Friendly neighborhood pet store opens hundreds of new locations with the support of Dynamics AX
As written on customers.microsoft.com
Almost a year ago, Pet Supplies Plus had 300 stores across the United States and was planning aggressive store growth in the coming years. Decision makers at the company knew they would need a strong technological backbone to support such an ambitious expansion, so they chose Microsoft Dynamics AX to replace the company’s disparate ERP systems. Now that Pet Supplies Plus has begun deployment, the company is beginning to see the fruits of its labor—and the validation that it made the right choice.
Brown recommends LCS to help reduce deployment times as well as lower costs, and she says, “we now have a better understanding of how to implement Dynamics AX across our stores and how to scale up more quickly utilizing the different tools and services in LCS. If you start with LCS and work your way through the cloud deployment, it’s your one-stop shop and your entry point into developing your Azure environment.”
Empowering employees to provide better service
Since Pet Supplies Plus deployed Dynamics AX to its stores last year, the decision makers at the business have heard lots of feedback from employees who are very happy with the change. “I’ve asked on a number of occasions if they’d like to go back to the old system and, across-the-board, nobody wants to,” Tedder says. “They are very pleased with the features and functionality of the Dynamics POS application and the future ability to evolve the POS application even further.”
The company is still in the early stages of its deployment process and the few dozen stores that are up and running with the new system are only a small sample size of the overall implementation. But Tedder says that he’s already seeing improvements in the time it takes to train employees on Dynamics AX. He explains, “Reducing training time for new team members is going to be extremely important and will result in a material ROI for any retailer using Dynamics AX.”
Taking care of neighbors and their pets
Pet Supplies Plus is also using Dynamics AX to help standardize its data, streamline its workflow, and standardize business processes across all its locations. “Dynamics AX is fulfilling our wish to have one system of record, one version of the truth, and a simplified applications portfolio, especially for the corporate office environment,” says Tedder. “The combination of those things coupled with business intelligence and reporting will yield efficiencies and improve our ordering in the ongoing months—we planned for this; it was part of how we made the decision to go with Microsoft Dynamics AX.”
The most important benefits, however, will be for the neighbors who come in and shop at Pet Supplies Plus locations. Tedder says, “We want to make sure that we provide a convenient option for our customers to purchase supplies for their pets, at a great value. Our goal is to make sure that we capitalize on that magic moment between team members and neighbors when we’re helping them select and purchase the products they need for their pets.”
"I’ve asked on a number of occasions if they’d like to go back to the old system and, across-the-board, nobody wants to."
- Miles Tedder: Chief Operating Officer, Pet Supplies Plus
Talking DevOps, hardcore air hockey and more with Donovan Brown
Donovan Brown was a new technical seller at Microsoft struggling with a demo when he sent the email that changed his life.
“I had completely hosed the VM [virtual machine] I was using,” Brown recalled. He sent a desperate, cold-call email to a technical evangelist for help, which led to an invite for Brown to demo on stage, which led to a meteoric career rise.
Three years later, the once-unknown salesman has become one of Microsoft’s top presenters, with Brown now the senior program manager in charge of the company’s vision for DevOps, an approach to software development that incorporates Agile methodologies. DevOps calls for development and operations teams to step out of their traditional silos and collaborate in a system that emphasizes automation, testing, monitoring and continuous delivery.
Microsoft Build 2016, San Francisco.
Many organizations are interested in DevOps for its potential to deliver products faster in evolving markets, but aren’t sure how to build a supply pipeline or adopt new ways of working. A longtime developer who is also passionate about car-racing and air hockey, Brown has risen as a leader at a critical time for the industry, demystifying DevOps for thousands of IT pros around the world.
“DevOps is here. It is how you succeed. It is how you beat the competition. Why should you do DevOps? Because your competition already is,” Brown said recently in a demo for developers at Microsoft’s Ignite New Zealand conference. It was one of his many high-profile appearances in 2016, which included keynotes at Microsoft’s enormous Build and Ignite events.
Along the way, Brown has become known for his quirky personal brand as a gifted public speaker who also has killer technical chops. His winking catchphrase, “I’m going to rub a little DevOps on it and make it better,” has spawned the memorable hashtag #RubDevOpsOnIt. He has become so recognized in dev circles that he’s now known as “The Man in the Black Shirt,” a reference to the polos he wears on stage.
