Unveiling Business Optimization: Rachel Profitt's Deep Dive into Dynamics 365's Process Catalogue and Power Platform Synergies

Mark Smith: 0:33
Welcome to the Power 365 show. We're an interview staff at Microsoft across the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technology Stack. I hope you'll find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we'll be focusing on business process guides and I don't know if you've heard of them, but you're going to know a lot about them by the end of this episode. Today's guest is from Denver, colorado in the United States. She works at Microsoft as a principal program manager. She's a recipient of the Woman of Channel Award and former Microsoft MVP for Dynamics AX. She's passionate about training, helping others understand how they can use and implement Dynamics 365 and all things business apps. You can find links to her bio, socials, etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, rachel.

Rachel Profitt: 1:26
Hi everyone, thanks for having me, mark.

Mark Smith: 1:29
Now the crazy thing was is factually the last time you're on this podcast was Episode 66. That was a lot of episodes ago. I have just published Episode 500. Wow, so that's a lot of episodes ago.

Rachel Profitt: 1:46
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 1:46
Right, and back then you were an MVP. You weren't working at Microsoft and you were a thought leader in all things finance and operations back then, as well as CRM even. You seem to work across the gamut of the technology stack and of course, it was so good that Microsoft said let's have you work for us.

Rachel Profitt: 2:06
Yeah, I do get around a little bit, and maybe that whole I can't decide which product I like best has something to do with my new pet projects.

Mark Smith: 2:17
Yeah, Totally right, Totally. So tell us a bit about what's been your big focus over the last 90 days.

Rachel Profitt: 2:24

Well, I basically live, breathe and sweat and sleep all things, dynamics 365 and this new business process catalog and the guidance that goes along with it.

Mark Smith: 2:36
Uh-huh.

Rachel Profitt: 2:37
The initiative actually started almost a year ago In fact, it's probably just over a year ago and a lot of work went in behind the scenes before we were able to make our first launch and the first version of the catalog that we went public with. But I was having a conversation with my skip manager and I said I feel like implementing Dynamics shouldn't be that hard, like it shouldn't be this hard, like everyone's out there reinventing this wheel every single time and like 80% of it probably doesn't need to be reinvented. Like there's still uniqueness that every client has. But, like, how do we actually make implementations go faster? And like, I don't know how familiar you are with FastTrack, but one of the primary goals of the FastTrack team, right, is to make implementations go faster, go smoother, get more out of your benefits. And I think, like those are some pretty generic goals that I think anyone who's implementing, whether you're a partner or a customer, like what's these things, right? So it's kind of like how can we think bigger, think outside the box and make that happen? So, yeah, I sat down as the chief cat herder of about 30 people internally to start making this business process catalog. Because you know we didn't have a budget. We used the number one used ERP system in the world Maybe you've heard of it Microsoft Office, excel, yes, yes, to track all the details of what we kind of started down this journey. So the good news is I didn't start from a blank piece of paper. A lot of people ask me this. So where did you start from? Isd, which we at Microsoft we love our acronyms. So ISD stands for Industry Solution Delivery, which is what formerly used to be MCS, which was Microsoft Consulting Services. It's the group inside Microsoft that actually does implementations for customers as a paid engagement. So I took their catalog because they had a catalog that they were using for their implementations. We had a look at it and we're like, well, yeah, this is pretty good, but it's really kind of FNO specific and uses a lot of software terminology. If you're brand new to Dynamics, like I'm sure Mark, you can testify to this. We at Microsoft love making up words. If you didn't actually have a lot of knowledge and baseline about what we were talking about, you'd be looking at this catalog. That was maybe it was pretty good, but for a brand new person it would be very hard to uptake and learn.

Mark Smith: 5:22
Yeah.

Rachel Profitt: 5:22
So I was like how do we make this better Then? How do we publish it so that everyone can have it? It's not just a secret resource for Microsoft internally, and that's where we started from. Then it was like what else can we do with this thing? Now that we've built it, how do we get more people to tell us what they think? That's how it all got started. It's not really what I've been doing in the last 90 days. The last 90 days it's conference season, mark, so I've been out at conferences trying to tell the world about the business process catalog and guidance.

Mark Smith: 5:59
So where can we touch it? Where is business process guides? Is there a URL? Is there a resource that we can use as a starting point to get a feel for what's been built so far?

