Name: Maximize the Impact of Your Microsoft Business Applications Investment
Uploaded: 2026-09-24T18:46:03.113Z
Duration: 56 min 8 s
Description: Maximize the Impact of Your Microsoft Business Applications Investment

Transcript for "Maximize the Impact of Your Microsoft Business Applications Investment": Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for maximize the impact of your Microsoft business applications. To kick things off, I'm pleased to introduce Tanya Todd, vice president of delivery at Argano. Tanya leads delivery across our managed service organization and works closely with clients to help ensure they not only implement Microsoft business applications successfully, but continue to realize value long after go live through optimization, support, and continuous improvement. Joining Tanya is Yogesh Khasat, Argano's global client success leader. Yogesh partners with organizations around the world to help maximize the business impact of their Microsoft investments, aligned managed, services strategies with business goals, user adoption, and long term success. And we're especially pleased to welcome Brian Millsap, CIO of Hampton Products. Brian brings the customer perspective to today's discussion and will share insights from his organization's journey, including how a strategic managed services partnership can help drive operational excellence, innovation, and greater return on a Microsoft business applications investment. Over to you, Tanya. Thank you so much, Corinne. Let's go ahead and dive in. So let's let's talk about what we're gonna cover today with our time. So the agenda is we'll start with some introductions. Who are we? Argano and Hampton products. We'll talk about today's market challenges and IT complexity. We'll look a little bit around our portfolio, process portfolio. We'll talk about Argano's perspective. We'll do a little bit of a deep dive into our unified managed services partnership. A little bit more around AgenTic AI, at scale, licensing and storage optimization, which have been really top of mind. And then we'll talk about our flexible managed services model. So let's go ahead and and jump in. We are Argano. Argano is the first and only largest global specialist consultancy exclusively focused on high performance business operations. Our high performance outcomes are enabled by data and cloud and accelerated by agentic AI across whatever platforms our clients run-in. And as you can see, we have a number of different platforms, that that we support. We're here to talk about our Microsoft application managed services. So we're gonna move in to talk a little bit about Argano's, partnership with Microsoft. We are really excited that Argano has been named to the twenty twenty six twenty seven inner circle for Microsoft AI business solutions. So this is for the eighth consecutive year. This recognition places Argano among the top 1% of Microsoft global AI business solution partners. This designation and these other designations really reflect our ability to bring together the right capabilities across AI business solutions, cloud and AI platforms, and security. Our specializations in supply chain finance, service, agentic business solutions and analytics on Microsoft Azure demonstrate expertise across both operational excellence and the unified data foundation required to scale AI and drive measurable business outcomes. We at Argonaut are also, manage not only a managed services provider, which you're talking about today, but we're a Dynamics three sixty five fast track portfolio partner, and we have seven fast track solution architects, within the team. So that means we can also help customers accelerate adoption and realize value faster across Copilot, d three sixty five, and the power platform. Just looking across the bottom here, we do cover multiple industries with our deep domain and expertise. So that's a little bit about our Microsoft partnership. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to our special guest, Brian Millsap, to introduce Hampton products. Over to you, Brian. Hey. Thanks, Tanya. Good morning, everybody. Hampton Products, we are a leading manufacturer, security door hardware, cargo management, portal security products, padlocks, door hardware, bungee cords, cargo management. We serve major retailers across North America, Lowe's, Home Depot, Walmart, Ace Hardware, Amazon. And our portfolio includes, national well known brand names like Brinks, Keeper, Right Products, Universal Hardware. And for over thirty years, Hampton is focused on delivering, innovative products, exceptional customer service, and strong partnerships that help secure, protect, and connect people, places, and things. So that's Hampton. You wanna know about me? Yes, please. Alright. Thanks. Thanks, Brian. There you go, guys. Yeah. So I serve as a senior vice president and CIO at Hampton Products. I do have the CIO title, but my role spans more than technology. I get to do a lot with business process improvement, operations enablement, data analytics, and overall, just helping teams leverage technology and AI to drive growth and efficiency across the organization. Been doing this at Hampton for about twenty seven years. Thanks, That's. me. This is. great. Brian, definitely it's been great journey, and thanks for being here, and, thanks for the partnership. Of course, Brian Brian didn't talk about lot of the things that Brian has done as part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Like, they have been very early customer of Dynamics, even three point o, went to 2009 and then, helped also product team in terms of influencing road map since those early days. So, really thankful, Brian, for all your commitment to the Microsoft and the product where it is right now. We had a lot of fun over the years, and this was a pleasure when when we when we bet on Microsoft early on in the Dynamics life. We were betting that they would be true to their commitment to invest in it and grow in it and really and really make it a leading, ERP and WMS solution. And early on, it wasn't, but we bet on Microsoft and and all all that came true. It's been it's been a great, it's it's it's been a winning bet for me and my team and for Hampton overall. It's been a it's been a good process. I kinda miss the old days