Common Data Services (CDS), Power Automate, and Power Apps are another set of solutions that can play a significant role in your custom solution design. As you may already know, CDS is the Microsoft Azure-based business application platform that enables you to build and extend applications with your business data efficiently. Using Power Automate connectors, you can bring data from multiple data sources, including Finance and Operations and other applications from the Dynamics 365 family. On top of this data, you can build modern low-code apps using Power App or the CDS SDK. 

In an implementation project, you can explore whether requirements could be best suited to be a Power App using the CDS platform. Typically, the applications that you build using CDS and Power App are last-mile applications that are not fundamental parts of the ERP system but are either managed in spreadsheets or different third-party systems. Using CDS and Power Apps, you can build these applications very quickly and integrate them easily with Finance and Operations. You can also embed the Power Apps applications within the Dynamics 365 application as personalization, which provides the ability to access PowerApps within the Finance and Operations user interface.

The following are some scenarios we think will be best suited to be developed using the CDS platform to cover last-mile situations and to integrate business processes:

• An independent solution with a low dependency: For example, this could be a service desk app that can be used by employees to request products or services, and once it is approved by managers, it can be used to go and create purchase orders in the application. 
• A solution that requires data from multiple sources: For example, this could be an app for salespeople who go out to the field to manage collections. They need to pull data about the customer from Finance and Operations, sales, and social media to understand the full picture of the customer before the meeting.
• A sophisticated solution that utilizes the power of Azure Cloud infrastructures, such as Azure Machine Learning and Azure IoT, along with data from D365FO: For example, this could be a plant management system for the manufacturing industry that collects IoT data related to machines used at the production site. The app can provide sophisticated functionalities that are specifically associated with the plant management system; however, it can also pull operations data, such as machine details, purchase orders, and supplier and warranty details. 

Now, building customization in the Power Platform has become much easier, with the introduction of the dual-write feature, which automatically synchronizes data between Finance and Operations and CDS. Dual-write brings out-of-the-box scenario-based integration between Finance and Operations and other Dynamics 365 products such as Dynamics 365 for Sales and Customer Service. You can also use dual-write to synchronize your custom data entities to CDS to build the external application.

With this understanding of standard features in Finance and Operations, now let's delve into the best practice of writing design documents in Finance and Operations projects, starting with the solution design document.