Microsoft D365 for Supply Chain Management is an innovative platform that enables organizations to optimize their supply chain network and enhance their business efficiency. This platform helps organizations to create a secure supply chain by detecting and preventing cyber threats, improving cyber security, physical management, and endpoint security across their entire supply chain network with multiple levels of security and continuous updates and patches.
Increasing factory efficiency is critical in supply chain management because it enables organizations to reduce downtime and ensure accurate performance through proactive equipment maintenance, synchronize maintenance and production scheduling, enhance inventory accuracy, and manage product quality. The Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management solution provides a comprehensive perspective of inventory, manufacturing, service, warehouse, and logistics operations. Through predictive analytics, this system enables individuals and businesses to transform data into meaningful insights that inform smarter strategic choices.
By implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, organizations can meet the fast-changing customer demand by performing distribution planning in minutes. It enables companies to resolve demand and supply imbalances by enhancing their supply chain and inventory visibility in real time. Furthermore, this platform allows organizations to control the everyday operations of a warehouse. These include warehouse configuration options, costing methods, and inventory management, which helps to increase factory efficiency.
Let’s explore the many benefits of Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management for factories.
Enhanced Visibility
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers numerous benefits for supply chain management, including enhanced visibility. Enterprises can utilize its resources to build digital supply chains that are characterized by strong collaboration, seamless coordination, adaptability, and responsiveness to demand. One key advantage is the ability to collect, integrate, and visualize supply chain data for optimized operations.
The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, which uses the best Microsoft AI, collaboration, low-code, security, and SaaS applications, provides an open approach to help organizations maximize their supply chain data investment. Organizations can increase visibility and proactively overcome disruptions by unifying supply chain data from multiple sources. Companies can invite suppliers, partners, and customers to receive and share information in one place and collaborate in real time, thereby identifying risks early.
Real-time visibility into the supply chain and inventory is another key benefit. The Inventory Visibility Add-in has been recently updated to provide greater functionality for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. This microservice is designed to be highly scalable and enables businesses to retrieve inventory information from various third-party systems. It results in the creation of a unified and comprehensive view of all inventories on a global scale.
The platform developed by Microsoft for supply chain management offers customers the flexibility to leverage the capabilities that address their supply chain requirements. It is made possible by providing building blocks that are accessible through various Microsoft platforms such as Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, and the Power Platform. Dataverse enables users to access a multitude of data connectors, allowing them to acquire visibility and act throughout their supply chain.
The utilization of data, analytics, automation, AI, and IoT in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management allows for the provision of predictive insights, and supply chain efficiency. It reduces errors throughout the supply chain and makes managing/viewing data much more efficient. Further, manufacturers can use this enhanced visibility to improve decision-making, unify process oversight, and improve service quality. Through the integration of data, this software provides manufacturers with real-time insight into their supply chain operations. As a result, they can achieve effective supply chain management, leading to sustainable supply chains. For manufacturers, real-time visibility into the supply chain provides predictive insights across order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, warehousing, and transportation, maximizing operational efficiency, product quality, and sustainability.
Agile Planning and Business Continuity
Agile Planning is an essential feature of Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management that provides real-time visibility and advanced insights for manufacturers, distributors, consumer product groups, and retailers.
With Agile Planning, businesses can create a connected, resilient, digital supply chain that enhances operational visibility, improves planning agility, and maximizes asset uptime. The functionality provided allows businesses to swiftly detect any problems with supply and demand by utilizing data from various sources, including vendor information, inventory levels across multiple channels, production status, and logistical data. Subsequently, using user-friendly visual editors that require minimal or no coding, they can establish automated procedures to tackle these issues, establish flexible manufacturing and distribution workflows, and maintain a steady track record of meeting delivery deadlines.
Business Continuity is another essential feature of Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management. It enables businesses to ensure continuity on the frontlines of manufacturing by providing capabilities to help companies easily scale production and distribution, keep critical processes running, and ensure continuity. Using Dynamics 365, corporations can construct a robust supply chain to secure continuous business operations and optimize revenue. This platform deals with various concerns including complete supply chain transparency, fluctuating consumer requirements, supply obstacles, and interruptions caused by equipment malfunctions.
Finally, Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management provides an integrated platform that connects the entire supply chain and helps businesses get more value from their data. This tool helps companies to manage unforeseen events, anticipate potential supply chain disruptions in advance, and take proactive measures to mitigate risks using smart coordination.