when we were, you know, a x u g and, just just having a great time. And Microsoft listened to us as as customers, and I think they continue to do that, although this whole thing has grown massively. But, but they listened. They took input, as a as an SMB, and and certainly in those days, we were much smaller than we are now. I was just in some ways flattered, but it was it was nice that Microsoft listened to the customer. And they had a real focus on that back in the day, and and they still do. But there's a lot more customers now, as you know. Absolutely. Yeah. And the way, Hampton has been investing into Microsoft technology, like, advanced warehouse, something that wasn't there back in 2009, and then landed cost model, it wasn't there back then. But with the feedback, Hampton has provided it. It's something is in the product and something Microsoft has incorporated and, More than once adopted with more. than once, we built it, and then Microsoft no. They didn't they didn't take our code, but we built something. And then not long after, they launched the same thing. But as I. said, they were reading my emails, so they were listening over my shoulder. I don't know. But many, many times, that happened to us. But it's been real nice to be able to keep the the, you know, keep the code low and not have so many customizations. A lot of our customizations have been already integrated into the into the stack. It's been nice. That's that's great. Yeah. It's great to now have a one solution with warehousing and, landed cost and everything and which is shipped out of the box from Microsoft. Yeah. No kidding. We we lived for a lot of years with the with the third party WMS, and it's always so limiting to have those integrations. And it it this we've been on, what, the FNO now for a little about four years now, I think. Almost four. And it's been really we've been able to do so much, that we couldn't do before with reporting analytics, all the data in in one place. We don't have to add anything to an integration. We don't have late data. It's just all there all the time, and it's it's really nice. Right. Right. So, Brian, now that you're on Dynamics for four years, what has been journey on the Dynamics platform? Tell us a little bit about things you have done since then, like, as you see here, like, in terms of Copilot and transformation. Well, we've we've released a lot of when I have a pretty as you know, I have a fairly deep technical team. And, together with your help, we've been able to do a lot we've released a lot of bandwidth to do a lot of growth and a lot of really great things, not having to maintain those integrations and sort through data or or not have it available. So, we've moved to fabric pretty you know, we've moved we have everything to fabric, and we have a dashboards that are are we were able to really quickly produce updated dashboards in in the company across the whole company. All the leadership team and all of the managers have access to the same dashboards, and it's really nice to be able to we're aligned on the same goals. That's nice. We've we've put a lot of effort in the Copilot. We were we were fairly early adopters of Copilot, but we've been able to to really focus on on pushing more Copilot initiatives across the company, which is really we're currently tracking at about, I think, one or two workdays a month per user that we're saving. And we're and we're trying to continue to increase that, and we will. If people just record more meetings, we double that number pretty quickly. So we're getting there. We've, with together under your managed services model, we were we spent a good amount of time evaluating some Magentoq, agents that would help us, inside Dynamics and, being able to kind of use your, your calculator to to to work on ROI. And I said as you know, I said some pretty aggressive, return requirements. And we were able to cover to to pick up a couple. We I think we I think we ran one or two and and discarded those, and we're we're we're honing in on finishing up our our second one. We got we got one in in place now, and we're in user testing for the second one. So being able to focus on those kinds of growth and improvement things, has has been nice. Just by being on being on f and o, being able to, move, resources over to more strategic things and getting out of that, you know, a lot of the tactical stuff that we had to we had to do to maintain the integration. That's that's great, Brian. Yeah. You you have wonderful team, and it's just great to be partner who can help you on the strategic initiatives and areas where you're looking to navigate further, getting the perspective of how other customers are doing it in the industry and, some of that stuff. So, yeah. For. sure. I mean, with with with my team, a lot of a lot of my team has been with me for a very long time. And, I I like to say, you know, we sit over here and we we breathe our own gas. Right? So we always think that everything that we believe might be true. And and especially post COVID, we haven't been able to get out. I mean, so many of these, conferences have gone virtual and just not as effective. Frankly, the a x u g days were the best. And getting getting key players of my team out of the office for a week and into a room with other people where you can actually share issues, share your concerns and your challenges and share solutions. It's been those were great days, and I miss that. I miss that a lot. And having your team's perspective on I mean, as you interact with other customers, as you have a view of, a view of other industries, being able to bounce, you know, things off of your team has been really, really helpful. It filled that gap for us where we used to have more interactions away from the office, out of the sort of firefighting things that we're we're always we gravitate towards the tactical, and you have to you have to actually intentionally focus on the strategic. And so setting some of that side that time aside and working with you you and your team helps to helps to fill that gap that we used to get from from getting out. So I miss those days, but, but it's it's it's it's excellent having you and your team to help us see the future and see other solutions and make sure that we're not doing what we just what we think is right for just our little industry. So yeah. So thanks for for that. