Creating a collaborative, digitised Ministry of Defence

Ben, an airman, wishes to report an incident he has experienced regarding inappropriate behaviour.

Ben uses the anti-bullying virtual agent chat bot to submit his incident privately and securely. At this stage he can choose to remain anonymous.

The incident is automatically routed to Lisa, a trained advisor who is presented with anonymised data. Smart Assist prompts Lisa with relevant knowledge base articles that may help Ben. Safeguarding flags suggest additional mental health screening questionnaires.

Whilst performing other duties, Ben spots a colleague being unfairly treated. He wants to offer support but is unsure of the best way to do this. He uses the virtual agent chat bot, however it is not yet trained to handle this scenario, so this time the chat is escalated to Ash who is a trained Allyship advisor. Ash provides guidance on how Ben can be an ally for his friend.

Molly, a team leader on personnel welfare, can use aggregated data about the interactions her team is having to understand gaps and patterns. This data-led improvement approach ensures time is spent on improving services offered to personnel and making sure they are relevant, based on their needs.

John, an airman, is training to work on the latest helicopter being delivered to his unit. The replacement of an expensive part on the helicopter is complex, however John can learn the processes with a mixed reality hands-free experience using HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 guides. As he moves the virtual parts around in 3D, he can see each stage in the replacement process step-by-step so he can confidently and precisely carry out the procedure on the physical system.

Later, during the installation of the replacement part, John finds that some components do not seem to fit correctly. He puts on his HoloLens 2 and makes a call using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to the supplier's design team, who are using Teams. Jane at the design team picks up the call on Teams and has a Remote Assist session with John. She can see the problem and sketches some directions and annotations in 3D space using Remote Assist. John can now see how to complete the installation correctly.

During testing of the installation, the onboard IoT sensors capture some anomalous vibration, which exceeds the thresholds defined. This triggers an IoT Alert for proactive maintenance in Dynamics, which is routed through the local engineering team as a high priority issue.

Hilla picks up the issue and creates a Field Service case for a maintenance engineer to perform an onsite service and diagnostic repair. Julie in the dispatcher team uses Dynamics 365 Field Service to schedule the work order to James who is the most appropriate engineer with the required skills and equipment within the area.

James receives the work order on his mobile app and reviews the travelling directions on the map. He visits the base and goes through the required inspection tasks on the work order, taking any required photos. He carries out the required maintenance, and reviews related knowledge to help him calibrate the system and ensure everything is working correctly within tolerances. Once he is happy, John signs off the work, and he completes the work order. Julie can see on her schedule board that the job is now completed.

Jon is part of a team that identifies how technology could benefit the MOD and has been tasked with looking at robotics. Jon goes to his search engine and searches for keywords 'robotics' and 'military'. Behind the scenes, Microsoft not only searches the Internet, but also across the MOD's internal systems, including Teams, SharePoint and Dynamics 365.

The first search result for Jon is a record in Dynamics 365, showing how his colleague Ash is working on a similar project as part of the Industry Partner Programme, specifically relating to robotics for military use.

Jon reaches out to Ash on Teams and is invited to a channel focused on robotics within the defence industry in the UK. This channel includes a link to the related opportunity in Dynamics 365, which the team have been discussing.

Jon clicks on the link and reviews the related account, seeing a full history of the communication between the MOD and the company, as well as insights into recent contracts and deployments of their tech. There is a related company news feed, which has a blog article that talks about how their robots are replacing traditional vehicles in the field.

This is exactly the use case Jon had in mind. He reaches out to Ben on LinkedIn and starts a conversation to find out whether they could supply some innovation in this area and showcase a proof of concept for the MOD.

Vanessa has just taken over a team that is responsible for getting crisis support to those that need it.

Up until now, every year, a member of her team has used a combination of Excel and email to capture and store the data needed to operate this service. It would take weeks just to capture the data, and then additional effort would be wasted bringing the data together to make sense of it.

Vanessa has a Power Platform Centre of Excellence she can engage with to help her modernise this business process. She attends one of the regular app-in-a-day workshops. Over the next couple of days, she uses her new skills to make a simple Canvas Power App to capture the data needed, sharing it with the entire organisation, and uses Dataverse for Teams to store the data with built-in validation.

Not only does this save Vanessa and her team weeks of effort, but her users are happier, and IT now have visibility of how the data is being managed, eliminating shadow IT.

As Lewis runs the CoE, he can see that Vanessa's app not only complies with IT policies, but that it is also popular, and so engages Vanessa to ask if she would be willing to help support additional local teams in adopting the Power Platform to rationalise Access and Excel legacy solutions. He is also exploring the additional benefits of migrating to Dataverse and Model Driven Apps, including scheduling the resources with Dynamics 365.

James in IT is responsible for the rollout of Microsoft HoloLens 2 with Dynamics 365 Guides and Remote Assist, to help train frontline operations staff on highly specialised and sophisticated robots for transportation in rough terrain. It is a complex project with many moving parts and dependencies. Critical resources need to be deployed and scheduled, costs tracked, and the system needs to be accessed simultaneously by crews in various operational environments. James configures all the resources, project dependencies, milestones and skills he needs in Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Sarah is a field trainer with skills in deploying and training crews on HoloLens, Dynamics and Teams, and Robots. David creates a deployment plan, requiring a mixture of devices and personnel. Each of the resources and dependencies are grouped into the resource requirement. The crew to be trained, and locations are also included in the plan.

David uses the resource planning and scheduling capability to schedule and book Sarah and the crew, along with travel time so she can be transported to site. Within the overall project, there are several key milestones during the deployment - enabling various crews across the organisation to receive certification in using the new capability.

Sarah can book her time to each project on her tablet app, so that project costs can be accounted for, and her timesheet is automatically assigned to the correct project codes. Project operations are linked to the finance system, and to the supply chain module, enabling spare parts to be sourced and delivered to site when required.

A supply chain issue has been highlighted due to regional weather disruption, which pushes the project schedule back by weeks. James uses Power BI to review the overall project status and costings, as well as see the insights on the supply chain delays, so he can plan and reorganise the projects so that further training can take place in areas that are not so badly affected.