D365 Commerce - Improve the performance on the Point of Sale (POS) with the Cloud powered customer search feature

Performance in the Modern Point of Sale (MPOS) and Cloud Point of Sale (CPOS) is critical for a retail business. Recently I helped a customer increase performance of the search functionality for products and customers by enabling the Cloud powered customer search feature. With this enhancement, retailers will be able to easily switch their current customer search experience from SQL-based search to cloud-powered search.

Note: It is required that both Commerce headquarters and Commerce Scale Unit are updated to version 10.0.18. Updating the POS is not required. 

Some benefits of using the Dynamics 365 Commerce search experience include

• Better product discoverability
• Scalability and performance required for e-Commerce traffic

To enable the cloud-powered search feature in Commerce headquarters, follow these steps:

1. Go to System administration > Workspaces > Feature management.
2. Find and select the (Preview) Cloud powered customer search feature, and then select Enable now.
   
   
3. Go to Retail and Commerce > Headquarters setup > Commerce scheduler > Initialize commerce scheduler and select OK to display the new 1010_CustomerSearch job on the Distribution schedule form.
   
4. Go to Retail and Commerce > Retail and Commerce IT > Distribution schedule.
5. Run the 1010_CustomerSearch job. This job publishes the date to the Azure search index. When publishing of the index is completed, the status of the job will be set to Applied.
   

   For the initial index publish, the 1010_CustomerSearch job may take a few hours to complete, as it will send all the customer records to the Azure search index. Subsequent updates should only take a few minutes. While the cloud-powered search feature is enabled but the index publishing is not yet completed, the customer search from POS will default to the existing SQL-based search. This ensures that there are no interruptions to store operations.
   

   
   

   In the bath Job list look for: Incremental sync with schedule '1010_CustomerSearch'

   
   When the batch Job ends (1010_CustomerSearch), please go to the download session (Retail and Commerce > inquires and report > Commerce Data Exchange > Download sessions) and check if the status changed to Applied. If the status is Applied, run the 1110 - Global configuration job to update the POS channels.
   
6. After the 1010_CustomerSearch job status is set to Applied, run the 1110 - Global configuration job to update the POS channels of the newly enabled feature in Feature management.
   
   
   

   In the bath Job list, look for Incremental sync with schedule '1110'

   
7. Subsequently, run the 1010_CustomerSearch job at regular intervals to send customer updates to the search index

For more information please review:

Product search and customer search in the point of sale (POS) - Commerce | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Docs

Cloud-powered search overview - Commerce | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Docs

Highly performant and scalable customer search experience using the new cloud search infrastructure - Dynamics 365 Release Plan | Microsoft Docs

Thanks for reading,

Said

Acknowledgments: I want to thank my colleague Amy Flowers (Customer Engineer) for her contributions and peer review.