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. So we'll we'll hand it over back to Tanya to take us through some of the challenges we see in the market today from other customers and how how we are helping them. Thank you, Yigash, and thanks, Brian. We'll just do a quick check if there's any questions in queue before we jump into our next section. I don't see any, but please feel free to drop them into the q and a, and we'll be pausing to review them as as we move forward. Thank you. Alright. So today's IT environment is complex. Customers like you have made a significant investment in your Microsoft platform. Technology is changing and growing fast. Keeping environments stable, secure, optimized, and ready for AI now requires continuous focus, not just periodic support. How do you know if you're truly maximizing the value of those investments? So managing solutions, integrations, continuous innovation is complex along with changing and adopting and adapting to new technologies, business processes, along with market factors. So really, there's there's a lot behind it, and we're seeing a scale and a speed at which technology is changing, the likes that we've never really seen before. And when we talk about that within the Microsoft ecosystem, there's a significant amount of business processes behind that that an organization would typically need to support along that journey. I'm gonna jump ahead into a slide that really sort of showcases business processes within the portfolio. Now this slide is a busy slide, but it's busy intentionally. If you're managing one or many of these business processes, there's a considerable amount of area of system functionality and expertise that's needed to support, maintain, and optimize it across the journey. This can become challenging from a business perspective and having expertise in all these areas can be difficult to find. This is where our Argano's managed services can help. So providing expertise and resources that span multiple business processes, system expertise, and functional and technical acumen. So by partnering with Argano for your managed services, you do get the benefit from this expertise, across a broad section of business process areas. So, just wanted to to pause here a little bit on that because not only are these business areas complex and we talked about changing technologies and rapid adoption, but now we're adding and building on top of this with Copilot, AgenTek AI, additional solutions to help see that return on investment. And, again, being able to adapt rapidly is something that can become so key. And I'm gonna go ahead and just move us now into what our perspective looks like. So I'll check again. Looks like we don't have any questions inbound, so we're gonna go ahead and keep going. So let's talk about Argano's perspective on a unified managed services partnership. Argonaut's managed services is helping to drive continuous business impact for your Microsoft investments. We are looking at, outcome focused partnership. So really partnering with our clients and support aligning on business goals, sharing successes, additionally, adding and layering on continuous innovation. So being able to add in things like this AI, innovation, driving new value for business and applications. And the way that we're doing that is with a flexible tailored model. So understanding that rigid one size models don't work well for all customers, and all customers are different where they're at in their journey, the size of their team, the expertise they have at the table, and one size may not fit all for for where somebody needs to be met on that journey. So within that construct, again, we're looking at that outcome focus partnership to really work together with our clients, to provide that managed service. So let's go ahead and jump into a little bit about that partnership. Alright. So our unified managed services is Argano acting as your single accountable partner. So we're handling everything from Azure support to Dynamics enhancements to Microsoft support escalations all integrated under one program. From Azure infrastructure at the foundation to d three sixty five, power platform applications, and the productivity suite in modern work, Argano is running and optimizing the full stack as an integrated service. So Argano can run and assist your with your Microsoft platforms as a living, breathing system. So monitoring, optimizing, and innovating across all these areas so your technology keeps delivering the business value. We're looking at the outcomes. What are your business goals today, now, in the future? And as part of the Argano managed services, we're also partnering on that road map, that future state. So conducting quarterly business reviews, we're planning alongside our customers. So during these reviews, we're working on building and maintaining the roadmap, identifying areas of the system you may already be licensed for and not be utilizing or fully utilizing, talking about optimization of those areas. So are there areas of business process change that could solve for the business school? We're also looking at continuous innovation. So we're frequently hosting webinars, what's new sessions, brunch and learns to help facilitate learning to our customers on these new technologies, hot topics, and bringing value to the table. So looking at moving beyond a break fix model, we're also bringing a continuous innovation team to work closely with our customers and Microsoft in adopting those new technologies. And being ahead of the curve means you don't need to be behind it. So we're thinking about managed services differently. Looking at an AI powered managed services, in the motion. On the left side, we're operating and optimizing the platform. So making sure applications are stable, secure, and continuously improving over time. On the right side, we're accelerating value through AI, whether that's Copilot, agents, automation, and driving better decisions and productivity. What connects these two is data signals and performance. Everything happening in the environment generates insight, usage patterns, issues, opportunities, and we continuously feed that back into the system. So instead of managing the