Manage your financial operations effectively with a comprehensive view of financial data across your organization and flexible processes that adapt to the way your business works.

With access to real-time information across your organization, easy-to-use inquiry tools, and powerful analysis and reporting capabilities, financial management in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 can help you handle revenue, payables, receivables, and cash flow efficiently—so you can gain insight into financial performance, plan strategically, and make confident, informed decisions.

Advantages of Microsoft Dynamics AX financial management

• Gain insight into your financial operations. Improve strategic planning with 360-degree views of business performance. Set up and review graphical displays and reports and conduct targeted analyses of detailed information to help you make confident, informed decisions.
• Measure economic performance across operations. Understand your business costs with allocation schemes that match your business model, and plan and calculate future costs based on budgets and forecasts.
• Expand your business across borders. Conduct business without geographic constraints and manage exchange rate adjustments with multiple language and currency support, while meeting accounting requirements in different countries.
• Simplify efforts to meet regulatory compliance commitments. Help reduce the time and effort required to comply with reporting, tax, and financial regulations.

Recruit and retain the talent your organization needs to drive business success
With access to integrated, real-time information about employees, jobs, and specific skills across your organization, Human Resource Management in Microsoft Dynamics AX helps you effectively manage and align your workforce to help achieve your business goals.

Specialized human resource management Role Centers organize relevant tasks, information, and tools so that people can manage their work easily. To understand workforce trends, for example, human resource managers can access strategic data, analyze it with predefined data cubes, and generate customized reports with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services—all from within their Role Center. With integrated, task-specific payroll information and real-time access to financial data, human resource representatives can quickly find the job and employee information they need.

• Attract and retain talent. Recruit and preserve talent with powerful tools to streamline the recruiting process, and help maximize employee potential through training and development programs.
• Increase organizational insight. Maintain your organization, job, and position hierarchies, and have the flexibility to make changes based on business needs. View line organizational charts for functions and reporting relationships, and manage matrix- and project-based assignments.
• Store and access your employee information in one place. Give your human resource team efficient access to the employee and job-related information they need to manage employees and teams across your organization. Easily track a history of employees, positions, and organization units by effective date.
• Personalize Role Centers to speed productivity. Provide quick access to common tasks, reporting data, and key performance indicators (KPIs) from the convenience of a home page.
• Provide convenient, online access with Employee Portal. Give employees online access to a host of information, such as training, personal data, and performance. You can also manage recruitment, track applicants, and much more.

Streamline and automate business processes throughout the supply chain to improve planning, optimize inventory levels, reduce costs, and respond quickly to changes in customer and supplier demand. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 connects sales and purchasing processes with logistics, production, and warehouse management to provide real-time visibility throughout the supply chain. With the ability to integrate external business processes and support application-to-application connectivity, you can improve supply and demand planning to optimize inventory levels and increase reliability rates for execution and delivery. In addition, you can help simplify government and corporate compliance commitments by defining custom business rules and workflows based on risk scenarios.

Microsoft Dynamics AX for supply chain management can help you:

• Improve customer service. Enhance the security and reliability of deliveries with the global available-to-promise (ATP) view, which provides delivery alternatives in the event of unexpected disruptions. Automate sales and purchasing processes, track and locate inventory items quickly, and help ensure accurate pricing and discounts to improve customer satisfaction.
• Reduce costs by optimizing supply chain management processes. Improve productivity, adapt internal processes quickly to meet new demands, and optimize processes across sites in the supply chain.
• Control and streamline inventory. Use powerful inventory management tools to improve forecasting and planning, match supply with customer demand, and create sales and purchasing forecasts based on specific items and time periods.
• Increase visibility throughout the supply chain. Empower users to view real-time data through a user-friendly interface and Role Centers that provide quick access to tasks and critical business intelligence (BI) information, such as key performance indicators (KPIs) and custom reports.
• Lower the costs of supply chain integration by using Microsoft BizTalk Server to smoothly orchestrate business processes, quickly meet changing partner needs, and easily form new partnerships.
• Increase cooperation among purchasing, production, customer demand, inventory, and other key areas of your business.
• Automate sales and purchasing and help streamline intercompany operations. Improve relationships with your customers and suppliers, manage intercompany orders within one system, and help achieve better cost control.

Microsoft Dynamics AX helps the people in your organization increase sales and reduce costs with relevant information at their fingertips. Sales and marketing managers work more effectively with their teams and sell more efficiently by using the Internet and telemarketing.

Microsoft Dynamics AX also helps your people manage a broad range of other business areas, minimizing the need for multiple systems.

• Improve customer relationships. Get a real-time view of customer and prospect data with the ability to define relationships and track your correspondence, phone logs, and automatically generated activities. Take advantage of that information to strengthen customer relationships.
• Increase sales force productivity. Identify and seize important sales opportunities with access to integrated sales information, and evaluate sales activities against the profitability of each segment or customer. Effectively manage your pipeline for increased closure rates.
• Plan more effective campaigns. Simplify campaign planning, execution, and analysis by using rich ERP data with definable processes that can increase effectiveness and control costs by measuring the success and profitability of each campaign.
• Optimize sales by managing telephone sales and marketing activities together. Gain insight into customer needs, improve lead generation and qualification, and improve sales performance by combining sales and marketing information.