Making sense of the massive amounts of data universities gather can be tricky, but it can also be helpful when it comes to definitively answering the most pressing questions facing educators and administrators today. What makes students stay at your university or apply to transfer? What leads to academic successes or struggles, and what are the early warning signs? How can you optimize your curriculum?
This is a real story of digital transformation.
Crunching the Numbers
For Dr. Resche Hines, finding answers to these questions took time—a lot of it. As the Assistant Vice President of Institutional Research and Effectiveness at Stetson University—a university located in DeLand, Florida, a cool 20 miles from Daytona Beach and 30 miles from downtown Orlando—Hines regularly interacts with data and reports from across the entire university. This could range from research to better understand the university’s 4,300 students or crunching the numbers for a new construction project.
Hines recognized the need to find a more scalable, user-friendly solution that could empower his university’s faculty and staff to conduct their own data-driven investigations and engage students and alumni with the most up-to-date information. For Hines, that meant implementing an interactive data visualization tool that helped him draw smarter insights from his institution’s data. That tool was Microsoft Power BI.
Now Stetson’s community is more engaged and more frequently turns to data instead of inherited wisdom and intuition to answer questions. Students and alumni feel more knowledgeable and connected to their campus with readily-digestible, interactive information. Faculty feel supported in their never-ending quest for better curricula and offerings for their students. And perhaps most importantly, Stetson University has enhanced its ability to conduct complex research, have more productive conversations, and debunk long-held institutional myths.
Empowering Employees
“There’s so much data out there that it becomes overwhelming for people to consume. Though you have data on every element you want about your life, there’s no way to easily use it,” explains Hines. “You can get it, but what are you going to do with it? Power BI has allowed us to transition that data to make it usable for the end user, to leverage it, and finally start looking at the data in a comprehensive way.”
Big data is often complex, which makes it difficult for researchers, faculty, staff, and administrators to understand. To encourage user adoption and explain to the Stetson community that Power BI would help alleviate challenges associated with data engagement, Hines and his team went to every school and department chair and personally demonstrated how the tool could be leveraged. Through this personal interaction with his community, Hines was able to directly empower the Stetson faculty and staff.
The easy-to-use platform even transformed critics into advocates. Today, faculty and staff at Stetson are using data to have better structured, more informed conversations about transforming curricula and classroom supplies. “We had a faculty member who was able to use Power BI to ask the Dean of their school for additional resources,” says Hines. “That’s when I knew we were on to something special.”
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive enrollment report from Stetson University using Power BI.
Power BI has helped Hines debunk many long-held and potentially damaging institutional myths.
“There were some areas of the institution that I thought were pain points for us in terms of retaining students, but we’re actually doing very well in retaining students,” Hines explains. “I thought most of the data would tell us that STEM areas are pain points for any institution in retaining students. Our STEM areas here are out-retaining our general population, which was an amazing discovery. To see that through Power BI was definitely a myth buster for me and for the institution. It helps to change the conversation.”
Engaging Students and Alumni
For prospective, current, and former Stetson students, access to university information has improved dramatically. Federally required information such as enrollment trends, retention, and graduation data is more accessible than ever. Before Power BI, the university could make PDFs for people to download, but the data was static and complex. Students can now interact with and explore data online rather than being forced to download information.
Hines has even seen progress in Stetson’s alumni and stakeholder community. The university is in the early stages of developing a Power BI partnership with Stetson’s Alumni Gifting Program. Hines is currently working on a template to help them understand and leverage historical statistics about the program for the public. For every gifting program, they’ll be able to pull up data on the success of each campaign in progress and understand the intricacies of campaigning. The end goal is to help stakeholders and alumni see data points that have been previously difficult for them to see, such as the best time for email and calling campaigns or which days of the year are the biggest giving days.
Power BI has not only helped debunk myths and change the conversation at Stetson, it has also helped acknowledge students who often go unnoticed.
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive retention report.
“Sometimes students outperform their scholarships, which were based on high school performance,” Hines says. “How do we track this and show student appreciation and reward them? Power BI helps us track these students and provide better incentives to show appreciation for their hard work.”
Microsoft is proud to partner with Resche Hines and Stetson University as they continue to engage students and empower faculty and administrators to achieve more.
The U.S. Navy is using drone boat swarms to keep harbors safe
The U.S. Navy is testing a team of drone boats to protect harbors here and abroad. The boats, which are basically autonomous versions of the Rigid Hull Inflatable, are connected to a AI routing system called CARACaS. In original 2014 tests the boats worked separately to protect ships in a harbor and the new routing system now allows them to swarm as a team to surround and neutralize threats.
