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Showing posts from July, 2022

AP Automation in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain

As a solution architect, prospects and clients often ask me for ways to improve their Accounts Payable process.  They receive hundreds of invoices every month, and it can take considerable amount of time to enter all of the detail as well as attaching the invoice for reference during the approval process.  This is an area where we have often needed to bring in an ISV solution, but that could cause other issues.  Microsoft has been doing considerable work around automation for AP and they recently released a public preview of their Invoice Capture solution. I have had the opportunity to set this up in one of my test environments so I could get an idea of what they have to offer.  As we would expect, the Invoice Capture solution is built on the Power Platform.  It uses a model driven Power App along with Power Automate Flows to integrate with Dynamics 365 Finance.  However, since it is a solution, they have done much of the work for you, including creating the standard flows to load the

Smart Narratives - a quick and easy way to get your message across

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 I was recently working with a client on Power BI visualizations.  We were talking about various visualization techniques as well as the options for Power BI visuals.  As I was going through the different options, I touched on Smart Narrative.  The client had never seen or tried this visualization, so if made me wonder, how many other were not aware of this visualization option and how to use it. The Smart Narrative visualization became generally available in June, 2021.  The purpose of the Smart Narrative visualization is to help quickly summarize visuals and reports by providing relevant out-of-the-box insights that are customizable.  As the name applies, the visual adds narratives to the reports to address key takeaways and point out trends.   Initially, I was not too excited about this visualization, because I often feel a picture is worth a thousand words, so I would rather look at the chart or visualization and draw my own takeaways and trends.  However, I have learned in working