Discrete Manufacturing Configuration and Management
Discrete manufacturing is critical for businesses that produce unique, custom-made products. Managing this process efficiently and flexibly is crucial to meeting customer demand and staying competitive. Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management offers several benefits for companies that want to improve their discrete manufacturing configuration and management.
One of the key advantages of Dynamics 365 for discrete manufacturing is the ability to configure and use the manufacturing process more efficiently. With Dynamics 365, manufacturers can easily define the steps involved in their manufacturing process, from product design to production and delivery. It allows businesses to streamline manufacturing processes and reduce lead times, resulting in faster delivery and improved customer satisfaction.
Another benefit of Dynamics 365 is managing sales and customers more effectively. With integrated customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities, businesses can track customer orders, manage customer accounts, and provide real-time updates on order status. It helps improve customer communication, reduce errors, and increase customer satisfaction.
In addition, Dynamics 365 for discrete manufacturing offers several other features that can improve efficiency and reduce costs. These include inventory management, production planning, and quality control. By integrating these functions into a single system, businesses can reduce errors, increase visibility, and streamline operations.
Distribution Planning and Demand-Supply Balancing
Distribution planning and demand-supply balancing are critical aspects of supply chain management that require careful planning and execution. With Dynamics 365, businesses can now access powerful tools that simplify and streamline these processes, providing numerous benefits.
One of the key advantages of Dynamics 365 is its ability to perform distribution planning in minutes. With the system’s advanced algorithms and predictive analytics, businesses can quickly generate optimized distribution plans considering factors such as customer demand, inventory levels, and shipping times. It saves time and resources and helps businesses make more informed decisions, improving overall supply chain efficiency.
Another benefit of Dynamics 365 is its ability to resolve demand and supply imbalances through enhanced visibility. By providing real-time data on inventory levels, customer demand, and supplier performance, businesses can quickly identify and address any imbalances that may arise. It enables them to adjust their production and distribution plans, accordingly, ensuring they can meet customer demand while minimizing excess inventory and waste.
In addition, Dynamics 365 also offers powerful forecasting capabilities, enabling businesses to accurately predict future demand and adjust their supply chain operations accordingly. By leveraging historical data and market trends, businesses can make more informed decisions about production schedules, inventory levels, and distribution plans, ensuring they can meet customer demand while maximizing profitability.
Maintenance management
Dynamics 365 offers maintenance management features that help factories schedule and track equipment maintenance tasks. By implementing preventive and predictive maintenance strategies, manufacturers can minimize unplanned downtime and optimize the utilization of machinery. This proactive approach enhances factory efficiency and reduces production disruptions.
There is also a scheduling optimization feature that can be used in case a machine gets pulled out of production and distribution plans demanding changes. You can complete the task in a matter of minutes using the computing power of Azure. Unlike the past, when hours were spent on historical data analysis, this application allows production managers to assess changes quickly and continue to optimize production.
Data Connectors and Dataverse
Dynamics 365 offers various benefits for supply chain management, including using hundreds of data connectors to gain visibility and act across the supply chain. In addition, Dataverse can be utilized for building blocks and addressing specific supply chain needs.
With Dynamics 365’s vast array of data connectors, businesses can leverage data from various sources to gain valuable insights and make informed decisions. The platform’s ability to connect to various data sources, including social media, IoT devices, and more, allows businesses to monitor and manage their entire supply chain, including raw materials and finished products, all in one place. These insights can help optimize the supply chain, improve delivery times, and reduce costs.
Furthermore, Dataverse provides a secure and scalable environment for storing and managing data. By utilizing Dataverse’s customizable building blocks, businesses can tailor their supply chain management to their specific needs, addressing unique challenges and opportunities. For example, businesses can create unique columns with unique values in some entities, set unique ID columns with an auto-number, and set the prefix and the seed per their requirements.
New Features of the 2022 Release Wave 2
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers end-to-end capabilities for supply chain management, including product information management, planning, inventory, sales, procurement, manufacturing, asset maintenance, warehousing, and transportation management. Organizations need to increase their resiliency to minimize disruptions and ensure business continuity.
The 2022 release wave 2 introduces several new features and improvements, such as supply-risk analytics, improved support for supply forecasts and multiple external vendors, planning optimization enhancements, simplified implementation and configuration experiences, flexibility and mobility in the warehouse packing process, enhanced allocation capabilities, multilingual product information access, and new asset management scenarios supported by sensor data intelligence. These features and improvements help organizations balance costs and investments while creating a resilient and agile supply chain.