platform and then separately trying to innovate, we're doing both at the same time. We're operating and improving the system continuously. And underneath that, you can see the full Power Platform coverage. So from Dynamics to Power Platform to AI agents, this is how we're actually running and evolving the Microsoft stack for our clients. It's not support versus innovation here. It's one continuous sys system that's delivering both. So with that, let's talk a little bit about some of the agentics delivery stories that we've done here at Argano, and I'm gonna pass it over to Yogesh. Thank you, Tanya. Yeah. We we would be doing this service to our clients if we didn't talk about AI in context of continuous, innovation and value creation. At Ergno, we have many agents that were created for different customer scenarios. So there are first party agents that are sub published by Microsoft, shipped along with the Dynamics product. And then there are third party agents, which we have created, which we work with our customers to implement those. And then there are customer specific use cases which we work with the customers and create those agents for them. What you see on the screen is list of our agents we have created at Ergno and, work with multiple customers, on the implementation. Accounts receivable accelerator, it's very focused on taking unstructured data in form of remittance advices you receive from the customers or and then taking it into Dynamics, creating the customer payment journal, applying cash, it really allows collections team to process and stay on top of the receivables faster, and they can utilize the time to collect the money, than really spending too much time on the busy work. Similarly, sales order proofing agent and data quality agent, those are another two winners which are out there, which we have built. On the far right, you see few other agents which are categorized within finance and supply chain area, which we have created and, delivered for a few of the customers. Brian, as part of our journey together on the agents, do do you mind speaking about the first introduction of agents, then value creation, and then maybe a couple of agents which we have started working. on. Of course. I really appreciate when you when you came to me with the agents, concept, that you came with your calculator. And it was it was really helpful to work, with you through that, through the the business of value calculation to ensure that I was going to get the value out. And you let me set my parameters. And, you know, I may have frustrated you a little bit, but, like, I'm gonna get my payback in twelve to fourteen months. And we went through we went through quite a few of them, you know, between IT and your team. And then when we when something when I thought would come close, then we would branch out to that that vertical. And and we found, that a lot of, Hampton is is an SMB. I mean, we're we're fairly good size. We have a lot of national brands, but we're not a massive public company. And in a lot of places, we run fairly lean, and we run pretty efficiently already. So we we found that some of them just didn't make sense because we weren't gonna get the ROI now. If I'd expanded that one that one number out to twenty four months, we may we may have worked some more in. But I really wanted our first couple of of of attempts to implement an agent to really be big wins that I could talk about. Hey. And we got this payback in twelve months. I wanted to be able to our first a crisp couple out. And so we we focused on, our consumer care team and our order management team. And they're a very lean organization, fielding a lot of of inquiries. They sit in between global supply and sales and operations and the customer, and they just have this they're the ones in, in our company that are really managing the movement of goods and the fulfillment of orders and the satisfaction of customers. They're the key they're the key players there, and it's a very small team. And if someone's out, then it's chaos over there. But they do a great job. So we we went, at a couple of agents, the pricing agent, which addressed a very real business need. We spent a lot of time, researching customer specific pricing. And in in dynamics, there's trade agreements, and trade agreements, you know, control the pricing. And we have a fairly complicated pricing structure. And so you have to run through a whole bunch of, formulas to get to a price if a customer requests a price. Oh, if you get this, and here's the gives for this customer, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there. But the pricing agent was, was able it integrates with in 365. It works through our existing pricing structure. It gets pricing information back. It reduces a lot of manual effort, gets our response time back to those customer inquiries. We may even open that up to sales and reps to be able to interact with it, just not yet, but eventually. The outcome is faster service, improved satisfaction, and greater efficiency for the team. So we released a little bit of of work time for that for that team. We're currently in UAT with that. We're validating the pricing against real real customer scenarios, which is important because there's a lot of outliers for us. We were making adjustments as we find issues, and, I think it's I think it's gonna already already, it's helped us improve our pricing retrieval accuracy and reduce exceptions and issues. So that's been really, really helpful. And it's been taking us that long to implement, and it wasn't very expensive. In parallel, we're also evaluating and we're we're launching the sales order agent, which is also gonna support the same team. We want to automate and streamline more of the order management process ensuring that that each initiative demonstrates a clear and measurable return on investment. And this one will take away, possibly some of our expense directly from our I don't say our EDI partner. But it'll it'll help to move some orders off of that platform, saving us that cost per character, cost per document kind of stuff, and be able to onboard some of the simpler customers more quickly through through that agent. So those are two that I'm really excited about. And there's more there's more. I just need to have a couple big wins