What's New: Sales Lines Suggestions with Copilot (2024 release wave 1)
Sales line suggestions with Copilot in Business Central, as covered in the 2024 release wave 1 What's New video. Covers better keyword extraction and context understanding, faster product search, blanket order linking, document-specific search, units of measure, and CSV upload with column mapping and caching.
- Introduction and Overview
- Improved Product Search and Context Understanding
- Search Performance and Blanket Order Support
- Blanket Order Linking and Document-Specific Search
- Units of Measure Support
- File Support and CSV Processing Overview
- CSV Upload and Column Mapping
- CSV Parsing, Suggestions and Caching
- Conclusion and Feedback
Overview
The video walks through updates to Copilot sales line suggestions, which help create sales quotes, orders and invoices from natural language or structured data. It demonstrates better handling of product queries, including compound words and modifiers such as “small” or “commercial use”. It also shows a search speed-up from about 60 seconds to about 6 seconds on a 40,000-item database.
It then covers searching from blanket orders as a source document, narrowing search to a specific document, and support for all configured units of measure. The last part shows uploading a CSV file, reviewing the detected separator and column mapping, generating suggestions, and caching the mapping for later files with the same header. Only CSV is supported for now, and other file types are hoped for in the future.
Key points
- Keyword extraction recognizes compound words without spaces, for example ‘guestchairs’ is read as ‘guest chairs’.
- Copilot uses modifiers like ‘small’, ‘bigger’ or ‘commercial use’ to pick the right product variant.
- Product search is up to 10 times faster. The example is a 40,000-item database that drops from 60 seconds; the caption says ‘56 seconds’, but 10x implies about 6.
- Searching from a blanket order creates a direct link to the blanket order line, so quantities cannot exceed the linked blanket order quantity.
- Search can be limited to items in a specific document by giving its document number, for example a sales quote number.
- All configured units of measure for an item are supported, such as pieces, bottles, kilos and pallets.
- Only CSV files are supported for attachments for now. Other file types are hoped for in the future.
Features
Every feature below: status not stated, demoed.
| Feature | At |
|---|---|
| Improved keyword extraction for product search | 1:03 |
| Context understanding for product queries | 1:58 |
| 10x faster product search | 2:43 |
| Blanket order search and linking | 3:48 |
| Document-specific item search | 5:18 |
| Units of measure support | 6:45 |
| CSV file support for sales line suggestions | 7:32 |
| CSV column mapping and detection | 9:34 |
| CSV mapping caching | 12:06 |
AL objects mentioned
As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.
Quotes
- 0:27 “designed to streamline the creation of sales quotes orders and invoices using natural language or structured data”
- 2:43 “product search now works up to 10 times faster for for example for a database with 40,000 items the search time has decreased from”
- 3:48 “it doesn’t merely copy from the blanket order it establishes direct link to the blanket order line so you won’t exceed quantity in the”
- 7:52 “currently we support only CSV file type and in the future we hope we’ll have support for other file types as but for now”
- 9:54 “the copilot detected that the file has a tap column separator and uh we also have a list of all the columns from the”
- 12:26 “we save the or we cach the mapping against the column header sorry the CSV header uh value meaning in the future if a”
Disclaimers in the video
- 7:52 coming-later: in the future we hope we’ll have support for other file types as but for now it’s only CSV
Presenters (as heard): Alexa D bransky, jayen topa, chatton.