Inventory logistics
The inventory and logistics updates in this release wave offer improved visibility, efficiency, and resilience for business supply chain operations. If you use warehouse management processes (WMS), you can benefit from the Inventory Visibility Add-in, which allows soft reservations and inventory allocation. Soft reservations help you track real-time omnichannel sales demand, preventing overselling, while inventory allocation allows you to reserve on-hand inventory for important channels and corporate customers. Its expanded WMS support enables businesses to take advantage of the benefits brought by soft reservation and allocation capabilities.
Moreover, businesses can track real-time consumption within allocated quantities for specific stores, channels, or markets, supporting promotional events and new product launches. This feature ensures immediate reallocation and replenishment decisions can be made based on the data. Additionally, the Inventory Visibility service allows the deduction of soft reserved quantities from allocated ones and calculates available-for-reservation quantities within a specific allocation.
Furthermore, with Inventory Visibility, you can obtain a comprehensive inventory summary across channels and data sources through the Inventory summary entity in Dataverse. It opens up various business possibilities, including inventory analysis using Power BI or other analytics tools, field service integration, and distribution to downstream business partners. These enhancements aim to boost your supply chain operations and overall business performance.
Procurement
Improving procurement and sourcing practices is crucial for organizations to enhance their agility and resilience in supply chain operations. By investing in these areas, businesses can better identify and address the risks related to their sourcing strategies.
A recently introduced supply-risk assessment dashboard empowers businesses to recognize and comprehend potential sourcing shortages and delays easily. It enables proactive decision-making, allowing them to balance cost and resilience while optimizing their supply chains.
To boost supply chain resilience, businesses need to diversify their sources of supply. It means having the capability to obtain products and materials from multiple vendors, whether through manual ordering or driven by master planning. By doing so, businesses can better withstand disruptions and uncertainties in the supply chain, ensuring a more robust and flexible operation.
Warehouse Management
The Warehouse Management solution now offers versatile capabilities adaptable to various warehouse layouts and operational scenarios. This release focuses on simplifying configuration, reducing implementation time, and providing valuable insights into system performance and usage.
A new mobile packing experience benefits customers of large items or extensive packing areas. While moving around, warehouse workers can now perform packing activities using the Warehouse Management mobile app.
The rapid implementation and configuration experience drastically reduced implementation time and costs for most customers. Moreover, warehouse professionals can now configure and maintain the system independently without requiring specialized consultants.
The integration of Azure Application Insights enables businesses to access valuable insights into the performance and usage of their warehouse management system, empowering self-service monitoring and issue diagnosis without direct involvement from Microsoft.
Planning
Planning optimization sees major improvements in performance and scalability, offering near-real-time insights into requirement changes. The latest enhancements cater to process manufacturing scenarios, enhancing planning accuracy and enabling quick response to changes without disrupting the overall plan.
Manufacturers can now leverage this feature for process manufacturing, including batch orders, co-products, and by-products.
Batch disposition codes now play a role during materials requirement planning, granting businesses greater control over inventory allocation and availability for reservation.
The system now considers supply forecasts when generating material requirements plans, improving the overall quality and accuracy of planning.
Additionally, sales quotations can now be considered to enhance the precision of generated material requirements plans.
Product Information Management
This release allows users in each legal entity to work with product information in their local language. It is particularly beneficial for multinational companies.
Manufacturing
The focus of this release’s manufacturing enhancements is boosting agility on the shop floor. It is achieved using sensor data from machines and equipment on the production floor to drive business processes.
Enhancements to sensor data intelligence introduce new asset management scenarios for downtime registrations and asset counter updates, allowing businesses to customize and extend the supported scenarios.
Moreover, latency experienced in the production report-as-finished process is significantly reduced by separating the physical registration from any derived financial updates.
With these powerful enhancements, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management empowers businesses to optimize warehouse operations, streamline planning processes, and increase agility on the shop floor, thus driving overall efficiency and productivity.
Conclusion
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management offers comprehensive features that can help businesses optimize their factory operations and improve efficiency. By utilizing the platform’s advanced planning and scheduling capabilities, real-time visibility, and intelligent analytics, companies can make more informed decisions and quickly respond to changing market demands.
With Microsoft D365, factories can streamline their processes, reduce waste, and increase overall productivity, ultimately leading to greater profitability and success in today’s competitive business landscape.