Finance and operations leaders, in partnership with the IT teams that support them, are undergoing pressure to modernize their older legacy systems with solutions that take advantage of the agility, speed, simplicity, scalability and potential cost savings of cloud-native models.
The world has changed dramatically in just the past couple of years. Hybrid work has become the new reality; automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming essential tools; cybersecurity threats are growing exponentially; and regulatory and compliance requirements are more stringent.
The new reality is that today’s business environment is becoming more complex. In addition to hybrid work and increased globalization, more businesses are turning to services-oriented business and consumption models for their customers, which means they must adapt to subscription billing and management models.
The shift to a services economy also means significant growth in project-centric business, which involves a very complicated set of processes for finance and operations. This involves integrating new approaches for sales, invoices, billing, collections, supply chain management and more. Reporting must be more frequent and decision-making powered by a high reliance on automation, real-time data and analytics enhanced by AI and ML.
The Need to Modernize Finance and Operations
Relying on legacy finance and operations systems, particularly on-premises systems, is an obstacle that prevents organizations from leveraging their data seamlessly with automation, intelligence and end-to-end security to drive successful digital transformation initiatives.
By modernizing with an end-to-end cloud model, finance and operations teams can be tightly integrated with other vital company functions, such as HR and sales, while achieving key goals, including:
- Maximize financial visibility and profitability.
- Enable workplace transformation.
- Drive project-centric services success.
- Simplify and accelerate new product and services development.
- Strengthen security, privacy, compliance and governance.
- Improve all aspects of the business with faster data-driven, intelligence-infused decisions based on real-time information.
The big decision for IT, finance and operations leaders is not about whether to modernize their systems; it is about how to modernize with the greatest opportunity for success and the least disruption to existing operations. That’s where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations comes in.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a portfolio of a dozen integrated business applications built on Microsoft Azure, designed to enable organizations to deliver operational excellence and seamless, data-driven customer and employee experiences, in an end-to-end hyperconnected, secure platform.
Why Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations provides customers with a model that enables easy integration with other business applications, supported by high levels of automation and business intelligence for reporting.
Dynamics 365 Finance is an enterprise-grade financial management system designed to handle end-to-end finance operations, including:
- Core financial processes such as general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed asset, cash and bank, and budget
- Tax and audit
- Intercompany accounting
- Project accounting
- Financial reporting and more
As part of a cloud-native, integrated business application platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations offers advantages in flexibility, speed, intelligence, automation, easy collaboration and end-to-end security. Customers can maximize financial visibility, operational excellence and profitability through a range of key capabilities, including a greater ability to:
- Assess business health, improve financial controls and strengthen agility with advanced financial reporting powered by embedded analytics and AI-driven insights.
- Integrate financials into core processes and automate tasks to boost productivity, support evolving business models—including as-a-service subscription models—and maximize financial performance.
- Minimize costs and optimize spending across business geographies with process automation, budget control and intelligence-driven financial planning and analysis.
- Decrease global financial complexity and risk using a guided, rules-based chart of accounts and no-code configuration to simplify regulatory reporting, electronic invoicing and global payments.
- Simplify collaboration via seamless integration across the broad portfolio of Microsoft solutions, including Office 365, Teams and the associated applications within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.
- Strengthen security with an end-to-end model that leverages zero trust, threat intelligence, cloud-native security information and event management and more.
Takeaways
Finance and operations must be seamlessly integrated across all aspects of the business for organizations to compete effectively in today’s fast-changing environment. Legacy systems do not provide the agility, scale and flexibility to meet the challenges of hybrid work, globalization, project-centric services, end-to-end automation and more.
Decision-makers across finance, operations and IT have an opportunity to simplify the path to a modern, cloud-native approach by taking advantage of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 portfolio and, in particular, Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. For more information, please visit Microsoft.