The system is also running an automatic vehicle identification system that allows the boats to assess friends and foes on the high seas.
Autonomous boats work well because, well, there isn’t much to hit in the ocean. These boats are especially useful in keeping unwanted boats away from Navy vessels and because they work in concert they can patrol a spot and then mass together to prevent a threat. The best thing? These aren’t special, custom-made boats. The Navy is simply outfitting standard boats with AI and control mechanisms and letting the loose making it far easier to retrofit older “dumb” boats and recruit them into the coming machine army.
Mario arrives as Pokemon Go peaks, with declining downloads, falling revenue
The phenomenal mobile hit Pokémon Go has peaked, just as the anticipated Nintendo title Super Mario Run hits the App Store, vying for mobile users’ attention and the chance to best Pokémon’s record-breaking numbers. According to new data from App Annie, Pokémon Go has seen declines in both downloads and revenue over the past several months, though it’s still highly ranked because of the massive size of its active user base.
Pokémon Go’s U.S. downloads fell from over 80 million in July 2016 to 1.5 million in November, the firm found in a new analysis of Pokémon Go data. The figures indicate the app is nearing market saturation, as November accounted for only 5 percent of all U.S. downloads for the game since its U.S. debut. (Or, in other words, most of the people who want to play the game, already have it installed.)
Despite the drop, the game was decently ranked at #16 in the U.S. in November, in a ranking of all iOS and Google Play Games downloads combined. For comparison’s sake, however, it was #1 in July.
More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Pokémon Go’s active users are declining, which, in turn has affected how much revenue the game is pulling in.
Though it still has a sizable audience with 23 million mobile active users in the U.S., that’s down by a little less than a third from July to November. In July, the game saw 66 million monthly actives playing, said App Annie.
When the game launched, U.S. users were spending an hour each day in the game, and now that’s down to 45 minutes per day.
In addition, Pokémon Go has seen its U.S. revenue drop from $125 million in July down to over $15 million in November. This saw it fall from #1 on the combined iOS and Android Games revenue chart to #6 during the same time frame.
The game has tried to juice its declining numbers through special events, like the one it held during Halloween which helped it bring in more revenue than the week prior. App Annie found that the week boosted U.S. revenue by 170% over the previous week, thanks to this event.
It also tried to get players to return with daily bonuses introduced last month. But neither of these initiatives were enough to bring Pokémon Go back to its earlier record numbers.
Of course, earnings and engagement like what Pokémon Go continues to see are something other mobile developers would kill to have. And U.S.-only stats only tell part of the story. But these new figures can help to illustrate where this massive mobile hit may end up leveling off, now that all the hype is winding down. (Expect the Mario hype to take over going forward!)
Pokémon maker Niantic Labs has prepared for the game’s slowing traction, though, and has been moving to monetize the app through other means. This includes the sponsorship deals with businesses like McDonald’s in Japan, Sprint, and most recently, Starbucks.
“It’s not surprising to see Pokemon Go’s performance peaked after it’s exceptional, record-breaking launch,” notes App Annie SVP of Research, Danielle Levitas. “The heart of the story, however, is that the game’s 23 million monthly active users [U.S.] in November was more than 50% greater than the #2 most popular game,” she adds.
If that’s what Pokémon Go’s peak looks like, it’s not a bad place to be.
Flex—delivering supply chain innovation on a global scale with Office 365
Global enterprises often struggle to maintain the kind of fast-moving culture of innovation that smaller companies appear to employ effortlessly. But this is a time of change in business, and thanks to technology advancements, global companies can communicate almost as quickly as a team working side by side. Now, companies like Flex can reach across geographical boundaries to serve global customers even more effectively than ever before. At Flex, our approximately 200,000 employees handle prototyping, design, manufacturing and logistics for customers worldwide. We’re operating as a single, cohesive company focused on innovation. It’s not just that we can communicate and collaborate efficiently among our more than 100 factories or between headquarters and our various business centers. We’re taking our focus on reinvention a step further by empowering all employees to share their ideas and experience to make Flex even more nimble.
