The Optimisation Advisor in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

In the Spring ’18 release of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (read more here), Microsoft has introduced the Optimisation Advisor (or Optimization Advisor if you are American).

As far as I can tell, the Optimisation Advisor (OA) is Microsoft’s first tentative step into automating business rule controls, solution optimisation and, dare I say it? Self-healing!

Out of the box, the OA comes with a number of prebuilt rules. These rules are available under System administration / Periodic tasks / Maintain diagnostics validation rule as shown below.

In this screen you are able to configure whether a rule is active or not and how often the system should check the rule. However, you are not able to create new rules without coding. You can read more on how to create new rules through code here.

Under System administration / Periodic tasks / Schedule diagnostics validation rule, you are able to run an unscheduled check (as shown below) or scheduled checks based on the frequencies configured for each rule.

Once the rules have been assessed, a list of opportunities is created and displayed in the Optimisation advisor workspace as shown in the following screen.

The user can click on an opportunity and select More information from the ribbon. This shows the detailed information for that opportunity. This is shown below.

If the user clicks on Take action, the system automatically invokes the action associated with the opportunity. In this case, the periodic job to clean up closed on-hand inventory entries is started as shown in the following example:

The OA is a great addition to D365FO and shows great promise for the future. The potential of what can essentially become a “self-healing” system is certainly there and as Microsoft builds out the rules library, the system’s ability to optimise itself is evident. This could also be a great opportunity for ISVs and VARs to build optimisation rules and share these with clients through LCS.

The sky’s the limit´with OA… It will be great to see how it evolves over the coming releases.

Microsoft’s documentation for the Optimisation Advisor is available here.