that I can publish amongst my my leadership team and executives, and then I think we can probably expand that slider a little bit and take a little more time to get our ROI back on some of the bigger ones. But we wanted to prove it prove it out on some on some of the ones that I can also the the consumer care team and customer care team report directly to me. So I'm able to to help to help be more engaged with that implementation as I'd like to be. So That's. that's great, Brian. And you're not the only customer who is looking for more for less. This is same thing we are seeing across the board where everyone wants to try AI, but they want to see the outcomes quickly. And we are taking the same approach at Argenoware. Let's identify the top impact use cases which we can achieve easily and then show that business value, then you can go to the business, identify more, and then we make it as a iterative process. And as you learn more and then internal team is able to deliver more on the agents, it just reduces your time to getting them in place, and then also, we we have better better buy in from the business team. Right. I mean, in in in any in any. company, the, the target area might be a little different. I would I chose what I chose because, you know, the the the manager of the department reports directly to me. We have a weekly interface, and I'm able to be more engaged with that with that project. Also, I have more I have a deeper personally deeper understanding of that process. It also that the the the two agents that we will, that we are implementing, they touch across departments as well. And so we'll be able to it's not just gonna be like the AP clerk or such as gonna be the accounts receivable clerk. This is gonna be something that other departments will interact with. And I think that that for me will also be a better adoption and show you know, it's more marketable across the company, once we have have this. win. So and we need to do something reasonably quick because, I mean, technology is moving. If you don't move quick with AI, it's changed in three weeks. So that's why we really wanna we want something we can pull in quick and have a lot of people touch it and make some noise about it and have a big win. Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks, Brian. And going back to the, list of other agents and what we have delivered for other customers, there is, like, suite of lot of different supply chain agents, and this list keeps growing. Like, we have smart supply chain agent, product availability, and, pricing as we talked about. Those are really winners when you look at so many customers have similar use cases and same thing as what we talked about, receivable agent, which which is also something used for many, customers. Okay. Going to the licensing and storage. So which is, like, another important thing that has hit every customer this year, especially with more enforcement on the licensing from Microsoft. And, it it has really allowed us to work with the customers, get their licensing optimized in terms of, like, when you go live, you are looking at, okay, I'm going with, more relaxed license, access, and we want people to have more access so that they're not stuck. But, eventually, it's important that we start to bring it down, dial it down, and how only the required access, not just from licensing and cost standpoint, but also just to make sure we are not leaving doors open. This is another important stage, another important thing as you open up your environment for MCP. Because now if they have access, they can just give the, natural language prompt and, how MCP take care of those tasks. You want to make sure underlying security is, tightened up, and you're not leaving too much access open for people. With this, we have also seen significant amount of savings in the licensing cost, from 20 to 40 percent as high as 40% in terms of saving or cost avoidance, meaning some of the customers with the the way they were give giving the roles and access, they would they were overprovisioned. And if they had to go for their renewals, they would end up adding more seats in the higher tiered licenses. And that's where Arbno's investment in ASM tool we call, it is audit security manager tool, which allows us to help customers on the security and compliance. It also does lot more like, SOX and, also gives you lot more, traceability that that helps especially those public companies' environments where you you have little stricter guidelines from the compliance standpoints and audit requirements. On the other hand, the storage optimization as well. As you go on the platform and you are there for longer time, you start to accumulate the data. And any SaaS platform is not the best when it comes to pricing to store a lot of data. It's like you don't want to leave lot of unnecessary data in the SaaS, environment. For example, what we have seen is when you migrate data or how the data imports, there are a lot of staging tables which consume high amount of storage. It's okay to purge that data. You can purge the bad job logs, periodically. There are many such purge routines or cleanup routines provided by Microsoft. It's important that you pay attention to those and schedule those so that you're not leaving that unnecessary data, which increases the volume of data needs in your environment. And when you copy that from one environment, let's say, from production to, sandboxes, you're just multiplying that with number of sandboxes you have. So cleaning up with that source is important. Then comes the archival strategies. As you grow, like, in terms of number of years on Dynamics, it's important you start looking at archiving the older data and allow your BI teams to have the strategy to look at the archived locations and continue to support the all the analytics based on the archived data as well. Right? It needs some efforts, but it's important that you plan it so that you can also forecast your capacity. How much your storage is today, at what rate you're growing in terms of how many gigabytes of data you're adding every month, what number of users you have, and how is it aligned with your entitlement with Microsoft? Or at what point you'll have to buy more storage, and, what does that mean from the budget standpoint