Mohammad Yasar on The MVP Show

[Mark Smith]: 2:00
Today's guest is from KL or Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I don't know, I think I might've been there, but I'm not sure.I'd have to go back and check my itinerary.He works at Anita as a pre-sale solution architect across APAC region. He was first awarded as MVP in 2023.So relatively new, he strongly believes that knowledge grows when you share it, not when you store it, which is a great MVP quality, of course. You can find links to his bio, social media, and particularly check out the link to his YouTube channel. He's a rock star in the F&O space with close to 10,000 subscribers on his channel. Welcome to the show, Mohammad.

[Mohammad Yasar]: 2:43
Hi Mark, thank you so much for inviting me here.

[Mark Smith]: 2:46
Good to have you on the show. I always like to kick off with understanding a bit of the personal lives of my guests. So let's start with food, family, and fun. What does that look for you in KL?

[Mohammad Yasar]: 3:01
Okay. So yeah, as you obviously know that I live in Malaysia from like past 10 years.I'm originally from India,southern part of India from a very beautiful city called Chennai.So I moved to Malaysia in 2012, around 2012. So Malaysia is a food heaven.So I am a very foodie person. I like to explore a lot of food.I'm into the Thai, Malay, Indonesian,Indian, Pakistani cuisine.So we hunt for a new restaurant every day.And we also use the mobile app for ordering food from different restaurant almost every day.I'm a very regular user of the app. And I have a six year old, I'm married.And I spend majority of my weekends with her,taking her to a mall, to a play area, as different animation, two to four day movies.It's my regular routine. And just that you're asking this year from the new year,which is to get back to shape, get back the health. So I was weighing about close to 100 kilos like two months back.So I lost around 20 kgs in just two months.I feel a lot more better, more confident, work life-wise as well, and more productive.So when you are good, things around you start looking good and getting better for you. So I'm enjoying this.around you start looking good and getting better for you. So I'm enjoying this.

[Mark Smith]: 4:51
Wow. Listen, 20 kgs, that's a lot to drop. How did you do it?

[Mohammad Yasar]: 4:59
just cut your carbs and the sugar and just you lose your weight like air out of balloons.340It's just two things it's 90 percent diet.

[Mark Smith]: 5:09
Yeah, I wish it was that easy for me. It never seems to be, you know,if it was like air out of a balloon,I'd be a happy man. I often do fasting, you know, where I'll have nothing,I'll eat for a four-hour window in the day,and then the rest of the day no eating whatsoever. And I can lose about a kg a week on that scenario, but it's still relatively hard to maintain over a long period of time. It's something I constantly work on. So good to hear of your success. Tell me, how did you get into the Microsoft business application ecosystem? What was your journey?

[Mohammad Yasar]: 5:57
OK, I started my career in India with a company named Cognizant Technology Solutions.It's a US-based MNC. So that's when I started. I have an IT and industrial engineering degree.So that laid a base for being a good functional consultant with both domain knowledge and IT knowledge.So I joined Cognizant as a business analyst.And I was into different applications like JD Edwards, Oracle,and SAP and all that.And then I was put into a new project in Malaysia.That's when I migrated to Malaysia.It was a very big caterpillar dealership end to an implementation.So I got an opportunity to get start, get from the scratch, get trained in the AX 2012 R2.So that's when you start from nothing and you have your business user,you have the pressure, you have to learn,you have to perform thousands of scenarios. There are not so many materials available out there.Microsoft learn and everything is now improving. But in 2011,2012, almost nothing. Even the will only give you the navigation path.Doesn't give you any story. Radical, as the expensive books, I bought them all.Nothing worked. Finally,the testing,some of the blogs will not give you the full story.But here and there. knowledge, right? So that's when I got started and started learning from that project. It's almost a five-year Australia, New Zealand, China,Singapore, Malaysia rollout. So it was a great experience.

[Mark Smith]: 7:43
Did you travel quite a bit for that rollout?

[Mohammad Yasar]: 7:49
Mostly it was kind of remote but yeah between Australia, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, I was mostly primarily responsible for Singapore, Malaysia region.

[Mark Smith]: 7:58
Well, well, and this was predominantly in the finance and operations side of things,is that right? Yeah for AX

[Mohammad Yasar]: 8:07
Yeah, for 2012 ARC 2, at that time on-prem. Yeah, it was primarily only for that area.