Rachel Profitt: 6:11
Yeah, absolutely so. There's two main resources that people should know about. The first one, and this is really mind blowing, the link is akams forward slash. Are you ready for it? I'm ready. Business process catalog.

Mark Smith: 6:29
Excellent.

Rachel Profitt: 6:30
Yeah, so this resource, this URL, takes you to a GitHub repository that is public. You do have to sign in with a GitHub account. So if you don't have a GitHub account, you'll have to sign up for one. But it's super quick and easy to sign up and get an account. But then it drops you into a folder it's our templates folder inside of the GitHub repository. There's bunches of stuff in there, but it drops you into our templates folder and there's two versions of the catalog right now. So there's one that's just like a normal Excel spreadsheet. That's called like business process catalog October 2023 or something of the like. A new version will likely get published next month. We're about quarterly is when we publish new versions, so then a new version will be up there, named whatever month we release it, and then like two below that in the repository. there's another version. That's a CSV file, then, and that version is new. I released that one at the power platform conference in Las Vegas, and so that version of the catalog is importable into Azure DevOps. So the basic idea is that you can open this thing up, delete all the lines that don't apply to your project, insert new lines, like where you need extra rows, and create your Azure DevOps. You know work breakdown structure as a starting point and actually run your Dynamics 365 project.

Mark Smith: 8:03
Okay, wow, just looking at it, it is massively detailed. There are a lot of resources in here.

Rachel Profitt: 8:09
Yeah, so the spreadsheet has like more than 3000 rows in it and so it's a hierarchy. We've broken it down into like so level one of the hierarchies end to end processes, so things like prospect to quote, order to cash, procure, to pay, record, to report whatever. There's 15 of them. And then at the next level, we call them business process areas, and they're just like a logical grouping of business processes within an end to end to make it easier to navigate, because if I just put a list of 900 business processes out there you'd be lost.

Mark Smith: 8:46
You'd still be lost, right. So?

Rachel Profitt: 8:47
we tried to like create these groupings and there's just under 100 business process areas in those 15, end to end. And then, I don't know, we have like seven or 800 business processes and more than 2000 patterns or use cases or user stories whatever you want to call them at the bottom level and the fourth level of that hierarchy. We do expect to continue to grow. We have a lot more work to do there. We acknowledge that and we want people to contribute. Tell us what we're missing, like. Or if you don't like the way we've worded something, let us know. So, like in that GitHub repository, if you go over to the issues tab, there's buttons where you can go give us feedback, right, so you can go, say, create a new issue and say, hey, I think something's missing from the catalog, or hey, I think you should reword this. Or hey, I want to give you a process flow diagram for this process. That doesn't have one yet. And that's super exciting because we're in the process of designing a super secret mascot. Nice, yeah, it's super secret. You know Ninja Cat, right? Yeah, yeah, I want to make my own Ninja Cat, but not a.

Mark Smith: 10:00
Ninja Cat right, but for like.

Rachel Profitt: 10:02
Dynamics right.

Mark Smith: 10:03
Yeah, it's going to be awesome. Is it going to be ready by Dynamics Mines Conference?

Rachel Profitt: 10:08
If it's not, I would be shocked.

Mark Smith: 10:11
It's six months away, right, so you got time.

Rachel Profitt: 10:13
I'm actually really hopeful that it's ready before the end of the year.

Mark Smith: 10:17
Awesome, awesome. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to getting my sticker.

Rachel Profitt: 10:21
Yeah, exactly right. I'm like everybody's going to want this. They're going to want the Creadly badge to put on their LinkedIn, but then they're also going to want stickers and whatever other swag we can come up with. With this new mascot on it. I like it, so I'm super excited for that. I think it's going to be cool and hopefully help us like create some more community around this, because it takes a village to deploy ERP and CRM I don't know if you know this and we have to come together as a community or this. It won't work. This idea is I'm really betting on the community to help me with this.

Mark Smith: 10:59
Have you got many community contributions in there so far?

Rachel Profitt: 11:02
We've got a handful, we've kind of been beta prototyping it with a handful of people, and so I'm starting a Tech Talk series, not next week but the week after, because next week here is Thanksgiving, of course. So it's like that first week in December, last week in November kind of crosses over when this Tech Talk series will go public, and so when we do that, that's when the world will know how to actually contribute to this thing Beyond me. Just kind of describing it in this podcast, I've described it in a number of different meetings and we've had a handful of people that are contributing. But we think the big launch is really going to be in about two weeks.

