Microsoft Dynamics 365 – 2022 October Release

Available as a cloud-based solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a highly customizable, easy-to-use business management solution designed to help you connect the individual parts of your organization. Each April and October, Microsoft releases solution upgrades to boost functionality and meet the demands of a growing customer base.  

The next major update (Microsoft Dynamics 365 2022 release wave 2) is scheduled for regional deployment on 1st October 2022. Below are just some of the highlights that we know will be of interest to our international customers. You can read the complete October 2022 release plan online. 

Dynamics 365 Business Central 

Ideal for established international SMBs (Small Medium Businesses), Dynamics 365 Business Central lets you start small and scale up with additional functionality as your needs grow. It can accurately process thousands of daily transactions and unify your business across finance, operations, supply chain, and project management divisions. Dynamics 365 offers SMB users a seamless, dependable service and platform to run their business on. In this latest release, Microsoft delivers even more features to help onboard users with easy access to the apps they need. Plus, thanks to improved tooltips, easier menu navigation, and enhanced automation, users can quickly be more productive.
Some of the key updates include: 

• Administration: This release includes features for better and improved communication regarding the status of each system environment. 
• Application: Wave 2 offers improved finance and supply chain capabilities plus support for integration with Shopify. Thanks to several optimizations and enhancements, users can now run their business processes more efficiently. 
• Better with Microsoft 365: This release delivers better collaboration of business processes in Microsoft Teams. For instance, it’s easy to delegate which users can use the Excel add-in.  
• Onboarding: This release includes enhancements to make it easier to find and install apps so users can become productive even faster. 
• Development tools: Dynamics 365 has now moved entirely to Visual Studio Code while Microsoft continues to invest in ways to enhance developer productivity. 
• Power Platform: Thanks to even more efficient automation with Power Automate, users can quickly set up workflows for the specific needs. 
• Country and regional: From October 2022, Microsoft Business Central will be available in more than 100 countries/regions.  

Dynamics 365 Finance 

Dynamics 365 2022 Release Wave 2 includes general availability of vendor invoice OCR (optical character recognition); a smart feature that can automatically read and recognize accounts payable invoices for a complete end-to-end automation of accounts payable. Additionally, Microsoft has updated the subscription billing solution to include split billing. This means that subscription billing users with recurring contract billing can select additional customers and include them as responsible parties on the billing schedule. Multiple customers can be billed from a single contract and it’s possible to produce an invoice for multiple customers from one billing schedule. 

There are also improvements for Globalization Studio: 

• Tax calculation service is now integrated with Dynamics 365 Project Operations (preview) and includes several service improvements. These changes help eliminate the need to develop adaptations to complex tax scenarios. 
• Electronic invoicing service: recently several countries have introduced mandatory business-to-business (B2B) e-invoicing legislation where invoices need approval by tax authorities. To support this, new e-invoicing functions will be available in Finance. 
• Electronic reporting: it is now possible to replace a base data model, automatically upload parent configurations, and add a configurable approach to run ad-hoc reports. Furthermore, the previous 2GB file size limitation is now removed. 

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can modernize business logistics, deliver proactive customer responses, and unify processes from sales to fulfillment. In this release, Microsoft offers enhancements to inventory and logistics, product information management, as well as planning and manufacturing. 

• Inventory and logistics: it’s now possible to allocate inventory and make soft reservations of Warehouse Management Processes (WMS) items in Inventory Visibility. Both WMS-enabled items and non-WMS items are supported. With soft reservations for WMS-enabled items, you can track omnichannel sales demand in real-time and reduce the risk of overselling and/or losing profits. By allocating inventory for WMS-enabled items, organizations can reserve on-hand inventory for the most important channels and customers
• Product information management: With release wave 2, all product information is displayed in the user’s preferred language which might be different from the system language. Ideal for organizations with two different legal entities, languages can be aligned to specific legal entities and will automatically show the correct language when a user signs in
• The Planning Optimization Add-in allows master planning calculation to happen outside Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and the related SQL database. This functionality ensures improved performance as it minimizes the impact on the SQL database during master planning runs. Quick planning runs can be performed several times during business hours allowing planners to immediately react to demand or changes
• Manufacturing: With this release, Microsoft offers improvements for the Sensor Data Intelligence add-in (previously named IoT Intelligence). Organizations can use sensor data from machines and equipment to optimize business processes on the production floor. With access to real-time insights, your organization can immediately react to any changes

11 new countries/regions 

The demand for Dynamics 365 Business Central online continues to grow and with this release, this powerful solution will be available in 11 new counties (Albania, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Oman, and Pakistan). For each new country/region, Microsoft partners develop relevant localization apps which are then published to AppSource. Users can then combine the apps with the localized built-in language offerings. 

Dynamics 365 and industry clouds and Microsoft Power Platform release plans are also published in 11 additional languages (Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish). 

Are you ready to grow your international organization with Dynamics 365? 

Dynamics 365 2022 release wave 2 offers hundreds of new features and enhancements and confirms Microsoft’s commitment to power digital transformation for all their customers and partners. If you’d like to discuss any of these new features and the impact they have on your organizations, get in touch with Pipol today.  

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