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News from ARP Ideas

Maximizing the Value of IT Consultancies: Insights from Our CEO

Business

We're excited to share insights from our very own CEO, Ambroży Rybicki, who was recently featured in a Business Leader article. In the piece, he provides a comprehensive guide on how businesses can effectively collaborate with an IT consultancy.

In the current digital era, businesses across various sectors and sizes depend significantly on technology to stimulate growth, enhance efficiency, enrich customer experience, and secure a competitive edge. To achieve this, the right strategy and team are crucial. It's no secret that managing and optimizing intricate IT systems and developing everyday business solutions can be challenging. This is where the role of IT consultancies becomes invaluable.

As Ambroży Rybicki explains in his Business Leader article, partnering with an IT consultancy can significantly lighten the load for many businesses. They offer expert advice and support in navigating the tech landscape, allowing business leaders to concentrate on their core business goals and daily operations.

IT consultants often operate behind the scenes, but their contribution to powering businesses is critical. Their work is an essential component of business success, especially in a challenging economic environment where businesses need to maximize the potential of their IT teams. The difference they make can be the deciding factor between a business thriving or struggling.

So, how can businesses engage effectively with IT consultants and extract maximum value from them? Here are some key takeaways from our CEO's article:

Identify Your Business Goals

Before initiating a partnership with an IT consultancy, businesses must have a clear grasp of their own objectives. This process should begin with introspection on current challenges, identification of potential improvements, and outlining the goals they aim to achieve through the consultancy.

Whether the objectives involve streamlining operations, enhancing cybersecurity, optimizing cloud usage, gaining deeper customer insights, or improving customer service, articulating these goals is crucial. Once you comprehend your objectives and current pain points, you're in a prime position to collaborate with a consultancy that can offer customized solutions aligning with your business needs.

Do Your Homework

The team behind the consultancy is what makes the difference. Spend time researching and assessing all your options before making a decision. Look for consultancies with a proven track record, relevant industry experience, and a comprehensive range of services.

Evaluate their expertise in specific technologies, their certifications, and testimonials from previous clients. Most consultancies will have a section on their website showcasing their past work, including the challenges faced, the approach taken, and the solutions provided.

By conducting thorough due diligence, you can compare consultancies and determine which one is the best fit for your business.

Maintain Open Communication

Effective communication is the bedrock of a successful partnership with your consultancy. In the consulting world, there's no such thing as "overcommunication". Establishing open communication channels from the beginning is crucial if you want to extract maximum value from your partnership.

Clearly communicate your expectations and budget constraints from the outset, and hold your consultants accountable by regularly checking in on project timelines and progress.

Be open to the consultancy's feedback and recommendations. They're there to advise you on what is required, so be open to input, challenges, and collaboration. Open dialogue ensures alignment of all parties, fostering an integrated relationship focused on achieving the same goals.

Define a Clear Scope of Work, But Stay Adaptable

Consider your consultants as an extension of your IT team. The advantage of outsourcing is that you can bring in a dedicated team with the required expertise to successfully run a project without the need for training or calling on other resources within the company, and at a fraction of the cost. However, this requires a clear scope of work or at least openness to suggestions from consultants regarding the scope. Nevertheless, direction from businesses is critical.

Part of this scope of work involves being clear about your budgets from the start. Be sensible. In an uncertain economic climate, businesses must be able to financeall the projects they set out to complete, for them to be successful. Therefore, instead of working on multiple projects simultaneously, ensure that you focus on one project at a time so each can be executed properly.

Next, outline specific tasks, deliverables, and milestones that need to be achieved – essentially a roadmap so both parties are aligned. However, remember that this scope of work will need to be flexible. If you’re unsure that the project scope you have defined will be the best, you should openly discuss it with your consultants to determine the Most Viable Product, and then expand the functionality once the most desirable ones have been implemented.

Regularly reviewing and revising the scope of work will be necessary for accommodating any changes or evolving requirements throughout the project.