Mark Smith: 11:46
Nice.

Rachel Profitt: 11:47
And so the other link that I wanted to share with you. Yes, because I only give you one, and then we struggled with the spelling of it. So, that's all right. I've come to realize that the issue is that catalog is spelled differently depending on if you're like US English or UK English or Australia English.

Mark Smith: 12:08
Yes, Yep, you're on the money, because I can see clearly. My spelling of catalog was quite different.

Rachel Profitt: 12:14
Yes, my spelling of catalog is like the US English, so I might need to rethink. Or you know what? I should just go make all the different spellings because I can make redirect links.

Mark Smith: 12:26
Yes, exactly Coming soon to you. Problem solved right.

Rachel Profitt: 12:31
Problem solved, all right. So the next link I want to share with you is https. Colon forward slash forward akams forward slash one guidance, but the one is spelled out.

Mark Smith: 12:43
Cool.

Rachel Profitt: 12:44
So this is the guidance hub. There's a lot of different things happening in the guidance hub, one of which is the end to end business processes, and we keep adding more resources and other stuff out here to it. We want this to become the one stop shop where you can go to find anything for implementing Dynamics 365. Because right now, even when you go to learn, it's all segregated by products and it's really hard to find stuff. And more and more we have two in a box or three in a box where we all have to get along, we all have to play nicely across the applications. Odop is becoming more and more true ODOP. In case people don't know one Dynamics, one platform Got you. But so the goal is that every single row in that spreadsheet will have a learn article that goes with it, including a process flow diagram.

Mark Smith: 13:42
This is brilliant.

Rachel Profitt: 13:44
Right. The goal is that by putting all of these kind of standard flows out there, you've got the vanilla baseline way that this works, along with a list of all the configuration. You can stick it into an Azure DevOps project to help you manage your project and make your implementation go faster, because you're now not hunting and pecking. A lot of what we're doing is indexing all the different steps that you need to do, Because product documentation and this is not product, it's not technically product documentation- no no. Like we're not replacing all the product documentation that's out there, but it's more like first go do this one, and here's the learn article for that, and then go do this one and here's the learn article for that, and then here's the third thing you're supposed to do, and here's the learn article for that, but also giving you some guidance, some best practices, some things you should think about, because a lot of times our product documentation tells you how to do it. But it doesn't really tell you why, or why would I choose this checkbox over that checkbox, and so people need more context, and so that's what we're trying to build right now is context and the why.

Mark Smith: 14:55
I like it. It's top of mind for me because this morning I just built a chat GPT, gpts and I fed it the success by design PDF which is 700 pages In no time at all. The querying of it was super easy, like I was like tell me what is a business process? And it describes a business process, has these things in it. You should be documenting the as is business state or process state, then the 2B and then whatever the agreed ultimately state as built. And then there's things like you know, folks don't know what an entity relationship diagram is. Well, what is that? What are all the parts? It just responds back, in fact, queried it and said build us an example, and it jumped into SQL and it actually built out a SQL ERD with the relationships in SQL, which I didn't know you could do in SQL, but it did it. That's cool.

Rachel Profitt: 15:53
I don't think any of you could do that in SQL either. That's pretty impressive, no.

Mark Smith: 15:57
As I assumed that because there was an ERD, which is about relationships and metadata and data types etc. That it assumed that that was the best tool to use, it wrote it as a SQL visualization, but it was like a command as well. I was using SQL in it, yeah.

