Anyone who has ever traveled by plane knows how stressful it can be to have a connecting flight. You must wait your turn to get off the first plane, figure out where your next gate is, and hurry to catch the next plane, either with carry-on luggage in tow or a worry in the back of your mind that the airline will lose track of your bags.
And if you’re hungry, you may get distracted by the restaurants on your route. Even if the connection goes smoothly, it inevitably adds quite a bit of time to your itinerary, which means less time at your destination. It’s inefficient at best and chaotic at worst.
Switching between work applications on your computer burns fewer calories than sprinting across an airport, but it can be just as disorienting. According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, the average user toggles between different apps and websites nearly 1,200 times per day. At two seconds per switch over the course of a year, that comes out to five entire work weeks spent hopping from app to app. HBR also found that 65% of app switches were followed by another switch less than 11 seconds later. As the study’s authors put it, “how we work is itself a distraction.”
But it doesn’t have to be. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is designed to cut down on distractions by integrating productivity apps and the data they use into one seamless workflow.
Microsoft 365’s suite of apps, including Excel, Outlook, and Teams, have set the standard for productivity for decades. They’re useful and intuitive enough for casual users, while also having advanced functions that are suited for personal projects and work tasks alike. When connected with BC, these apps become supercharged—and help avoid productivity lost to meandering app switches.
For example, let’s say your team needs to update the product descriptions for a series of SKUs. In the past, you may have needed to find the existing product description in one app, copy and paste it into your word processing app, switch to an email app and attach the document, send it to your team, and then have your team edit the doc, reattach it to a new email, and send it back. That’s a lot of hopping around, not to mention the possibility of mixing up file versions!
With BC and Microsoft 365, however, you can share data like product descriptions from Business Central directly to Teams, and then view and edit the description collaboratively without ever switching apps.
Similarly, you don’t have to jump back and forth between BC and Outlook to find important data and make sure it gets in front of your customers. Instead, you can pull that data directly from BC into Outlook templates to send key emails like quotes, order confirmations, and payment reminders.
With Excel, you can instantly export any BC data to a spreadsheet to make the data easier to share and review. You can also update records in Excel and easily upload them back into BC or transform those records into clean visual reports. And just like with Teams, connecting BC to Excel enhances collaboration—multiple users with varying permissions can work on a spreadsheet at the same time, and the lead author can then publish the finalized document in BC.
Distractions add up quickly, so reducing the number of times you have to switch apps can drastically increase efficiency, productivity, and present value. In fact, Forrester found that BC’s improvements to operational workflows yield a three-year benefit PV of nearly $150,000 for a team of 15 finance and operations users.
And when you combine the benefit of those app integrations with AI-powered automation tools like Microsoft Copilot, which can reduce the number of rote yet time-consuming tasks on your plate, your organization can get even more done in even less time.
Integrating Business Central and Microsoft 365 is more than just a matter of good user interface. It’s about using the Cloud to make those apps as useful as possible, as often as possible.
On-premise ERP solutions can’t reach the level of seamlessness that BC offers. Data is only useful if it’s available and accurate, and with on-premises servers, there’s no guarantee that the data at your disposal will be either of those things.
Productivity lost to application-hopping feels like a modern problem, but it’s actually a product of outdated tech. Without a singular source of truth to pull from, users have to do the heavy lifting of making sure business data is up-to-date and pulling it into a particular app. But when an organization decides to modernize and embrace the Cloud, the applications can do that lifting for them.
If you’re looking for a way to make work less inherently distracting, upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the way to go. But you don’t have to take on such a significant transition by yourself. Reach out to Enavate’s team of experts today to learn how we can help make the implementation process as smooth and efficient as possible.