Top 10 Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services

Microsoft’s Lifecycle Services (LCS) is an Azure-based collaboration portal that provides a unifying, collaborative environment, helping organizations manage their Microsoft Dynamics AX application lifecycle from pre-sales to implementation and operations. By bringing all the important aspects of implementing and managing a Dynamics AX environment together, LCS ensures a high-quality implementation through the use of specific business tools.

Using LCS, project managers, business analysts, developers, and IT administrators can effectively and collaboratively manage the application lifecycle of Dynamics AX implementations. Let’s look at some of the features of LCS that are strengthening AX implementations:

1. Increase Predictability of AX Implementations: Through the use of LCS, you can improve the predictability of your Dynamics AX implementations by standardizing processes and operations across your organization. Deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time, to ensure repeatable and predictable outcomes with each implementation or upgrade. You’ll be able to better assess the needs of your organization with the capabilities to align competitive differentiations to realize business value faster.
2. Proactively Monitor Implementations: With LCS, you can readily identify and define Dynamics AX requirements and develop robust systems that meet the needs of the organization. A single dashboard gives up-to-date information about your project and leverages LCS checklists and tools to manage projects. Proactively monitor implementations and reduce the time taken to resolve issues, improve ROI, and simultaneously reduce the TCO.
3. Promote Collaboration: Since LCS is an Azure-based portal, it allows for easy sharing and collaboration on projects. Share projects with team members across or outside your organization who are helping build your Dynamics AX solution. A unified collaborative workspace for both customers and partners accelerates the implementation process, which ultimately reduces the time to value for your implementation.
4. Simulate Real-Life Business Requirements: The Business process modeler feature allows you to create, view, and modify proposed Microsoft Dynamics AX business process hierarchies and flowcharts to suit real-life business requirements. Capture process flows for modification and version tracking through Task recorder and export them to Microsoft Visio. You can also identify gaps in business processes and devise workarounds to fill those gaps.
5. Estimate AX Implementation Usage: With Usage profiler, you can estimate current and projected usage of Dynamics AX implementations. Use data from the Usage profiler and adjust job scheduling to reduce system load and impact. Usage profiler also generates detailed summaries of usage characteristics and you can view graphical representation of your peak load profiles. You can also review estimated usage by sites or batches and make required adjustments to improve system performance.
6. Assess Infrastructure Required: Estimate the infrastructure required for your Dynamics AX implementation (for both on-premises and Azure deployment) using the Lifecycle Services Infrastructure estimator. You can also get automated estimates of hardware needs based on Usage profiler data. Graphical reports provide data on the impact of changes to usage and peak load profiles.
7. Check Status of Incidents: LCS incorporates an issue search feature that you can use to quickly search the Microsoft database for issues, hotfixes, workarounds, and feature updates with respect to Dynamics AX implementations. Sort issues by product version, view status of reported issues, download hotfixes, and verify their impact on the implementation. If there is a change in the issue status, you can receive automated notifications to proactively manage your implementations.
8. Efficiently Manage Projects: Through LCS, you can choose to use the provided methodology, customize it, or create your own. Share methodologies across the organization and standardize processes and procedures. You can also track the progress of your project and review it across your project team. Get recommendations on tasks and document templates as you move through project phases and upload related project documents, timelines, and supporting files for everyone to see.
9. Monitor System Health: LCS allows you to upload key Microsoft Dynamics AX system information to get indicators and messages about your systems’ health. Through the Environments section, you can effectively manage deployed AX systems directly from the dashboard. Manage multiple cloud-hosted environments at the same time using LCS tools, and review results through graphically illustrated reports.
10. Simply Deployment: By automating the server setup and deploying systems and software for different environments, you can simplify the deployment of Dynamics AX environments in the Azure cloud. You can also customize virtual network settings, add new environments to an existing virtual network, or scale systems up and down – with these types of cloud-based environments, you can do all this and more.

Achieve Success with every Dynamics AX Implementation

With cloud-powered support, you can prevent and resolve incidents in time, facilitating proactive diagnosis and collaborative support with Microsoft. By continuously updating LCS and Microsoft Azure, you can get access to the latest tools and capabilities and achieve unparalleled success with your Dynamics AX implementations.

by Indusa