Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Dynamics NAV 2017

Recently, Encore hosted an event: “What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017”. We presented the best new Features in Dynamics NAV 2017, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. enjoy!

Video will start playing at the correct point in the presentation.

Transcript:

Trevor: The next thing I want to talk about is the intelligent operations. So we’ve already quite a bit of this in our Dynamics CRM system. This is the first released NAV that includes embedded artificial intelligence, machine learning into the systems that our customers can leverage. Okay. So it’s actually remarkably easy to setup. So we’ll take a look at that setup first. So, [Inaudible 00:24:18] role.

So if I go into my Business Manager role, where most of these assisted setups are, I can go down to, and it’s actually an extension, which I know they’re going to talk about a bit later in that day. An extension you as a customer can go grab, an extension for Microsoft. And it’s called Sales and Inventory Forecasting Setup. So what I had to do to set this up is I had to go to the Cortana Intelligence Gallery. So, Cortana analytics suite, which has all machine learning products in it, I had to go out there, and I’ll walk you through this quickly. And this gives me some instructions on how to do this. But essentially, I open it up and I get into Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and it opens up that package. By the way there’s a couple different forecasting products available, depending on what you’re looking to do. This one works out of the box with NAV. The other ones…doesn’t mean you can’t consume them.

So I go South Central U.S. That’s just a region that I want to dump this thing in. And then it prepares that package. Now, all I need to do is run it which will take about five minutes and then deploy web service. This is a bit technical. But that…in the URL and the username and password that I then go back into NAV and enter here and here. And then I just decide in NAV how often I wanna run it. Do I wanna run it every day, once a week? And what that’s actually doing is taking a look at your sales history, your transactions and trying to predict for you what you need in terms of inventory coverage for your different items.

Now I recognize not all businesses can forecast based on sales history, but I think the importance here is this types of features you’re gonna see embedded more and more into our business solutions. They are coming. They’re becoming practical. They’re becoming democratized so that any business can really consume that type of service. And then if we take a look at the results, I don’t know enough sales history in my NAV, so I’m gonna head over here. But if we take a look at the results, if I look at one of my items, once you’ve turned that feature on inside the Fact Box when you look at that item, you’ll see if the forecast identified…that you need some stuff. You’ll see it over here.

So essentially, I can look at the Inventory Forecast or the Sales Forecast. Essentially, it’s recommending at these periods that I need to start biting these items. So I can simply say Create Purchase Order, and it’s gonna go ahead and create that purchase order for me.