Modern living is a very comfortable ordeal. Most countries around the world – and especially those in The West – experience, on a daily basis, levels of comfort never before experienced by any other species at any other point in history. It might sound like I’m exaggerating, but after living with the aftermath of a frozen pipe for nearly a week, I can assure you that I’m not.
Take a very obvious example. Eating. What skills do you need to know in order to successfully feed yourself on a daily basis? None, really. You could argue you need a skill in order to sell it in the marketplace and earn a sufficiently stable income so as to afford the food you want to eat, but that has nothing to do with the skills you require in order to physically obtain the food. When your stomach starts to grumble, all you have to do is walk to the nearest grocery store, restaurant, off-licence or fast-food joint and within minutes your desire for food is met (or, if you’re smart, you open your top drawer that's filled with an endless supply of delicious snacks). A hunter and a gatherer spent the entirety of their lives alternating between trying to find/kill food and avoiding being killed for food themselves.
As someone who has no idea how to hunt, skin an animal, build a fire, chop wood or even make a decent pasta, I’m thankful for the progress and the limited amount of time and energy I have to expend figuring out the logistic of my next meal.
Just as the grocery store has been the great equaliser for those of us that are culinarily challenged, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Business Central is the great equaliser for those that are resources challenged.
Liberté
During my week of frozen pipe hell, I was lucky enough to have a job and employer that easily integrated with a working from home model. While plumbers and insurance inspectors tore apart the kitchen in my south London flat, I cheerfully sat in my living room getting on with writing my articles and researching my white papers while never missing a meeting, a call or an inter-office joke.
My laptop is my office. Thanks to The Cloud, the place I go to every day to hang out with my colleagues is really just a building in The City that keeps us from awkwardly having to host clients in our living rooms and gives spouses the opportunity to take a break from hanging out with one another 24/7.
Dynamics 365 Business Central lets you have your cloud and eat it too. It gives SMEs and entrepreneurs all the resources they need to successfully run the logistics of a business straight from their laptop, smartphone or tablet. Setting up a business, and more importantly, having the technological resources to make your business work, has never been easier. From financial management to project management, reporting, analytics, sales and operations, Dynamics 365 Business Central brings together all of the business systems solutions required to get your ideas off the ground and into motion.
Egalité
Microsoft is the biggest productivity software provider in the world. It also happens to have some of the most widely used, successful CRM and ERP products out in the market. As an entrepreneur or a small business that is just starting out, doesn’t it make sense to take advantage of a product that is used by the very best in the industry?
Apart from letting you rub shoulders with giants and use the same technology established SMEs and larger enterprises use, Dynamics 365 Business Central lets you seize the power of digital transformation. Inbuilt into Business Central is the all too important, yet often missed digital feedback loop. Seamlessly integrating your customers, staff and products, the digital feedback loop allows you to drive greater insights and deeper analytics across your chosen industry.
Successfully measure your customers’ engagement, produce meaningful and actionable insights based on product usages and customer sentiment, and most importantly, empower your staff to be the very best they can be by equipping them with the resources they need to go further, work faster and build better processes, systems, strategies and ideas.
Connect to a world of data that can give you up-to-the-minute reports on the status of your business’s health. Forecast, plan and dream big with business automation, artificial business intelligence and in-built project management tools. Customise and create the solutions you need using Power Apps; or for more bespoke and complex solutions, engage the services of a partner, like Advantage, and create an entire system built around the nuances and demands of your particular business. There is no idiosyncrasy too complex or out of reach.
Just as the grocery store has made great hunters and awful hunters indistinguishable from one another, Dynamics 365 Business Central makes the technology your SME uses indistinguishable from that of the world’s best firms. The potential and possibilities are truly endless. With Microsoft’s new ERP Cloud solution, not even the sky can place a limit on you.
Fraternité
The company you keep says a lot about the company you run. The right mix of people and your business is a hit, run with the wrong crowd and you’re likely to end up a dud. The very same can be said for the technology you use. Bad systems give you bad processes, good systems give you good ones; great systems make you a formidable player and a competitor to watch out for.
Dynamics 365 Business Central not only connects at optimum capacity with any and all Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365 products, it also does so with any other SaaS (software-as-a-solution) needed to run your business. Setting up APIs that feed into and out of Business Central keeps every piece of technology your business runs on in one safely guarded, easily accessible ecosystem.
And because Business Central is fully hosted in the cloud, the product that you buy is always up to date, always up to speed and most importantly it’s always ISO, SOC and GDPR compliant. By simply purchasing a Business Central licence, your business gets access to an entire world of inbuilt state-of-the-art cyber-security best practice. Every fault Microsoft cyber experts, engineers and developers find automatically gets fixed without impacting the running of your business. Add to that a dedicated partner that has 18 years’ worth of experience working with Dynamics NAV, CRM, GP, and also has a rigorous IT Managed Services department (that’s us, wink-wink, nudge-nudge) and you’ve got yourself 360-degree protection and support.
The benefits of a cloud-based, all-in-one Microsoft ERP solution are simply too good to pass up. Doing so would be like waiting to catch some pheasant at Wimbledon Common when there’s a perfectly good Marks & Spencer just across the road. Vive la digital transformation revolution!
For a more detailed overview of Dynamics 365 Business Central watch the clip below:
This video was created by Microsoft and can be found on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 YouTube channel