and, having it on budget than having a unexpected spend, which which is not something you want to surprise CFOs with. So with with that, I'll hand it over to Tanev again on the next topic, and I think we'll just do a quick check on the questions. I see there are some questions we can take, at this point. There there are. So let's get to the first one coming in from Jane. How do you know when your Microsoft business applications investment is truly delivering business value, and what metrics matter most? So Brian, do you want to take that? Yeah. I mean, I can I can try to address that? I think that, and from from Hampton perspective, we have business metrics that across the company that we that we track. Some really important ones, obviously, are fine are high level financial metrics that we set, and also financial goals we set each year. And we track those, in, in an executive dashboard in fabric, a Power BI that we that we at every huddle, every every sort of management huddle that I have, we address those first. Are we are we hitting our EBITDA? Are we hitting our sales numbers? Are we hitting our inventory turns, our inventory accuracy, our customer fill rate? These are things that are important to a wholesale distributor of consumer packaged goods, and you may have your own metrics. Right? And then within each department, we have our own metrics as well. How is IT running expense wise, licensing wise, cybersecurity wise, you know, customer service in paths of their their big on fill rate, order order well, rate, how long is the order sitting around, order accuracy. And then consumer care, we're talking about things like hold times, customer satisfaction. So every everybody has their own metrics. And as we're looking at, any kind of, business application investment, something has to tie directly to affect those metrics. There and nothing else we do is all that important. I can't do things just for my own pleasure, just because I think it's a good idea or because I think it will make life easier. I have got to be able to tie, anything I'm investing money in from an application perspective back to, back to one of those metrics. How will it affect those metrics? So, yeah, you may have to take some swag at it. Well, we think it's gonna be like this, and we think it's gonna be like we think it'll save one person's amount of time, or we think we will be able to increase our order accuracy by x. We think we can, get our orders out the door so much faster, which will affect order accuracy or because of an on time thing. So we have to tie it back, and then you take a guess at it. You've you you have to, support it with as much sort of information as you can. You get some other team members to buy in. If it's gonna be an operations thing, I gotta get ops to say, okay. If we do this, can you get those orders out the door faster? And will you have enough information to get those orders more accurately filled on time? Or for a good global supplier, are you able to forecast better? You're gonna be able to keep us in stock on these things. So how will this application affect your work, and can you direct the drive that to a metric? And then you go, and you just you just measure it. How soon can we measure it? Can you measure it along the way when we're in test? So that's kinda how we go at it. It it takes a little bit of doing, and and it's hard sometimes because you get emotional about some of these things. Oh, I really wanna do this. Let's go make the case. You gotta be real about whether or not, it's it's it's you're you're doing it for for the sake of it's a pet project. It's an emotional thing or it can actually tie it back to a number. So we we're fairly disciplined. It's hard sometimes because I I do get emotional about some things. And I think I think I know best, and I think, oh, I really wanna do this project because I think it'll make things better. And if the numbers don't don't show it, then we just can't do it. So I don't know if that helps. Did that did that sort of answer the question, do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. It it does. I was just gonna say, yeah. Yeah. I think it does. And and to your point, Brian, each customer is gonna be a little bit different in where their priorities lie as well as, you know, what their appetite is and being able to really evaluate what those metrics are, what those KPIs are, and and, you know, make the determination of where that investment makes the most sense is very important and and unique to to each business really. Alright. Thank you. We've got one more question, in the queue. Before organizations chase new AI initiatives, what foundational capabilities should they have in place to ensure success? Yeah. I I can take that. So as we talk through couple of things, one, in context of Dynamics. Right? So in context of any AI agents you want to create with Dynamics, security is one of the most important thing. Do you have the security in place, the one you need? Making sure you have not too broad access is very important. Then, the next is how is your data state looks like? Do you have the data at right place, and then what's the quality of your data? So those those are couple of very foundational things. Then you can look at additional things, how you're starting with the specific, governance and what tools you're going to use, how your team is ready to govern agents. You want to make sure the agents you're building, deploying, you're able to validate them and keep them in control. Like, you don't wanna start with, like, super complex and, use case that's going to impact too many places. Like, here, we started, as Brian mentioned, we are looking at couple of use cases which are going to reduce the work of specific team. And, one of them is just pricing, validating. It's not writing anything into the system. It's getting the data from the system. Validating it is a lot easier. We have human in the loop, before we can let it run by itself. That's a? good that's you want to. make sure. you have Absolutely. yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. So wanna you you want to not put stuff back in the system in in your initial I would be really careful if your initial your initial AI initiative out. It should just be something you're consuming out of data and and