What’s new in Finance and Operations in Dynamics 365 Spring 18 Release - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Update 9.0.2

The Spring ‘18 release of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations delivers enhancements in system performance, servicing, reliability, and extensibility. It also offers new ways of integrating with other Dynamics 365 products and adds to our suite of business productivity tools.

Main features and enhancements in Finance and Operations for Dynamics 365 Spring 18 Release:

Business productivity

• Alerts - Client-based alert functionality enables a user to define alert rules based on business events, such as when an invoice is paid or a customer changes an address.
• Optimization advisor - Uses telemetry to analyze customers’ business processes, finds optimization opportunities, uses application data to quantify the opportunities, and then recommends solutions.
• Project timesheet mobile - Employees can create and submit project timesheets. The use of saved favorites and the ability to copy from a previous timesheet facilitates rapid, accurate time entry.
• Edit default project fulfillment hours - Project resource managers can edit the default hours as part of the project booking fulfillment process.
• Reserve project resources past the task end date - Project resource managers can fulfill resources on tasks past the current planned end date for the task.
• Person search report - You can find a person and their personal data in Finance and Operations.
• Data sharing for customer and vendor tables - Data can be shared across customer and vendor tables and many related tables across multiple legal entities.
• One voucher deprecation – One voucher is turned off by default, through a General ledger parameter.

Extensibility and customization

• Customizations through extensions only - Migrating customizations from one release to the next has been simplified by moving away from over-layering to the use of extensions.
• Extensibility requests - Customers can submit a request to Microsoft for extension support to be added to the product for a needed scenario. The Spring '18 release enhances this feature by moving it to Lifecycle Services.
• Extensible project work breakdown structure - Enables customization of the project work breakdown structure using extensions. This replaces the hierarchical grid control used for the project work breakdown structure with a standard grid that supports hierarchical data.
• Embedding PowerApps in workspaces and forms - Use PowerApps to embed data from external sources into Finance and Operations data.
• Custom fields - Organizations can add custom fields to tailor their application to their business requirements, using a no-code extensibility experience.

Integration

• Integration with Common Data Service (CDS)
• Integration with Dynamics 365 for Field Service - Provides data integration to support scenarios where Field Service activities are done outside Finance and Operations, leveraging the data integrator.
• Integration with Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation - Supports scenarios where project and resource management activities are done outside Finance and Operations, and the project accounting activities are done in Finance and Operations, leveraging the data integrator.

Improved support experiences

• Telemetry-based KB recommendation - Telemetry from a production environment can be used to identify the application hotfixes that apply to a tenant.
• KB recommendations when entering a support case - LCS provides telemetry-driven KB recommendations.
• Report production outage - Provides a quick and effective channel to escalate issues to Microsoft Support if the services in a production environment are degraded or become unavailable.

Supply chain management

• Vendor collaboration – RFQ process - Enhancements make it easy to tell who entered a bid (a vendor or a procurement department).
• Partial shipment of a load (split load) - Allows single loads or multiple loads to be fully or partially loaded.
• Immediate replenishment of locations - Used during wave execution if allocation fails for a location directive line that has a replenishment template.
• Reason codes added to warehouse counting and adjustment - Users can add a reason code when performing counts and when making an adjustment.
• Batch balancing enabled for advanced warehousing processes.
• Analytical workspaces with embedded Power BI for Cost management – new Cost administration and Cost analysis workspaces

Globalization

• India localization – project and upgrade - Users can manage India Goods and Services Tax (GST) for the Project management and accounting module, and AX 2012 customers can upgrade to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
• Enhanced configurability - New features include import and testing scenarios, and also broader support for configurability without coding.

Servicing, performance, and deployment

• Improved delivery of platform and financial reporting updates - Enhancements to how software updates are provided, to improve deployment time and the reliability of servicing.
• Upgrade automation - Upgrade automation makes major version upgrades a self-service operation for the customer, using LCS for non-production environments.
• Service hardening - Added service monitoring and alerting for core business processes, and improved form load performance of the most commonly used forms.
• Lifecycle Services sandbox self-service automation and RDP lockdown.
• On-premises deployment updates.