Learn from Your Consultants

Remember that when you outsource an IT consultancy, you’re investing in your own understanding and knowledge sharing. Working with consultants not only solves immediate challenges but also represents an opportunity for knowledge transfer.

Encourage your consultancy to document their processes, best practices, and recommendations. With this valuable knowledge, teams can learn from consultants and be empowered to leverage this information moving forwards. By making a conscious effort to learn about the processes behind each project, you can build out your own internal capabilities and reduce dependency on external consultants in the long term.

Evaluate and Provide Feedback

Regularly evaluate consultants’ performance and provide constructive feedback so that you get the most out of your investment. As well as monitoring progress throughout the project, evaluate the value they have delivered against the agreed objectives and milestones as you reach the end of the project.

But remember, feedback is a two-way street and you should be open to receiving feedback from the consultancy as well. With this, you can then identify areas for improvement, refine your engagement strategy and build a stronger partnership moving forward too – if you decide to outsource teams for other projects.

Engaging with an IT consultancy can be a transformative experience for businesses, but remember that to get the most value from your investment, you need to research, communicate, learn, remain flexible and evaluate throughout.

Engaging with an IT consultancy can be a transformative experience for businesses. As our CEO, Ambroży Rybicki, points out in his Business Leader article, to get the most value from your investment, you need to research, communicate, learn, remain flexible, and evaluate throughout.

Source: https://www.businessleader.co.uk/how-to-engage-with-it-consultancy-guide-for-businesses/

 

How cloud transformation can support your startup’s growth

Business

We are excited, that Startups Magazine published article by our CEO Ambroży Rybicki. Articke explores the critical importance of company culture in driving the success of startups. While many entrepreneurs and business leaders focus on external factors like product development, customer acquisition, and fundraising, they often overlook the internal environment that fuels their team's performance.

The article highlights several key strategies for creating a positive and productive company culture. First and foremost, Ambroży emphasizes the need for strong leadership and clear communication. Leaders must articulate a vision for the company that inspires and motivates their team, while also providing regular feedback and recognition to keep everyone on track.

Another critical element of a healthy company culture is a commitment to transparency and accountability. Leaders should be open and honest with their team members about the company's goals, challenges, and progress, and should foster a culture of constructive feedback and collaboration. This includes creating opportunities for employees to share their own ideas and perspectives, and encouraging cross-functional teams to work together to tackle complex problems.

Ambroży also stresses the importance of work-life balance and employee well-being. In order to maintain a productive and engaged workforce, leaders must prioritize their employees' physical, emotional, and mental health. This means providing resources and support for mental health and wellness, offering flexible schedules and remote work options, and creating a culture that values work-life balance and time off.

Finally, the article highlights the critical role of diversity and inclusion in building a successful company culture. By actively seeking out diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and creating a culture that celebrates differences and promotes equity and inclusion, leaders can create a team that is more innovative, creative, and resilient.

In conclusion, the article argues that company culture is not just a "nice to have" for startups, but a critical element of their success. By prioritizing leadership, communication, transparency, well-being, and diversity, entrepreneurs can create a workplace environment that fosters innovation, collaboration, and growth.

 

Start using Power BI and streamline data analysis in your business

Business

Microsoft Power BI is a suite of Business Intelligence (BI), reporting, and data visualization products and services designed for individual users as well as entire teams. Power BI is also part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which you can read more here.Power BI features include improved publishing and distribution capabilities, the ability to display interactive dashboards, provide insight into a wide variety of information through a single window, and convenient integration capabilities with other Microsoft products and services.It is a tool that allows you to easily get to specific data using the right filters, combining and consolidating data, thus allowing you to get a full view of how your business is performing. There are many different data sources that can be integrated with Power BI, such as SQL databases, Microsoft Dynamics environment, or data coming from file servers such as Excel.It is worth noting that Power BI navigation dashboards are not limited to pulling data from Microsoft tools. There are a number of data connectors available that allow integration with various cloud-based solutions. It is also possible to connect to legacy applications using a REST API.

Why should you start using Power BI?

