and drive rapid business growth. The April ’19 release will bring users together on One Version (version 10) for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. This release marks a monumental shift in supportability and allows the community to be on a continuous update cadence. The community can continue to build extensible solutions for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

The core capabilities being introduced in the April '19 release will be made available for customers on a continuous monthly cadence. These core capabilities will be persona opt-in enabled, which allows the customers to implement these new features at their own cadence. The key driver for any core capability is to increase productivity and ROI of the solution.

This release also focuses on the fundamentals to enhance the user experience of the solution with Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback as a primary driver. The targeted areas of these enhancements include performance, compliance, automation, and supportability of the service.

Financial management

The April ‘19 release for financial management focuses on responding to customer feedback for regulatory features and usability. Customers will have the capabilities needed to comply with IFRS 15 and for responding to the guidance on accounting for revenue recognition on contracts. Users will experience an enhanced expense report entry experience with a new header and details expense report, as well as automated settlements in the general ledger, a process completed periodically. A top 10 feature request has been fulfilled by adding bank foreign currency revaluation.

Supply chain management

Product information management and inventory management

The continuous feedback obtained when operating the service allows us to identify specific subprocesses within the inventory management area that can be subject to tangible performance improvements. This is an ongoing effort with broad impact on several areas of the service—it allows for faster feedback, less waiting time, and unblocks resources that otherwise will be waiting for a process to finish. With the April '19 release, the ability to configure and apply unit of measure (UoM) conversions for product variants has also been expanded so that UoM conversions at the product variant level are now supported throughout the application.

In future releases, we will continue to invest in both our product information management and inventory management capabilities. New classes of products and production processes will drive an evolution of the product definition and supporting elements. The inventory valuation capabilities will be expanded to support scenarios where multiple valuation methods and multiple currencies are required—for example, in case of different managerial reporting and statutory reporting requirements. We will also invest in making inventory on-hand information more readily available in distributed scenarios, such as in the retail industry.

Warehouse management

The Warehouse Management System (WMS) is a recent successful addition to the application suite that serves several industries, each with specific requirements on how to operate a warehouse. The solution has been gradually enhanced since its introduction in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, and a large suite of enhancements has recently been licensed from an ISV. With the April '19 release, the integration of these enhancements will begin, and the ability to handle catch weight (CW) products in WMS processes will be added.

Going forward, we will continue enhancing the released CW feature by adding capabilities of the second CW purpose-built solutions with the aim of allowing existing customers to upgrade to the April release or its following monthly releases. The solution will fit the needs both of distributors as well as manufacturers. The lack of this integration has been hampering the uptake of the WMS solution at certain customers—this reservation will be removed. The suite of 30-plus distinct features will partially be integrated as preview for the April release and its subsequent monthly releases. For example, a feature like enable label printing during wave adds flexibility in configuration and operation. All feature exposures will be achieved through flighting to allow for a controlled roll-out.

Sales and procurement

The April ’19 release brings usability enhancements in sales and procurement that increase user productivity and satisfaction. Super users will be able to propose filtered views and build forms where unnecessary fields or actions can be removed. As a result, knowledge from the super users can be disseminated to the organization and all skill levels of users can benefit from targeted views, crafted to fit the task at hand.

Going forward, the focus for sales and procurement and sourcing areas will be on improving business support for supplier collaboration, extended self-service, data sharing and maintenance capabilities, and improving business support within integration scenarios covering purchase requisition, request for quotation and purchase ordering relative to data flow and accounting distribution constraints.

Across the sales and procurement areas, the primary focus will be on improvements in our ability to track and account for goods in transit scenarios. Enhancing support of business scenarios within kit to stock, as well as kit to order, and extending our support for sales price and promotion management by adding extended price management flexibility leads to improved efficiency and lower cost of maintenance.

Manufacturing

It is a core priority to leverage the continuous feedback obtained from operating the service to drive tangible performance improvements, as well as to optimize core manufacturing business processes. In the April '19 release, the focus is on optimizing the resilience of master planning toward platform and infrastructure errors, as well as to deliver incremental master planning performance improvements. This is an ongoing effort that will continue in future releases as opportunities for process and performance improvements are identified.

