As a top management executive of a manufacturing organization, one of the key responsibilities is to make sure all of the business units or divisions are performing well i.e., right from the sales – delivery to support.

Also, being in a manufacturing sector, given the amount of competition faced in today’s fast-paced world, the quality of the products manufactured should be top notch and should be able to match the standards of other products offered in the market. If the product quality is great, it will increase sales, the marketing team can generate more interest in the products, and there is more trust from the sales, marketing teams and Leadership team in the product delivery managers and plants being involved in manufacturing the products.

Furthermore, the service delivery team should also match the expectations of the end customers, i.e., right from the field service executive to the customer service executive everyone should make sure the end customer is satisfied with the service that is provided.

But the question is, being a CEO/COO, you need to understand:

  1. If your product is being accepted by the end customers or not
  2. You should get insight with respect to the changing tastes and preferences of end customers
  3. You need to know if the product manufactured is living up to the expectations of end customers
  4. You should make sure the products are delivered within the deadline.

Now, the above activities are repetitive and to do that on a real-time basis or to monitor each divisions activity in person on a day-to-day basis is not easy.

But that is being made simple now with the help of Dynamics 365’s reporting and dashboard capabilities. Dynamics 365 reports and dashboards provide a 360-degree view of the entire business right from sales – delivery to services teams. It offers deep and actionable insights into all of these activities on a real-time basis within one CRM Screen and at your fingertips. These analytics and dashboards are accessible on mobile phones and tablets, thus making the job of top management or a director or manager of any department easy in terms of monitoring the performance.

Whatis a 360-degreeBusiness View?

360 Degree Business View provides you with a consolidated view of the entire manufacturing firm’s performance in a visual-graphical form, these views include deeper insights into the sales, marketing, customer service, field service, project service automation, customer behavior, etc. in one Screen and this, in turn, is called as a 360 degree business view.

Dynamics 365 also offers role-based dashboards and reports as well, which helps the directors of each team or even the top management to either monitor or get clarity of the respective team’s performance.
Below is a brief about the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Reporting for each Manufacturing firm’s departments:

  1. Sales: Allows the top management and sales leaders to track the performance of their sales team, provides a comparative analysis of the sales performance on a yearly basis or quarterly basis. It also helps in understanding the regions from which the demand for your products are more and the regions where the demand is less, and this helps the management to take necessary actions for improvement.
  1. Marketing: Gain insights with respect to the impact the marketing team has created through its marketing campaigns and activities and the amount of interest these activities have generated in the minds of customers and also get to know the brand positioning and brand management your marketing team has managed to create in the market with the help of Dynamics 365’s reporting tools and dashboards, as they gather data and information from various sources related to the manufacturing sector.
  1. Customer Service: Dynamics 365 dashboards and reports will showcase the customer service agents and the managers the kind of service requests they have got for a particular product/various products manufactured and delivered. Also, it shows the timeline required to complete each of the tasks in one CRM Screen. Furthermore, it allows the management to track the success rate, resolving the issues that were reported to customer service agents
  1. Field Service: Get to know the resources who are on the road to complete field service tasks such as: product installation, maintenance or repair and get a deep insight with respect to the upcoming or predictive product maintenance activities, and track the performance of each field service rep on a real-time basis in a graphical form.
  1. Project Service Automation: Track the activities right from project planning – execution and delivery within a single CRM Screen and drill deeper to each stage of product manufacturing activity and the pace at which the work is progressing.
  1. Customer Behavior: With the help of Microsoft Social Engagement and Dynamics 365 reporting and dashboards, top management can get to know the sentiments, tastes, and preferences of end customers with respect to your product. It also provides details regarding the changes what the end customer is expecting in your products, this helps the leaders in the firm to make changes in the product and act accordingly.

How can you build a dashboard with Dynamics 365

There are multiple ways to visualize data in Dynamics 365, some ofthe Out of Box features include

  1. Charts: You can build a variety of charts by using an easy to configure interface.
  2. Views: These are the list which can accept any filter criteria or sorting you want and display the data just the way you like.
  3. Dashboards:These are simple and easy to configure dashboards which can include quite a few things of which Charts and Views are key.
Dashboard with Dynamics 365

Dashboard Sample

Apart from the ones mentioned above, you also get the following:

  1. SSRS Reports
  2. PowerBI Reports: Power BI within Dynamics 365, gives a manufacturing organization a detailed and even more in-depth – graphical and interactive insights and analytics into the data, as Power BI extracts data from any 3rd party applications that are being used within the organizations, collects data from various sources such as: your companies social media, websites and other customer portals related to the manufacturing sector and provides you a much more deeper analysis of the customer behavior and also the general response from the public for the products you manufacture (B2C)

Wrapping it up

Now, with the flexibility of Dynamics 365, you can access the above-displayed reports and dashboards in one screen i.e. giving you a 360 degree view of your Manufacturing firm and if you are a leader of a particular division, you can look at the analysis and insights of your respective division with even more deeper drill-downs and insights that are brought to you by Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Nalashaa brings in a lot of experience in Dynamics CRM / 365 landscape and can help your organization realize the true RoI of the platform. Take a look at some of the Manufacturing industry-specific work we have done, here. For other offerings, please visit our Dynamics 365 page or send us a quick note at info@nalashaa.com, we would be happy to help you.