Quick start

Standard configuration is straightforward, and with pre-configured dashboards for services such as Microsoft Dynamics, Google Analytics, and Salesforce, you can get a convenient view of your data very quickly.

Streamlined data publishing and distribution

Data analysts can push reports and data visualizations directly into Power BI without the need to upload them to a shared drive or send emails.

Real-Time data

Dashboards update in real-time as soon as data is uploaded. This gives you constant insight and the ability to quickly identify and resolve issues. Data sources can include sensors in the factory, social media, or anything from which data can be collected and transmitted.

Customizable navigation

The app navigation experiences feature gives those responsible for creating reports the ability to customize the navigation to help viewers find content quickly and easily understand the relationships between individual data or entire reports.

Customisable security policy

Report creators can set row-level access filters to ensure recipients only see data that is relevant to them, reducing the risk of inappropriate people seeing data they shouldn’t.

AI support

Power BI users can use image recognition and text analytics, create Machine Learning models and integrate with Azure Machine Learning.

Data integration

Every organization needs to work with data that comes from a variety of resources, which may be in different formats. With Power BI, information is integrated and standardized in one place.

Data presentation

With Power BI, processed data can be conveniently visualized using visualization tools. The use of dashboards and report templates helps in the effective presentation of data. Visual reports help business users make better decisions based on a full understanding of the data.

 

Which Power BI license should I choose?

The range of Power BI functionalities varies significantly depending on the license you choose. That is why we have decided to present the most important ones in order to help you make an optimal decision.

Power BI Desktop (free license)

Power BI Desktop is a free license that allows users to connect to data sources, analyze data and create reports. This license is aimed at individual customers who want to create reports for personal use and do not need to share content with others via a cloud service.

  • build reports in Power BI Desktop (on a local computer)
  • export data to tools such as Excel, Power Point or a .pdf file
  • building data visualization
  • storing data and reports in a dedicated workspace in the cloud within Power BI up to 1GB per user
  • integration of multiple data sources

Power BI Pro

The biggest difference between Power BI Desktop and Power BI Pro is the ability to collaborate with other users. Power BI Pro allows you to distribute reports and data visualizations to other Power BI subscribers across your organization. Power BI Pro is sold in a per-user model, and the capabilities of this tool are best suited to small and medium-sized businesses where users need to create, share and view reports from other users.

  • Share data and reports with other users who have a Pro license,
  • cloud storage of up to 10GB per user,
  • ability to export reports to a website or SharePoint site

Power BI Premium

Provides an organisation with space and capacity in the Microsoft hosted cloud for sharing reports. The organisation can decide how to use the dedicated capacity, allocating it based on the number of users, workload needs or other factors – and scale up or down as needed.

  • the flexibility to publish reports across the enterprise, without having to license audiences individually for each user
  • greater scale and performance than shared capacity in Power BI
  • the ability to maintain on-premises BI resources with Power BI Report Server
  • Single API footprint, consistent set of capabilities, and access to the latest features for embedded analytics
  • No user/month charge
  • As part of the subscription, the organization receives access to shared, dedicated disk space up to a maximum of 100TB
  • Power BI Desktop users receive the ability to view and analyze reports published by Pro license users

Power BI Premium per User

This is a fairly new license that was enabled by Microsoft in April 2021. It combines the benefits of a Power BI Pro license and a Power BI Premium subscription. It allows access to the capabilities and functionality of Power BI Premium, without having to pay full amount per month for the entire organization.

  • access to shared disk space up to a maximum of 100GB per user
  • fee model of $20 per month per user
  • full range of Power BI Premium functionality

Summary

Power BI is a tool with enormous possibilities, thanks to a rich library of fully customizable data visualizations the user can present data in many different ways.Thanks to the customized visualization SDK the user can create many interesting and useful visualizations. These can be tested and debugged in real-time and can be scheduled into redistributable ready-to-use visualizations that can be used across all Power BI products. Visualizations created in-house can be shared with clients and customers.

Want to implement Power BI in your company? Contact us!

Contact us using the form HERE, call us at +48 61 624 86 40, or e-mail  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We will be happy to talk about the possibilities of Power BI in the context of your company.