Rachel Profitt: 16:15
That's super cool and interesting. Yeah, I think in barking on this goal of trying to build out all this documentation, but I'm more excited for the next 90 days. I guess you talked to co-pilot. We can't have any podcast these days or presentation of any sort unless we mentioned co-pilots at least three times. There we have it. I've said it at least three times. I love it. You may or may not be aware, but we're working on an app co-pilot that connects to the learn content as a help mechanism in-app help. We already do a little bit of that in the Power Platform Admin Center when you do issue searches. But now, when you're actually in-app any Dynamics 365 app, being able to type in an actual question and find help in natural language. Well, all of this learn content, all the product documentation, all the business process documentation is all going to get surfaced up to this thing. But I have some even bigger goals and ideas for this thing, because imagine for me for a moment like this is a partner scenario for partners listening demos like pre-sales. Do you know how much time is put into setting up and configuring your demo environment? Every single time? You're doing the same things over and over and over, but you have to go out to the customer's website and figure out what are their items and what are they charging for their items or their services or whatever. Then you have to go manually create those items and set up the pricing so that it looks realistic to the customer's scenario, just so that you could go do a demo. Then you rinse and repeat this so many times. Now we put co-pilot on top of it. Co-pilot understands how to scrape a website. I can give it a URL and say hey, co-pilot, go suggest some items for me for a sales demo. Then, by the way, please help me insert them so that I don't have to type them all in Exactly. But the same basic concept could be used for any normal configuration. I'm trying to set up my whatever. Here's my spreadsheet. Can you help me map the columns and import it? I think we're going to find a lot of cool scenarios that are going to get lit up with co-pilot on top of this. But process mining process mining has been another super popular topic. I don't know if you've ever tried to do process mining with Dynamics 365, like using our Power Automate stuff. It can certainly be done, but it takes a lot of effort, like upfront work, to be able to map all the fields and export all the right data, to be able to import it into the process mining tool so that it can actually give you meaningful data. That's another one of the goals of the outcome. That's probably going to be like a next year project because we have a lot of other work to get done first. But think of the idea that we've already mapped all of these steps and the metadata of okay, how do I confirm a sales order, like this button or this? Data changes. So when we change the status from this to this, that's when it became confirmed and these are the steps. Like I know when I created it. I know when we added lines. I know when I sent it to the customer. I know when it got confirmed back from the customer. It got confirmed as an order and then it got fulfilled. Like and there's all the steps in fulfillment and then we have to invoice it. So now we know all the steps, like very basic right, and like the data points of when each of those happened. So now I can start to analyze using process mining, like where did I have deviations from my process? Like we said the process should go like this, but sometimes it went over here like that, and other times it went over here like this, or where I've got like big delays, like what? Like maybe I'm trying to optimize my process and make my process go faster, go better and with that data of, like, all these different timestamps and all these different business events if you will I use the term business event loosely, not like the feature business events, but like I know when all these different events happened in my business process and now I can start to analyze and optimize that business process. But, you know, can we emit telemetry data to tell you, like, which business processes you're actually using versus the ones you told me you were using, where you've got opportunity to get more ROI out of what you already own? Test suite automation, right, like if I know which objects go with which business processes? I not. Okay, we just modified all these objects, or you modified all these objects in your customer environment. So these are all the business processes that you need to test and let me go ahead and automatically generate a test suite for you with all of those user stories related to those business processes. I think there's a lot of possibilities that are gonna come that I'm super excited about. But for any of those dreams to come true, we have a mountain of documentation to write and do, and that's where I think the community comes in.

Mark Smith: 21:42
You know I see it's Dynamics 365, guidance, documentation, other resources. Is it just sticking within the lane of Dynamics, therefore covering everything in that has a product name with Dynamics 365 in it, so all the FNO, all the Biz Central, all the customer engagement stuff, or does it do any touching of the Power Platform in the same context of Dynamics 365? Like I'm not getting into the discussion whether Power Platform is a part of Dynamics et cetera, but like is there any documentation that covers into Power Platform?

Rachel Profitt: 22:17
It does absolutely so and, honestly, when we think about other resources, some of the stuff that we've published out there are actually like there's some Power Apps and Power Automate templates as an example for solutions for a particular business process. Even everything you do in Power Platform is still about a business process at the end of the day. Yeah, 100% Right. So, too, like when I think about people that are like my presentation at Power Platform Conference about a month ago now, one of the key points that I was making is well, like it's really hard for you as a business analyst if you're just like getting into this low code, no code thing and you don't know what all these Dynamics 365 apps do, and like what they can do is like should I build it or should I buy it? And that was kind of this whole big debate and there's definitely arguments for and against both sides. But it was like, as a starting point, you have to have that business process focus to have a successful implementation. And I think that's true. Take out Dynamics and Microsoft technology period right, like you're implementing technology, you need to have a process focused approach, otherwise you're just building cool whiz-bang things Like what's the actual business problem you're trying to solve? And if you start there, right, and then you can go look at the catalog and say, what did we offer out of the box? If we don't have a row, there's a pretty good chance you should be building a Power App or a Power Automate to fill that right. But the basic process of that there's still a basic, fundamental and like way that that process works. And I think the idea, the goal, is that we get people sharing their stuff out there in like open source kind of way, like here's my sample of how I solved it for this business. And then we can stop reinventing that wheel and I might need to tweak it for my business, but we can all go faster and do way more cool things if we just share the basics right?