having humans look at and leveraging some human, interaction and and use it use it as an efficiency tool for your human somewhere, or a data validation opportunity you may have or something like this, but I wouldn't write it back initially. And your point about, security, we should all be doing security because cybersecurity is ground zero. Right? And so if you have if you have a good cybersecurity initiative in place, and if you're working and Microsoft has helped us with the with the focus on data and licensing because all these things tie together into your your larger security initiatives. I mean, you don't you'll waste money if you've over licensed someone. You also increase your risk if somebody has too much access in the company. So you should be you should be foundationally doing these things first. If if you gotta have your cybersecurity in place. You gotta have people in the right buckets. You gotta be phishing your people. And then and all those any of those at risk people need to be looked at hard and possibly their their access ratcheted down. All of these things are just foundational to be able to really launch an AI project and then and then launch your AI project, with a with a view on making humans more, more efficient and then measuring that. So that's where that's where I would suggest to start. And then you'll guess you've you've guide us through that. I mean, we're we're on that path, but, we're we're of the same mind, and I appreciate your support on all those things. And when we and especially your support when it comes around to mentioning licensing and data. We we we tend to panic a little bit and just like, oh, let's just delete all this data. And you're like, no. No. No. No. No. Let's look at how you're licensed first. Right? So I appreciate that. Absolutely. And I think, Yeah. that sorry, Auguste. That that is really good feedback and and not only the data and the security foundation. And I know you both touched on this, but having that change management in place so that you can drive adoption and start that at the outset. Because if you build something to, allow your users to gain productivity, you're never gonna get there if they're not using the tool. So making sure you're set up for success with that change has become so fundamentally important as well. Absolutely. Yeah. Alright. That sort of answered the questions that we had in the queue. So let's go ahead and we'll jump ahead and talk about our flexible managed services model. So I'm gonna go ahead. So, again, our model is flexible, tailored, built around how you operate, not one size fits all as we talked about. We've heard repeatedly from clients that managed services shouldn't force you into a single engagement model. So we've designed this flexible model built around how you operate, not on how we're packaging our services or thinking about packaging our services. So that starts with an understanding of how Dynamics and Power Platform are mission critical to the business regardless of how you engage. And then we've got these these three different categories again around how we're thinking about our clients. Neither one of them is better than the other, but they really sort of, help us to meet the clients where they are. On the left hand side in Assure, we're operating as a trusted operating team. So it's predictable focused, accountable operations, reducing risk, and ensuring the day to day. So we think about that as customers that have a bench, that have a team that's set up to support the solutions, and they're looking to augment, they're looking to add some some expertise in areas, etcetera. Then we move in to enhance. So in the enhance, clients are running well, but they wanna get more from what they already have. So we're looking at strengthening those outcomes. So responding faster to the business needs, improving adoption and driving better performance from the platforms that they already have and that are already core to operations. Moving to the right, accelerate is for clients who want are gonna deeply embedded in their long term business ambitions. So here, we're working with teams alongside leadership to help shape those roadmap decisions, priorities, trade offs, ensuring that dynamics and power platform are evolving deliberately with the business over time and not just keeping pace with it. So, again, across all of these models, we're accountable for outcomes, but the difference is how deeply we're embedded in shaping those outcomes and working with the teams, as they are partnering and as priorities change, the model is flexing with the customers. Let's go ahead and dive a little bit deeper there. So thinking about our clients in these three different ways, and again, I've I've said a little bit on the previous slide. This just gives us a little bit more depth than what we're thinking about. And and with each iteration, we're building on some of the services that that we're bringing to the table. So when we're talking about Assure, advisory shows up when it matters operationally. So helping teams respond to issues, changes, Microsoft updates without disruption. In enhanced, advisory becomes ongoing. So focusing on strengthening those outcomes as we're helping clients continuously get more from their platforms. And in accelerate, advisory is embedded. So again, working alongside leadership to help shape those long term, those long term goals. So whether it's situational, ongoing, or embedded in long term in long term decision making, that advisory exists across all of the models. And, again, our clients are all at different places in their journey, and this is why we take this custom fit tailored approach. No matter if you're looking to extend the IT team or mostly self sufficient or looking for deeper strategic guidance, Argonaut does have a fit for you. So balancing those needs alongside with planning, we can look at adding even, for deployed engineers to for more continuous innovation work. We've got these models to allow the flexibility to allow us to create that tailored package and ensure all of your support and continuous improvement needs are met. So I said a lot about the model. With that, we are gonna just come back to q and a as we look to as we look to wrap up. So let's see if we've got any additional questions here in