[Mark Smith]: 8:13
And so your specialty area now, are you still deep in 365 finance, or what particular modules are your specialty?

[Mohammad Yasar]: 8:24
So as you always say, Mark,it's about depth and the breadth. So my depth is about finance and operations. That is my core focus.But of course, in this era with just finance and operation, nothing is going to work out. So obviously, I'm also into Power Apps, Power Automate, and dataverse side of things.

[Mark Smith]: 8:47
That's interesting. I'm keen to understand how much things like, you know, On a finance related project,how much do you use Dataverse for example,when obviously finance is not built on Dataverse. How much do you use Power Automate? How much do you use Power Apps as part of the project deliveries you do?

[Mohammad Yasar]: 9:12
So that's a good question, Mark.So my current company is Anata. So Anata is a global ISV of Microsoft. Must be knowing. We build amazing applications on finance and operation dataverse and the power platform, CE and other CE applications specifically for automotive and heavy equipment industry.So the primary piece of our ecosystem is finance and operations. And our extensions are built on top of finance and operations.But let's say that yesterday I had a discovery session with a customer. It is with an EV brand,electric vehicle, very modern company.And the company,for some reason, want to appify the ERP. So they have this mindset that they They want to do everything they want to do in an ERP using a mobile app. When I probe them further,I asked them,do you really want your general ledger to be in a mobile app? Do you want your cash and bank and your, your trial balance to be in a mobile app? The answer is obviously no. So then what do they really mean by appifying the whole ERP is Certain portions of the ERP is something that they want to be in a form of a mobile app, right? So that is my understanding out of this discovery. So then I bring the concept of dataverse.Do you all write it connected with FNO? So you must be knowing about the automotive version of the dataverse and the industry specific dataverse that Microsoft offers.We also extend the dataverse further.with our own extension. So then I educated them about how they can build the mobile apps and the portals,which is not only bringing good experience for the business user,the front end user,but also for the customer to interact directly with the FNO data through the portal and the other areas.To give you an example,the customer wants normally receives a car into a dealership which we all go for a dealership for service,a person sits and registers the license plate number of the car,the check-in time and the checkout time using a pen and the paper.We can now use the seentities and create a mobile app within a minute,within not a minute,over-exaggerating, within a day, relatively within a day where you can pull your AI builders'text recognition. scan the license plate, get the data, and it's connected to the FNO.Now you have a full service history and you understand the car, not only just about the car, but it is also about the customer because the CRM data is also there.So it is like you're providing a complete 360 degree degree view of both the customer and the vehicle to the sellers.

[Mark Smith]: 12:27
Yeah very good, very good, good example, very good example. You mentioned Jewel Wright there and I just want to unpack that a bit. What are your thoughts on Jewel Wright? And you can be candid across the journey of Jewel Wright.Is it, you know, if you were to do a maturity assessment on Jewel Wright, what would that assessment be for you?Give and even you might want to give me a couple of common use cases that you're seeing you commonly come across for dual write

[Mohammad Yasar]: 13:00
Okay, so I wasn't, to be honest,kind of not very confident about the Dual-Rite even for a demo, like two years back or a one year back,because it's not very, very consistent and it is good for a demo, but not in real life.But eventually now a lot of our customers are live with it. It's a lot more stable and I have very good experience with it.very quickly build an inspection app, let's say, from my industry, this is an example.And when you are inspecting things like capturing the picture, capturing the audio and video, and we'll go, and you're also clocking in the time for registering the time sheet of a technician,so he captures the total number of time it takes for him to perform the service.So as soon as he clicks on the clock in button,start button, so the data is available in the projects module of Microsoft in the time sheet table right away, instantly within a second.So no more the technician needs to note down the start term and end term in a paper and pass it to somebody at the back end, back office staff will have one specific day where he keys in the whole lot of technician data into the system where he spends more than eight hours or 16 hours only doing that,right?So this entire process is now automated.So the backend stuff only need to validate the data very quickly because it's still not getting posted to the backend system.You still have an opportunity to quickly validate nd then just hit on the post button. So as simple as that.