We are also continuously enhancing and evolving our current manufacturing functionality to support the connected, intelligent operations of modern manufacturers. We will integrate with the intelligent Microsoft Azure IoT service to help our manufacturing customers close the digital feedback loop. This will consolidate close to real-time information from the shop floor with business data to generate business events and actionable insights.

Beyond the April '19 release, we will introduce enterprise asset management capabilities that will enable customers to track the total cost of ownership of operations assets, as well as to manage the ongoing maintenance of those assets. Maturing additive manufacturing technologies represent a shift in how to approach manufacturing and will also drive enhancements of how manufacturing processes are defined, planned, and executed.

Globalization

Microsoft Dynamics for Finance and Operations is localized for 37 countries/regions and provided in 42 languages directly by Microsoft. For information about the list of countries/regions localized and languages provided by Microsoft, please refer to Product localization and translation availability guide. The detail information about localization features provided by Microsoft per country/region can be found in Localization and Regulatory features. For information about localization and translation solutions supported by channel partners which extend the localizations and languages provided by Microsoft please visit AppSource. Microsoft continuously delivers regulatory updates to respond to legislation changes in 37 countries/regions supported by Microsoft. The list of planned and recently shipped regulatory updates can be found at Localization and Regulatory features – Regulatory updates. Alternatively, you can sign into Lifecycle Services (LCS) and view planned and released regulatory updates through the LCS Issue Search tool, where you can search by country, types of features, and releases.

To operate in many countries or regions, businesses need to quickly respond to changing regulatory requirements and meet very specific requirements of industries and verticals. With the April '19 release, we continue to make focused investments in globalization to expand the areas of configurable localization to simplify this process. With configurable engines for both Electronic Reporting and Global Tax, which are accessible through Regulatory Configuration Service, users can extend Microsoft-delivered regulatory configurations or build new configurable features from scratch.

In the April ’19 release, we made several of the most frequently changed features in Brazil and Mexico configurable, specifically electronic invoicing features for Brazil and Mexico and some Brazil Fiscal Books reports. Also, as the invoice layout is one of the most-customized areas by customers who deploy globally, in the April ’19 release we are extending the number of configurable invoice layouts beyond the Free Text Invoice layout that shipped in the October ’18 release. We continue enhancing the configurable engines capabilities in several areas such as performance optimization of customer-built features, simplification of post-processing operations, and improving tax configuration usability. In April ’19, we are also shipping several Russian localization features.

Platform

Between April and July 2019, several improvements to the developer tools will be previewed, making development environments more cost effective and productive. Development of more than one application on the same environment will be possible. Build automation will not require build virtual machines and will enable automated deployment to Lifecycle Services (LCS).

In addition, the Web Client introduces new features guided by user productivity, usability research, and customer feedback. This includes personalization of forms and workspaces, interacting with large data sets (with better filtering), and mobile device responsive capabilities. An improved workflow experience, including integration with Microsoft Flow, will be available.

Analytical Workspaces support new personalization options and power user editing tools of Power BI reports within the Finance and Operations client. Power users can extend reports and do data mashups using PowerBI.com functionality without any developer intervention.

New tools for management of network printers are also introduced. The Entity Store is supported for on-premises deployments.

Integration

With the April ‘19 release, customers will be able to seamlessly link to Common Data Service (CDS) for Apps from Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. A breadth of Finance and Operations entities will be available in CDS for Apps. Additionally, Entity Store will be staged in a customer’s Azure Data Lake. Microsoft will keep the data fresh with incremental syncs.

Event-driven integrations is a new capability that provides a framework to allow Finance and Operations business and workflow events to be consumed by Microsoft Flow and external systems. For example, this will enable a PO confirmation to trigger fulfillment by the vendor earlier; or enable a receipt of a damaged part to trigger the vendor claim process in real time.

Cloud operations and lifecycle services

Microsoft will manage the continuous updates of Platform, Application (Finance and Operations, Retail), and Financial Reporting with no costly upgrades required. A set of tools and experiences to support this experience (called One Version) will be made available in Lifecycle Services and will enable predictability, reliability, and continuous delivery. The service will be made available in the China Sovereign Cloud with all customer data maintained within the region.