the queue. And I don't see any more have come in. We'll give it a minute to see if anyone else wants to drop another question in the chat. Yogesh and I both have our contact details up. If you wanna learn more, if you wanna talk more about how we're thinking about managed services, we'd love to hear from you. So please go ahead and reach out. Our email addresses are there on the screen. And I do see one more question coming in. Let me go ahead and expand that. What's the single most important thing I should do next Monday morning to get more value from my Microsoft investment? How would you answer? Brian or your guest, do you have any thoughts there? That's a great question. And, I. guess, It is. muted if you're trying to answer it. But, next Monday morning, I'm on vacation that day. But I'll probably call my director of IT and tell him get more people to use Copilot. That's probably what I'm gonna do. We've done Copilot, I think, is your low hanging fruit for for basically people efficiency. Being that it's embedded in all of your Microsoft apps, Microsoft is improving it almost daily. There's some really great things you can do with it. And I'm I'm my IT director, has done a series of training events. We did this over about six months. We did every other week, like, look, like, an hour. We called a lunch with IT, and we focused it on on using Copilot. And we if you had a Copilot license, we required you to come. And if you knew somebody that wanted it or wanted a Copilot license, they needed to attend in order to request a Copilot license. So we saw a doubling of those licenses over the time that we ran that, and we saw a four x improvement in usage of Copilot. And using some of the the sort of standard metrics, we were able to come up with that that number that says we're saving one or two days a month per user in efficiency. And we're now tracking that on our IT dashboard, and we talk about that regularly. And so, having we send out a regular sort of newsletter email that says all these great things Copilot's doing, how we're leveraging it, some success stories within the company to sort of drive adoption. It's it's more than just, oh, help me write this email. It and I'm trying to improve the fact that across the company, we should be doing more agendas with our meeting requests. We should be doing better recaps of the meeting, better assignment for and follow-up on tasks assignments after meetings. My meetings that used to be forty five minutes to an hour are now fifteen minutes. So my meeting efficiency time, just personally, I'm seeing I'm booking a half hour meeting. I'm only using fifteen minutes. And I'm able to do a nice recap and and create, assignment task assignments and and set the next meeting within minutes. So I'm seeing a ton of improvement there. So I think that's probably the easiest answer I can give from that. Also, if you're not. on d three f o, get on d three f o, because now we don't have to do these every every three or four years massive upgrades. We do we do it twice a year, you know, code update, and we've gotten our testing down testing cycle down to, like, two weeks. So I'm only down we're only really have our code frozen for a couple of weeks, twice a year versus this whole massive update thing. And the cut and and and the users are getting much better at testing. They they are doing it now twice a year. So user acceptance testing going through their business processes, to make sure that they're, testing for the next code update is is that's a good cycle to get into. So I'd say if you're not on if you're not on FNL, get on FNL, and then more Copilot. I don't know what else. Absolutely. Thanks thanks, Brian. If Microsoft folks were here, they would be frightened to hear Copilot and, getting on Dynamics. But, rightfully, if you are on Dynamics and should look at, as Brian mentioned, like, what are the key business problems? And you have the tools. You already own the platform. You already have things on the, investments in the Microsoft platform. You should look at how can I solve those, challenges with the technology? How because there are many other customers who are benefiting from the technology, from Copilot versus Dynamics. And, you should always look for what is that next challenge for a business I can solve for and help my partners from the business. As I as. I'm thinking about it, I also would say if if you don't if you're not on Power BI and and fabric, I would go there too. And if you don't have, you know, I would stop I would stop sending push reports. I'd have people come to the dashboards. I would, I would say if you don't have if you don't have metrics for your team, get some and put those in in cope in Power BI and then address those regularly with your team. So there's a couple of things, because that will maximize there's some amazing things you can. do with with the data that you have and the tools that you have. And I would cancel some third. party licenses, you know, get rid of some apps, standardized, simplify. Most of it's in there. I've I've down to, I think, one or two add ons, from probably, I don't know, fourteen or something a few years ago, and it's it's nice. Unfortunately, Microsoft's consuming that savings cost wise. We won't get into that right now. But but but efficiency wise, we're doing great. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. I I just want to. I just wanna thank. Thanks, again, Brian. Yeah. Yokesh and Tanya. A special thanks to Brian Millsap, the CIO of Hampton Products for joining us today. And I also just want to highlight, please do feel free to connect with us. We have a number of upcoming events, across all of Argano. The link will go in the chat, at our website, but, community summit is taking place in Nashville, October eleventh to fifteenth. We'll be there. We look forward to to meeting with you. You can get a discount on our website, for registration. Similarly, with the Power Platform Conference, we will be in Vegas, at that event, and, you can get a 150 off your registration through, through Argano. So check us out. Additional upcoming events that you'll you'll start to to see, soon on our website include Convergence and Microsoft Ignite. So, please do, connect with us, and thank you again, to everyone who's joined. Bye for now. you.