[Mark Smith]: 14:43
Yeah. I'm a bit ignorant when it comes to dual write. I've never had to use it personally. I want to understand when we say dual write, is it like a full mirror of the data in two systems? Is that what we've got? Are you mirroring it

[Mohammad Yasar]: 15:04
It is not the.

[Mark Smith]: 15:05
or is the data sitting in one system and then being, if you like, presenced in the other system? So there's only one database but a presence across two systems.

[Mohammad Yasar]: 15:17
So there is one master system,the engine, the full blown engine where everything sets and so if your data,but a certain key data that you would like to use in other applications will be mirrored and will be sitting on the other systems that is in your data as well. So that's my idea, that's my view my idea.

[Mark Smith]: 15:38
Okay, so in this case,it would sit in Dynamics 365 Finance. You had a field in there, and it would also sit in the data verse as well.It's a copy, but if I updated one, it updates the other. If I update the one, the other, it updates the same, right? Exactly.

[Mohammad Yasar]: 15:54
Exactly exactly Mark. Yes.

[Mark Smith]: 15:57
Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Okay.I love doing these podcasts because I learn so much. Tell me about how you became an MVP.

[Mohammad Yasar]: 16:06
Okay. You have a lot of influence on that Mark. So I definitely have to give the credit to you. So let me tell you the full story. In short,I , as I mentioned before, there was a problem.So whenever we have a problem and we have a solution, and if it's a specific to a niche, then you are going to get a lot of attention, right?So that's what happened. So the problem is the FNOS space doesn't have documentation as good as Power Platform and all the documentations are very expensive.You have to buy or you have to purchase a course to learn it. So this is clearly a problem from 2012 until today.So I wanted to do a course on a real life scenario base, meaning just like how you implement a project, create a new company from the scratch and build it from top to bottom.Use just that company and do all that thousand configuration that you want to do never change the company, right? So that's my idea and that's what I wanted to do.So I wanted to actually do that because when I moved to Anata, it is an ISV and I was losing touch of the standard modules of Microsoft.So I didn't get any motivation to everyday have a learning schedule and practice it. So it was not working out.So I want to run a training program. but it didn't work out either because I cannot commit six months for doing this course every Saturday and Sunday.So then when I joined your mentoring program, it's called, I think 90 days mentoring challenge.For some reason, unfortunately you paused it, but it really benefited, like I'm sure it benefited 1000 of them.So in there you highlighted about the importance of personal brand and importance of sharing, right?So the concept of personal brand was very new for me in 2020. And it was a COVID period.My brain was ideal. I have a lot of time to read and think about so many different things.So this small idea of personal brand that you have pitched to me in a 30 minutes video created a lot of impact.And I felt like it's really making sense, right? So a personal brand is something really important for everybody in this era, right?So. Then I got, I connected the problem and this idea together.And I started right away on the same week, a channel with something influenced from your name, 365 NZ, right? So it's TechTalk 365.So then I don't want to go with the YouTube channel because creating a YouTube channel is just a two minute work, right?So I'm a very detailed oriented person. That is my drawback as well.I don't go to the market until the product is perfect, which is a wrong approach clearly.So I started talking to the wall using my camera for literally six months,which gave me a motivation to do my homework, reading, learning.And I really become an expert in that six months in finance and operation while doing this process.And I was truly believing that one day I will have 100,000 subscribers.So when I was talking to the camera, I'm addressing this 100,000 people, even though I'm alone in the room.So the MVP award, the attention that I'm getting, everything is just a byproduct. But the intention was for me to learn the system.

[Mark Smith]: 19:48
Nice. And what a fantastic lesson that is, because by you learning, right,so many other people are learning as well. So you're having this multiplying effect. And of course, when I look at your YouTube channel and the phenomenal number of videos that are up there,you got to be pretty proud of that. They look good. They're high quality. And as I say, I highly recommend people go check those out.and to talk and see you again.Thank you. I appreciate it.

[Mohammad Yasar]: 20:27
Thank you so much,Mark, for making an impact.I always thought you know,I should be catching up with you and thanking you for whatever you did in that that program.And I strongly recommend that you should quickly start resuming it and start impacting people.And I will definitely rejoin again. I want a second round.

[Mark Smith]: 20:48
Excellent. Watch your space.Something's happening.

[Mohammad Yasar]: 20:52
That's all.