Every organization is becoming a data company, striving to manage and extract value from volumes of data across departments, from traditional sources such as operations, finance, sales, and marketing to digital sales and marketing initiatives, and new observational sources like device telemetry and customer sentiment analysis.
The struggle most organizations face is managing data stashed in silos across on-premises databases and cloud services and normalizing the data to be used by services to process, analyze, and extract meaningful value from it.
Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerators take a big step to help solve these data conundrums.
With built-in collaboration with industry leaders, the freely-available accelerators extend the Common Data Model to include new entities to support a data schema for concepts within specific industries, enabling ISVs and other solution providers to quickly build industry vertical solutions.
Industry accelerators include powerful connected experiences that are designed to support common, existing business needs for specific industries, enabling solutions that deliver new insights and more personalized customer engagements. This helps simplify efforts to procure partner solutions or build custom applications by providing access to a unified data layer that saves customers the time and resources they would have spent creating their own proprietary data layer or attempting to integrate disparate systems and solutions.
Five industry accelerators are currently available, either in preview or generally available, to help accelerate innovation and deployment:
Automotive
The Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator is designed to provide a consistent, centralized data service that automotive organizations can use to deliver differentiated customer experiences. By building on the automotive common data model, businesses can merge data surrounding deals, sales contracts, specifications, fleet, warranties, inspections, test drives, branding, customer-vehicle relationships, vehicle and equipment, leads, service and after-sales management, and more.
The accelerator was developed in partnership with automotive technology partners such as Annata and Oxlo, to lower the barrier of entry for vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), mobility providers, dealer groups, and importers, and introduce standards that enable a richer customer experience.
A new white paper, Transform Automotive with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator, details the solutions and scenarios ideal for the Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator.
Banking and financial services
The Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator is now generally available on AppSource and GitHub. Developed in partnership with global financial services, the banking data model extends the Common Data Model to provide a shared and consistent metadata definition for common banking and financial industry data elements including loans, mortgages, referrals, branch details, collateral, deal, limit, facilities, and more. This common schema allows customers and ISVs to build solutions on the same data model—open-sourced and interoperable with open banking and The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN)—to rapidly bring to market solutions that deliver a better banking experience, one that differentiates banks from the competition and drives customer acquisition, loyalty, and long-lasting relationships.
Read our Transform Banking with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator white paper for a closer look at how the Banking Accelerator helps empower innovation.
Higher education
The Dynamics 365 Higher-Education Accelerator provides easy access to data entities such as students, faculty, extracurricular activities, previous education, test scores, courses, academic periods, programs, test types, registration status, and areas of interest. Institutions can create solutions that optimize student and faculty engagement, improve institutional effectiveness, and predict outcomes and gain insights from analytics.
When the accelerator is installed into Dynamics 365, the experience is transformed into one specifically built for higher education and allows institutions to quickly build PowerApps and Power BI visualizations. The higher-education data model, solutions, data samples, Power BI examples, software developer kit (SDK) extensions, and more are provided as part of the open-source creative license and available on GitHub and AppSource.
Nonprofit
Nonprofit organizations often contend with adopting technologies designed for for-profit companies that don’t fit their specific needs. The Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator, now in preview on GitHub and AppSource, aims to cut costs and boost efficiencies for nonprofits through interoperability, best practices, development of turnkey solutions, and deep analytics. It includes extensions to the Common Data Model to develop solutions for managing constituents, raising funds, grants and awards, program delivery, and tracking impact. The accelerator is developed in partnership with the Tech for social impact group within Microsoft Philanthropies, which works to empower nonprofit and humanitarian organizations around the world to advance their missions through the power of technology.
Read more about the Nonprofit Accelerator in this recent blog post, now available on AppSource and GitHub.
Healthcare
The Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator helps provide the interoperability you need to improve clinical care outcomes and drive more revenue. It unifies electronic health record (EHR) data while enabling a suite of systems and applications to help more easily manage and understand patient outcomes. When patient data is easily accessible, organizations can develop solutions that help gain a 360 view of patients and their individual experiences, better communicate and educate patients, make better patient care plans, decrease return visits, and more.
Download the eBook, Reimagining healthcare with Microsoft, for an overview of the accelerator and supporting solutions and scenarios. Also, keep up on the latest in our ongoing blog series by Doug Adams and Rebecca Crowe on the Microsoft US Health and Life Sciences team.
Take the next step
The five industry accelerators available today are the first in an ongoing effort to drive interoperability and innovation across industries. Stay tuned on the blog for updates and explore the resources below for a deeper dive into industry accelerators.
- Watch a presentation on the future of Microsoft Business Applications through industry accelerators
- Read an overview of industry accelerators
- Learn more about our investments in industry accelerators to enable ISVs and solution providers to help you succeed
- Learn more about the Common Data Model
Via: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/
