Do you want to join a major online retailer?
Connecting to online platforms such as bol.com, Amazon, Zalando or Thuisbezorgd seems very easy for many entrepreneurs and therefore very interesting. But what does this do to the competitive position of your organization? And what are other challenges you can face?
Threat or opportunity?
The large online platforms saw profits grow enormously due to the corona crisis. We also saw an increase in demand from our customers for links with such platforms. Many organizations will think “if you can’t beat them join them”. In many cases this is certainly the case. However, we also see various challenges when entering into such a collaboration.
This creates an unhealthy incentive if an operator of a platform is also a provider. The market master, who determines his own rules of the game, then also becomes a market trader on this same market. A platform can then better position its “own products” by placing them higher in search results. Because the administrator of the platform has all user data, he can see exactly which products sell best. Amazon is already making use of this by making ‘private label’ products cheaper and more visible.
Yet it can also pay off for organizations to join a platform. Especially bol.com or Zalando are interesting sales channels where you can reach a large audience relatively easily. A big advantage of bol.com over Amazon is that it does not yet offer private label products. At the same time, all these parties are partly shops – with their own stock and warehouse – and partly market places for other providers. Without clear rules, the incentive continues to exist to favor one’s own goods.
Do you have a unique product? Or if you have the exclusive right to sell, an online platform is quickly interesting. After all, it does not matter to customers who offers or supplies a (commodity) product. It is often the price which is the decisive factor.
Product and price determine your succes
It is important to ask yourself a few questions when considering joining a platform. Is my product unique? Can we distinguish ourselves on the platform or in customer experience (after sales)? How often does an average customer buy your product or service? Is it a one-off or repetitive sale? What do we outsource and what do we do ourselves? How do we bind the customer to us.
In addition, it is important to bear in mind that such a platform also raises certain expectations. This includes the terms of delivery, service, returns and complaints handling. When it turns out to be a success, this can also bring new challenges. Ultimately, it is up to the organization to weigh the costs of commission and – sometimes – distribution of a platform against the greater reach of potential customers. When an organization does not invest in its own distribution and marketing channels, the platform takes over this customer contact and your organization becomes enormously dependent.
Ultimately, it is very important that abuse of power and monopoly formation is actively combated. That platforms have a dominant position does not have to be a problem, as long as smaller companies have access to the online market and have a fair chance against the big (er) players. Supervision and new laws and regulations can also contribute to a healthier and more balanced online climate.
Performance tuning development VM
It is a general complain of any developer. Why is it so SLOOOWWWWW? And yes, it is slow. But there are performance tuning tricks. Slow is influence on 3 things
- Startup VM
- Is also startup of
- Batches
- Management reporter
- Windows security
- Windows update
- Windows maintenance
- SQL
- There is no SQL maintenance
- Disk
- Is also startup of
You could disable the batches & management reporter. That will help. But the real issue is how the disks of that VM are configured. In general, it looks like below 16 lazy disks.
Now you can change these to faster disks , but please be aware of the prices. Also, these are managed disk, the cost fixed amount every month, so stopping the VM will not reduce below cost.
| Size | Premium SSD | Standard SSD | Standard HDD |
| 64 GiB | 9.47 | 4.05 | 2.54 |
| 128 GiB | 18.29 | 8.10 | 4.97 |
| 256 GiB | 35.26 | 16.20 | 9.56 |
| 512 GiB | 67.92 | 32.39 | 18.36 |
How does the disk migration work? The first step is migration to managed disks
Managed Disks simplify disk management for VMs by managing the Storage accounts behind the scenes. Managed Disks also provide granular access control with RBAC and better reliability for VMs in an Availability Set. Learn more about the benefits of using Managed Disks
Source unmanaged disks are not deleted after the migration. Managed Disks are created by making a copy of the source disks. You can revert back to unmanaged disks by creating a new VM with the source disks. Configuration of the VMs is not changed after the migration. Learn more about migrating to Managed Disks
In order to complete migration, we will need to start the virtual machine. Once migration is complete, you may stop the virtual machine.
Next you can change all the discs
But hold on 16 disks multiplied with 18.29 makes 292 euro on top of running the VM. This is very expensive in the relation to how you use it. So next step:
- Archive your code & database.
- Delete the VM
- Deploy a new one
And of course, do not forget to setup the auto shutdown and the azure software reductions
Custom fields: handle with care!
The Microsoft team did release platform update 13 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition. One of the new features is Custom fields. This feature lets a power user or system administrator configure new fields on existing tables without using the development environment and deploy it on the other environments. It is a neat feature which can be of interest, but you also have to be aware of all pitfalls and downsides. In this post, I will tell you more about the custom fields. (meer…)
Dynamics 365 LCS Tricks – Barcodes, Document Routing, FollowMe printing
This blog assists those who are struggling to set up some aspect of printing in D365 for Operations due to the limited documentation in circulation.
We had 2 scenarios at our customer site:
– Barcode printing.
– FollowMe printing.
Barcode printing
Barcode printing is not meant to be complex, but when printing to screen or printer, it did not work. The reason was that the machine which generated the report must have the barcode font installed. When printing to screen a webpage is generated that contains the following content.
| <div class=”A09b3a143224144038c9c1d23f079020e14″
lang=”en-US” style=”word-wrap:break-word;white-space:pre-wrap;font-family:’BC UPC HD Wide’;”> <div>.7E6DK4/;;<@@=.</div> </div> |
Dynamics 365 LCS Tricks – install Knowledge Base (KB) article
LCS is the place for getting all the information from Microsoft related to your Dynamics 365 for Operations projects. This Web portal also allows you to get your MS fixes to your environment and knows which Knowledge Base (KB) articles have been applied.
In the next image, for instance, we can see that there are 167 fixes applicable. So, let’s start cherry picking.
How to: Read uncommitted records using Dynamics 365 for Operations
Recently we had a challenge to read uncommitted data from the Dynamics 365 for Operations database. Usually this is not required as you may retrieve dirty data. When using a business application, you should rely on correct and committed data as otherwise reporting might provide you incorrect data. However, if you find a very good reason to change the isolation level temporary, this post will guide you how to achieve this. (meer…)
Dynamics 365 LCS tricks – platform update 4 experience
Dynamics 365 LCS Tricks – mass install packages
Deploying packages is a time-consuming thing. MS has improved the speed, but we partner can also help. This helping is by merging the packages. Good merged combinations are Binary updates and x++ updates, but your own code can also be combined with your customizations on your Retail (SDK) part.
Till now I was not able to merge ISV packages, so those must be deployed separately. However, there is quick dirty trick for local VM.
Dynamics 365 LCS tricks – force LCS to update
LCS is your friend in Dynamics 365 as long it is up-to-date. And I have seen it is not always the case. So I will share some tricks to force it.
There are some things you should know LCS is only updating 1 time a day and that is 10 o clock in the evening. But when you look in LCS you see it is not updated for a couple of days. So what’s next?
Dynamics 365 LCS tricks – A day in the life of LCS
We all must use LCS when working with Dynamics 365 these days, sometimes it feels good and sometimes it is frustrating.
The next real live image of LCS shows how I feel about the experience.
We are speeding up but at the same time we have to wait.