The notion of continuous improvement is well established, but we wanted to make sure we’re capturing opportunities to enhance operations across every facet of our business—from the IT department to the factory floor. We’re supporting that effort with Microsoft Office 365, using the integrated apps not just for cross-company teamwork, but also as the basis for applications that foster innovation and process improvements. For example, we’ve built an ideation portal on Microsoft SharePoint Online where we can crowdsource ideas. Employees submit and vote on ideas, and we see which ideas gain momentum and buy-in. We’ve even included some gamification around the winning ideas to encourage our whole workforce to participate.
Giving employees the opportunity to see their ideas come to life is rewarding and empowering. It also benefits the operational efficiency of our business and enhances our level of service for customers. Supporting bottom-up communication is paramount to our ability to improve, because our employees see how things work every day and think about new ways to deliver improved results. And most important, employees can make an impact on a global level when their ideas are implemented as part of a workflow used by other colleagues.
We’ve also created interactive SharePoint Online communities for our project managers and salespeople, who can use Yammer directly from within the SharePoint Online sites or on their smartphones with the Office 365 mobile apps. Employees can freely engage with each other across geographic and hierarchical boundaries, communicating and cooperating throughout the company. Whether it’s for customer onboarding, production-line setup, materials distribution or new IT projects, select employees are using Office 365 to help us share expertise and foster better teamwork across Flex.
Our customers count on us to deliver the best solutions for their success. Showcasing the ways in which we’re tapping into our own knowledge base to become a stronger company makes us a better business partner and a smarter employer. The kinds of unified, open communication and support for innovation that we’re providing through Office 365 help us meet those goals in the modern workplace.
PATH, a Seattle-based global health nonprofit that innovates better solutions to help the world’s most at-risk groups, also tackled an equally daunting logistical problem: “With a piecemeal infrastructure struggling to keep pace with 38 offices and nearly 1,300 employees, most of whom work in the field in hard-to-reach locations, the organization needed to improve its own technological vitals. In short: “Our global footprint had expanded beyond our investment in IT,” explains chief information officer Erik Arnold.
A global rollout of Office 365 not only standardized its infrastructure; the cloud-based tools helped staff work faster and smarter to pursue projects in the most remote corners of the world—where its life-saving work is most needed. They now
overcome in-country connectivity issues,
strengthen coalitions with outside organizations,
break free of physical IT hardware,
expand without extraordinary expense, and
collaborate with colleagues around the world.
“This solution ensures we maximize the amount of our funding that goes directly to the activities that advance our program missions.” - Chief Information Officer Erik Arnold
Technology overcomes global barriers
Adapting to on-the-ground realities
PATH works in what Arnold generously calls “challenging places”—where internet connection, electricity and even roads aren’t reliable. Office 365 enables staff in remote areas to communicate with other locations, make deadlines and most importantly meet health needs. Mobile access to SharePoint, for example, allowed field staff in Kenya to send invoices and time cards to the Nairobi office, replacing their old system—delivering paper documents via motorcycle and airplane.
Employees can also check out documents to their laptop or mobile device from SharePoint, make edits then check the file back in—all so changes aren’t lost if the internet connection fails. “That feature means our teams in Tanzania and Zambia can use it more easily, helping them buy in to the system,” says Laurie Werner, deputy director of PATH’s Better Immunization Data Initiative.
Building partnerships
“The cloud is the only way our teams can efficiently collaborate not only within the organization but also when we partner with corporations, universities, governments and other nonprofits to build coalitions and partnerships,” Arnold says. “Office 365 is the obvious solution.” He has seen how adding Zambian health officials’ edits in real time to a diagram of health supplies distribution using Visio, flow chart software available at a steep discount to Office 365 Nonprofit recipients, strengthens relationships and streamlines workflow.
Another example: The Better Immunization Data Initiative, which uses data to improve countries’ delivery of vital vaccines, used SharePoint to collaborate on literature reviews, initial assessments and other documents at its onset; now that the project is underway, it provides updates to its external evaluator via the same platform. And because PATH depends on outside alliances—to develop lifesaving medicine and track children’s immunization schedules, for example—these tools are literally saving lives.
Staying flexible
PATH’s footprint is continually changing—it opens and closes offices as needed, moving personnel as they meet milestones and tackle new health crises. “We are cloud first—we have to be,” Arnold explains.
Instead of relying on on-site servers and other hardware, PATH safely stores all data in the cloud for immediate access anywhere, anytime and from any device. “We can move more quickly, scale up teams and spin up new solutions in sites in different countries,” Arnold says. “It’s so much easier when we’re not managing physical boxes and configurations.”