How will the implementation of Microsoft SharePoint increase the efficiency of your company?

Business

SharePoint Online is one of the key business solutions of Microsoft, which is a flexible, responsive and fully configurable platform for data storage and electronic document flow. It works as an intranet enabling the creation of internal information flow channels, sharing, versioning and collaborative work on files – helping to face many common business challenges. It can be considered one of the foundations of successful digital transformation. 

Why is it worth moving Dynamics CRM to the Dynamics 365 cloud version?

Business

How is Microsoft Dynamics CRM different from Microsoft Dynamics 365?

Dynamics CRM was introduced to the market in 2003 as software responsible for managing customer relations. Then it has been developed for the next 13 years until the premiere of its successor Microsoft Dynamics 365 in 2016.

In 2016, Microsoft replaced Dynamics CRM – Dynamics 365, a fully renamed product, which is a combination of CRM and ERP, but also AX and NAV – within one cloud platform. Thanks to this, companies can handle all their processes from one system. It is worth noting that in 2025 support for Dynamics CRM will be finally suspended, which has already been significantly limited in early 2020.

A very important feature of Dynamics 365 is smooth cooperation and data flow with other Microsoft tools operating in the cloud, such as Office 365 and Azure. As a result, a comprehensive environment of tools was created that can be used in a simple way to improve the functioning of the entire organization.

In the case of Dynamics 365, the scope of functionalities available to the user is differentiated primarily on the basis of which Dynamics 365 module will be purchased and the degree of its customization – made from the level of the system itself or by means of code written by programmers. The functionalities of the current Dynamics CRM are within the Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service modules.

The following Dynamics 365 modules are currently available:

  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Customer Service
  • Field Service
  • Business Central
  • Finance and Operations
  • Retail
  • Talent
  • Project Service Automation

As ARP Ideas, we specialize in implementing, adapting, and extending the functional scope of the first 4 out of the 7 above-mentioned modules (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and Field Service), as well as in the integration of the aforementioned modules, e.g. with Business Central.

Cloud vs on-premises

Charges

The most noticeable and the easiest-to-notice difference between the cloud-based and on-premises versions is the way of paying for the system. In the case of Dynamics 365 In Cloud, you pay a relatively low subscription amount every month for (almost) each license purchased. In the case of the on-premises version, this is a one-off, but very high cost.

In addition, in the case of the on-premises version, there is an expense related to the investment in server infrastructure, as well as regular costs related to its maintenance.

Data safety

In the case of the cloud version of Dynamics 365, this problem disappears because it is based on the Microsoft infrastructure, and all data is stored in specially secured Microsoft Data Centers. In the case of the on-premises version, the customer has to take care of the security of the server infrastructure on his own.

This means that the Dynamics 365 cloud version does not require any hardware except computers and mobile devices, which are necessarily necessary to use the system.

In the case of Dynamics 365 In Cloud – the process of installing and implementing the system is also much shorter than in the case of the on-premises solution.

Data storage

By default, Microsoft provides 5GB of space to Dynamics 365 clients on its servers and provides an additional 2.5GB for each additional 20 licenses. In the case of the on-premises version, the amount of space fully depends on the server infrastructure on the client’s side.

For this reason, the on-premises version is recommended for companies that operate on very large data volumes, and In Cloud for companies that do not have such high requirements in this respect. In some cases, also hybrid solutions are used.

Infrastructure administration and updates

An important difference is the issue of infrastructure administration and updating. In the case of the In Cloud version, we can talk about the so-called evergreen CRM. Everything happens on the side of Microsoft. The system is constantly updated – with bug fixes and new functionalities. No need for external support.

Microsoft tests new solutions itself, checks how they behave in the Dynamics 365 environment, verifies individual errors before uploading the update. And in the event of any failure, whether from the infrastructure or programming side, it quickly removes all errors, taking the risks and costs on yourself. At the same time, due to the size of Microsoft, it ensures the quality of the equipment on which the data is stored and the level of security that is not available to small and medium-sized enterprises. With on-premises versions, updates are largely customer-dependent and in many cases require external assistance.