Mark Smith: 24:20
Yeah, I like it. How do people get involved? As in, you talked about community engagement. What's the best way? We'll make sure both those links are available in the show notes. How can people proactively get involved with this?

Rachel Profitt: 24:32
Yeah, so there's another aka link that's gonna drop you in the GitHub.

Mark Smith: 24:37
Awesome.

Rachel Profitt: 24:38
So basically in the GitHub repository, go over to that issues tab and I'll give you the aka link that takes you right there. Basically, what you do is you say oh, I wanna create a new issue request, and then you choose what type you're gonna do, and one of them is a new business process or a new pattern or practice, and so you click one of those two buttons and basically say which one you want to. Author.

Mark Smith: 25:05
Yeah, yeah, so I can see here I could do a business prospects catalog change request, a content request or provide an error report right, or a new pattern or practice I can submit there.

Rachel Profitt: 25:14
Yeah, so the aka link for this one is business process catalog requests.

Mark Smith: 25:20
Nice.

Rachel Profitt: 25:20
We tried to make them easy to remember. So yeah, business process catalog requests. So you, basically you click on one of these and you fill out a little form to tell us that you wanna contribute, and you tell us which one you wanna contribute to, and so basically, you download the catalog, right, the Excel spreadsheet. Look through it If you know something about one of these processes and you wanna help author it and get credit for it. By the way, it does count as MVP submissions.

Mark Smith: 25:48
Contributions, or you're an aspiring MVP.

Rachel Profitt: 25:52
Like you can go to town and I'll nominate you to be an MVP.

Mark Smith: 25:57
Woo hoo, look at that, look at that. Good opportunity there right for folks. Yeah, I love it.

Rachel Profitt: 26:01
Yeah, so basically you find a row that you want to fill out, the form, it submits it into us and so we have different leads for each of the end to end processes that'll look over their crust, make sure that we don't already have somebody else working on it, and as long as there's nobody working on it, they'll send you back and approved with some additional guidance. But in that original folder, the business process catalog aka link, there's a bunch of templates, so you're gonna choose the right template. So either the L3 business process template or the L4 pattern or practice template, and it's a Word document. Have you heard of Word before?

Mark Smith: 26:38
Yeah.

Rachel Profitt: 26:39
So you type into it. It's pretty cool. Chatgpt is not off limits. It can actually help you author a lot of these and we've been using it even for what we've published already. A lot of them have had assistance. Keep in mind, ChatGPT doesn't always know, so you need to still use your brain and add the Dynamics 365 flavor, but it can certainly accelerate how quickly you can pump these things out. You create the graphic and then you submit it through a customer voice survey. I'll give you the aka link for that too.

Mark Smith: 27:11
Wow, okay, another one. That's four links.

Rachel Profitt: 27:13
I'll have there.

Mark Smith: 27:15
I love it. This is really good. Just as we close, is there anything else that you would like to add? Anything you want the community go do, learn. What do you see the runway for this? Is it particularly targeting consultants? Is it targeting end users? Any closing words?

Rachel Profitt: 27:33
Yeah, I think in terms of who we're targeting. I think we're targeting business decision makers who are trying to make a decision to buy. We're trying to target those functional consultants, business analysts, solution architects that are trying to figure out how to piece all these things together. They could work at the partner, they could work at the customer. It's not so much for the end user, like how do I use this and where do I go, it's more how do I implement this?

Mark Smith: 28:03
Exactly.

Rachel Profitt: 28:04
Or should I implement this? But I think that's what we're trying to answer. I think a lot of our L1 and L2 documentation is more for those decision makers like is this the right solution for me, in business language, not techie, software language and not weird marketing. I'm trying to sell you something and use a lot of buzzwords that nobody understands. So I think it's a pretty broad group of people, but I wouldn't say it's not for the end user. It's not for the end user who's going to go use a warehouse management mobile device or be a call center rep kind of thing and using customer service. It's the people who are trying to implement solutions.

Mark Smith: 28:51
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show from Microsoft, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. How will you create on the Power Platform today? Ciao?