Reduce cost and time to market and respond quickly to changing customer demands with Production in Microsoft Dynamics AX. Real-time insight into business and supply chain information—including inventory, warehouse, and production—helps you optimize production flow by planning effectively, maximizing resource utilization, driving accurate delivery performance, and streamlining business processes.

With Production in Microsoft Dynamics AX, your people can plan production to meet exacting schedules and delivery demands. Track inventory levels and plan delivery routing with flexibility and control. Access logistics, trade, and customer relationship management (CRM) data to plan orders for purchase, production, and transfer, and help minimize inventory levels, meet customer requirements, and provide reliable promises for delivery. Plan production sites using multi-site capabilities to maintain various production units for planning and execution.

Production in Microsoft Dynamics AX can help you:

• Manage production in a demand-driven environment. View real-time, integrated work in progress (WIP) with actual costs; make adjustments to avoid potential delays or cost overruns; and streamline inventory management based on demand and forecasting.
• Anticipate and reduce bottlenecks. Gain tight control over every aspect of the production floor with bottleneck scheduling. Quickly view processes and work utilization as a whole with a Gantt chart and use drag-and-drop rescheduling to minimize delays.
• Gain deep insight across the supply chain. With visibility throughout the entire supply chain, you can streamline business processes, optimize resources, minimize lead times, and identify accurate delivery dates.
• Improve control of production processes. Define manufacturing resources, including machines, people, tools, and subcontractors, and allocate them to work center groups. Tightly control schedules by using finite or infinite capacity scheduling for maximum flexibility.

In today’s competitive markets, success depends on empowering everyone in your organization—individuals, teams, and executives—with self-service access to business intelligence information. With the robust, out-of-the-box capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics AX, you can get quick access to personalized business intelligence (BI) information by using familiar, easy-to-use tools.

As an end-to-end business management solution built on the proven Microsoft technology stack—including the performance and services within Microsoft SQL Server—Microsoft Dynamics AX can solve today’s business intelligence challenges with integrated information and tools, custom BI access, flexible viewing and analysis capabilities, and scalability for future growth. Microsoft Dynamics AX, with or without the addition of PerformancePoint Server, is designed specifically to deliver the insight you need to drive business success.

• Empower your people to make confident decisions and drive organizational success. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 integrates with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to deliver extensible reporting tools and a BI platform that provides access to relevant, real-time data across your organization.
• Get fast, reliable, and comprehensive accounting, financial reporting, and analysis capabilities. Extend access to your business community, at the appropriate level, and improve the efficiency of your existing accounting processes.
• Combine the power of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 with the flexible performance management tools of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 to simplify monitoring, deeply analyze business performance, and enhance planning and budgeting.
  

Having access to the same line-of-business applications you rely upon in the office while you're away is a critical component of many companies today. Mobile access to these applications was once a competitive advantage—now it's a business essential. For those organizations with field sales, mobile professionals, mobile service technicians, or support staff, connected mobile solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics AX and the Windows Mobile platform create greater efficiencies, help open new business opportunities, drive increased productivity, and reduce costs. Mobile solutions for Microsoft Dynamics AX provide a familiar, flexible, and financially compelling mobile solutions platform, and enable you to:

• Extend the footprint of Microsoft Dynamics AX with best-in-class mobile solutions.
• Partner with leading system integrators.
• Speed mobile Microsoft Dynamics AX application development using tools on familiar platforms.
• Choose from a wide variety of highly flexible Windows Mobile–based devices.

Microsoft Dynamics AX Mobile Sales makes order-taking intuitive and easy
Microsoft Dynamics AX Mobile Sales is the first mobile application from Microsoft Dynamics AX. The RoleTailored experience in Microsoft Dynamics AX Mobile Sales is task-oriented and provides an ideal solution for field sales representatives and other mobile employees who need to work in remote locations. The field sales representatives can plan visits, review relevant sales information, and create orders while they are out of the office. Mobile employees can use the calendar and task functionality of Microsoft Pocket Outlook directly from the application to get a full view of their daily activities. The application leverages the power of Windows Mobile–based devices and helps mobile users become more effective and efficient in their everyday business tasks.

Microsoft Dynamics AX Mobile Development Tools
Microsoft Dynamics AX Mobile Development Tools enable Microsoft partners to develop and customize mobile applications for Microsoft Dynamics AX solutions, making it easier to extend functionality to benefit their users in mobile environments

See how applications like Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal, Workflow, and Unified Communications can improve collaboration and efficiency.

Microsoft Dynamics AX combines the power of the Microsoft Office system with enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities and takes collaboration to the next level. Support collaboration in your organization by:

• Deploying the Enterprise Portal.
• Using flexible workflow to ensure efficient business processes.
• Integrating the power of instant messaging and ERP.

Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal

• Build powerful connections with employees, customers, vendors, and other business partners. Simplify communication and collaboration by making critical information and reporting and analytical tools easy to access and share through a customized, Web-based portal.
• Make your business available online to all your users. People working at remote sites or on the road can use their Web portals to enter hours, project data, sales quotations, and orders to keep business information up to date, regardless of time zones or geographical barriers.
• Provide employees with self-service options. Employees can enter expense reports, make purchase requisition requests, view FAQs, register absence information, and update key human resource (HR) data at their convenience.
• Improve user productivity. Enterprise Portal is familiar, easy to use, and interactive and helps to minimize training requirements. In addition, rapid deployment helps reduce IT maintenance and administration costs.

Microsoft Dynamics AX Workflow

• Customize workflows. Standardize and streamline your organization’s business processes, and stay agile at the same time.
• Simplify compliance management. Create workflows to address current risk and compliance scenarios and to help ensure that employees are following your organization’s best practices.
• Quickly create workflows using templates. Use out-of-the-box templates to quickly configure workflows for common business tasks and activities without the need for developer assistance.

Integrated communication and collaboration tools

• Keep connected. Help people communicate effectively with integrated unified communications, including presence information, instant messaging, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) capabilities.

Increasingly, companies and organizations are realizing that looking at their business from the perspective of environmental sustainability reveals opportunities to run their business more efficiently. However, getting a clear view of relevant data can be quite challenging. That is why we are launching software designed to help your company look at your business from a new perspective, identify opportunities for increased efficiency that can deliver bottom-line cost savings, and track progress against initiatives to decrease your impact on the environment.

The Environmental Sustainability Dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics AX is here!
This cost-effective solution is designed to help Microsoft Dynamics AX customers track their energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, also known as their carbon footprint, over time allowing them to be more proactive in their approach to environmental issues. The dashboard represents Microsoft's commitment to developing technology that supports environmentally sustainable business practices.

• Streamline data collection
  To facilitate collection of energy consumption data, business processes such as accounts payable and inventory management have been extended, thus simplifying a previously painful and time-consuming process.
• Measure energy use and emissions
  A study of 150 companies in March 2007 by AMR Research showed that businesses consider their most important environmental goals to be energy and emissions reduction.1 The Environmental Sustainability Dashboard enables companies to track and report on four environmental performance indicators related to energy and emissions as prescribed by the G3 guidelines from the Global Reporting Initiative, an internationally recognized organization formed to facilitate sustainability reporting.
• Knowledge is power
  Microsoft Dynamics AX integrates environmental data with business data thereby allowing companies to make decisions that consider their environmental impacts. When businesses understand the resource consumption of their operations, managers can make fiscally and environmentally sound decisions about the way their companies are run.

Microsoft Dynamics AX for project management and accounting helps managers gain increased financial control of both short-term and long-term projects, including long-term time and materials projects, internal projects, and fixed-price projects. ERP project management software also helps streamline information exchange with people working in the field by using the Internet.

Microsoft Dynamics AX also helps your people manage a broad range of other business areas, minimizing the need for multiple systems.

• Set up and manage projects effectively. Set up your projects by identifying tasks, establishing start and end dates, and specifying load capacity. Schedule tasks for groups of work centers, administer budgets, and monitor status to anticipate and avoid potential delays.
• Work smart and make decisions with greater confidence. Find, use, and share information quickly with RoleTailored access to business intelligence that helps you track your projects, evaluate status, monitor budgets, and analyze performance.
• Control project costs and deliverables. Quickly analyze the financial performance of internal and external projects. Compare resources consumed and revenue earned for each project budget in real time.
• Plan and administer complex projects with ease. Tight integration with Microsoft Office Project provides the detailed information you need to manage project resources effectively, regardless of project size.
• Make your work flow smoothly. Allow employees, customers, vendors, and other business partners to interact directly with your ERP system. Offer access to relevant business information directly, and conduct business transactions through personalized, RoleTailored Web portals.
  

Maximize efficiencies, understand costs and revenues, and help enhance profitability with service management capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics AX. Your service professionals can easily create service agreements tailored to global customer requirements, automatically generate service orders, and help ensure timely compliance with commitments, using Role Centers that present relevant tasks and information in a personalized view to help employees work smarter and faster. Track key data using RoleTailored reports, alerts, and customized performance scorecards.

With service management in Microsoft Dynamics AX, you can:

• Meet evolving customer demands. Streamline the process of creating and maintaining service agreements to manage ever-changing service requirements.
• Manage financials effectively. Streamline accounts payable and accounts receivable management; track exact costs for service orders; monitor and manage invoicing; and handle multiple revenue models.
• Gain insight into operational processes. Save time and help reduce errors with integrated processes that minimize data re-entry and help ensure the availability of accurate, real-time information.
• Maximize the quality of services. Optimize resource use with automated planning for service orders; run customer feedback reports; analyze profit and loss figures; and track operational productivity to understand performance and achieve profitably.