Current updates in the In Cloud version allow you to use the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 – free of errors. In addition, Microsoft regularly extends the scope of Dynamics 365 capabilities. Thanks to this, Dynamics users always have access to the system that is the best version of themselves available. Such a digital transformation allows you to avoid the situation of ossification of the organization, the employees getting used to the legacy systems, which are not able to respond to the challenges faced by the organization.

On the other hand, in the case of very complex business logic, huge and complicated solutions – each major update may involve a certain risk of temporarily suspending the proper operation of the system. It should be noted, however, that this applies to a limited pool of the largest solutions. In standard cases, solutions based on Dynamics 365 are designed in such a way that updates are not a problem and a cloud migration will be a good idea.

It is worth emphasizing that the cloud version enables much smoother cooperation with other solutions from the Microsoft family – such as Office 365 or Azure. Thanks to this, they create a coherent environment of cooperation between team members and individual teams. This is particularly important in the context of the continuous increase in popularity of hybrid and fully remote work.

Examples of functionalities that are in Dynamics 365 and not in Dynamics CRM

Dynamics 365 collaboration with Office 365

Unlike Dynamics CRM, Dynamics 365 is more closely related to Office 365. For example, Relationship Insights is a feature in Dynamics 365 that uses information from Outlook to provide better insight into customer relationships.

Microsoft Flow helps you create and automate custom workflows running in Azure, Outlook, and Dynamics 365. For example, you can define a rule that performs sentiment analysis on the body of each new email in your Outlook inbox. If the email has negative feedback, it will automatically generate a case in Dynamics 365 CRM to resolve serious issues as soon as possible.

Machine learning and AI

The Relationship Assistant in Dynamics 365 uses artificial intelligence algorithms to track past behavior, and on this basis, it predicts the reactions of potential customers. It is a tool that helps to determine at which stage of the purchasing cycle a potential customer is and provides the seller with hints on the actions he should take to move him to the next stage of the sales funnel until the transaction is closed.

AI can guide the sales rep on how to do better by proposing the next steps to improve customer relationships, make additional sales, re-engage a customer who hasn’t bought any products for a while, or sell products to a potential customer who hasn’t bought anything before.

Integrated interface

The Dynamics 365 interface helps the sales team to reach the data they need faster and more conveniently – it has been standardized on any screen, thanks to which it looks consistent and intuitive to use at all times.

Closer integration with LinkedIn

Another significant difference between CRM and Dynamics 365 is that the latter tool is better integrated with LinkedIn data. Thanks to this, this portal becomes a more effective tool for searching for potential leads.

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps

PowerApps is one of the most interesting elements available in Dynamics 365. It allows you to create applications without or with very limited use of code.

Microsoft Flow enables users to create automated workflows that allow the software to handle tasks that previously had to be done manually. For example, you can automate e-mail notifications so that they notify you of every publication about your brand on social media.

Power BI

Power BI enables data visualization by adding PowerBI to the CRM dashboard – this type of functionality is not available in the case of Dynamics CRM.

E-mail Engagement

Email Engagement features allow users to track emails sent by Dynamics 365 and see if and when the recipient opened the email, clicked a link, or opened an attachment.

Better cooperation with mobile devices

Improved integration with mobile devices enables Dynamics 365 to access mobile device features such as camera and geolocation. Access to CRM system functions from the level of a mobile device has also been improved.

Improved search

Improved search functionality allows you to search not only your own records, but also shared records, notes, emails, and meetings of other users. Each result can then be filtered to quickly find exactly what you are looking for.

Learning Paths

The Learning Paths Dynamics 365 feature allows you to create an automated path for introducing yourself to the system for new users. Customizable help windows and pop-ups help guide users to appropriate actions from the interface, enhancing the user experience and helping to speed up learning how to use the system.

Do you want to implement Dynamics 365 in the cloud for your company? Contact us!

Contact us using the form HERE, call us at +48 61 624 86 40, or e-mail  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..