Scaling up
PATH is always evolving to meet the world’s health needs: It has seen double-digit growth for more than a decade. Modernizing its IT system provides scalability without a huge expense. “As a nonprofit, it would be irresponsible to build a large, complex, and expensive IT organization,” Arnold says.
“This solution ensures we maximize the amount of our funding that goes directly to the activities that advance our program missions.”
Collapsing distance and time zones
“SharePoint reduces my workload but increases our ability to communicate,” says Werner, who manages an international team from Seattle. She has set up alerts when staff from other offices update documents or complete tasks, so she always knows the status of any given deliverable. With all important documentation uploaded into SharePoint, she no longer has to hunt for information buried in her email or rely heavily on conference calls spanning multiple time zones.
“Office 365 gave us an efficiency we didn’t have,” she adds. “We have been able to develop interventions and ramp up our projects more quickly even though our teams are dispersed.” From the Peruvian rainforest to far-flung villages in Myanmar, that means PATH can build healthier communities—and save lives.
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CONIN: Finding, reaching and helping at-risk children through the cloud
Mendoza, Argentina-based CONIN works to not only eradicate child malnutrition in Argentina but also to serve disadvantaged families at risk of falling through gaps in social services. With Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft cloud services, the nonprofit helps more children and families receive the resources they need to thrive.
Its previous, analog-based systems helped the nonprofit impact the lives of thousands of youth. But with an Azure—powered IT system, CONIN is now poised to improve family health across Argentina-and beyond, as they begin to expand their services in Latin America.
Smarter Data
As nonprofit leaders know, effectively tackling a problem begins with understanding it. So when CONIN set out to map malnutrition in Salta, a northern and remote province of Argentina, the family-focused organization turned to the flexible and comprehensive solutions of Azure.
By identifying the most pressing needs of different pockets of Salta—from lack of clean water to insufficient healthy food—CONIN input data into an application developed and hosted in Azure, which they then displayed and shared in Power BI. The result: an accurate and up-to-date visualization of on-the-ground realities. They could then partner with the regional government to pinpoint priorities and direct limited resources at the most urgent issues first. What’s more, this detailed map provided the data to develop a long-term solution: CONIN and the Salta government drafted public policy to prevent malnutrition in the future—and ensure the area’s children have a healthy start to life.
The impact of the Azure mapping solution does not end in Salta. CONIN is rolling out the system in other communities in Argentina as well as in parts of Latin America and Africa. And other nonprofits will save time and resources by transferring an already developed solution to their own Azure environment.
Connecting Communities
Like many nonprofits, CONIN relies on a combination of staff, volunteers and partners to carry out its mission. And although CONIN's dedicated team has already served 20,000 youth over several decades, leaders within the organization knew they could reach even more people in need by leveraging cloud-based tools.
CONIN, then, developed an app in Azure that triggers an alert whenever the nonprofit-and government-run community census identifies a child in need. Take, for example, an alarm CONIN staff received about Bryan, a cheerful and playful boy who was born with Down syndrome and severe kidney problems. His mother, who didn’t even know she was eligible for services, was invited to the nonprofit to begin the process for getting care for Bryan. CONIN paid for Bryan’s surgeries, arranged for transportation to and from medical visits and now enrolls Bryan in a special CONIN school. The system also allows CONIN staff to track the boy’s health with digital updates on his progress.
Without this alert app that automatically analyzes data to identify families in need, Bryan may never have gotten a fair shot at a happy, healthy future.
Field-to-office solutions
Proactive nonprofits not only help the at-risk families that seek them out but also bring in others who may never have known about their services. CONIN teams used to do this community outreach and information-gathering with inefficient paper surveys. Since receiving an Azure grant, they canvas Argentina's poorest neighborhoods with a digital, cloud-based polling solution.
“Today, the technology makes it much faster: It enables us to have every child in the system,” says Teresa Cornejo, president of a CONIN network member that addresses nutrition in Salta. By inputting information designed to identify families in danger of malnutrition, lack of education or unmet medical needs, the data is automatically synched to folders accessible anywhere—from CONIN's offices to employees traveling the dirt roads of Salta.
Canvassers go door-to-door with mobile phones or tablets, making the highly detailed data they collect immediately available on an Azure cloud platform. CONIN, other partner nonprofits and the government of Salta province use this up-to-the-minute information to work toward their goal: making malnutrition a problem of the past.
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Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive enrollment report from Stetson University using Power BI.
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive retention report.
