How Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Platform Can Help Your Business

Posted on: January 23, 2023 | By: Guy Logan | Microsoft Dynamics AX/365, Microsoft Dynamics Manufacturing

Companies globally strive for dependable supply chains to fulfill customer needs. If there is anything that companies have learned from the years past, it’s to plan for the unexpected. Relying solely on past experiences to guide future decisions is no longer effective as customer demand is constantly evolving, whether due to economic factors or a shift towards environmentally-friendly choices.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform to help address these challenges. An open, extensible, and adaptive platform enables companies to unify experiences across different planning and execution systems. At the core of the Supply Chain Platform is the Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which introduces a ready-made command center for users to manage disparate supply chain data.

This blog will explain why they Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Platform can help your business: it connects your ecosystems, enhances supply chain visibility, gains agility to meet market demands, improves efficiency and productivity, and enhances security and sustainability.

Connect your ecosystem

The Supply Chain Center data manager integrates data across existing and new enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain systems in a company. An open, flexible platform helps maximize their existing investments without needing to replace them. Now companies can have better data visibility in near real time across their entire supply chain to better assess risks.

With Supply Chain Center, it will be easier for companies to adopt new supply chain solutions in an incremental manner to digitally transform different functional areas of their supply chain while ensuring that those new solutions adopted in the future are interoperable with their existing landscape to achieve faster time to value.

Enhance supply chain visibility

Once companies overcome the challenge of data visibility, the Supply Chain Platform enables them to generate actionable insights from this unified data to predict stock outs or shipment delays and prevent overstocking. Companies can track orders all the way until they reach their end consumer and proactively mitigate any constraints along the way to meet customer commitments. This type of end-to-end visibility is only possible with a unified platform approach.

The best part about leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem is that the supply chain team can rapidly act on these recommendations by collaborating internally or with external suppliers with built-in Microsoft Teams capabilities right from within the Supply Chain Center without having to toggle between multiple systems.

Gain agility to meet market demands

The Supply Chain Platform helps companies adapt to changing business needs with ease. Companies can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, a market-leading solution of the Supply Chain Platform, to future-proof its business and gain the flexibility to adapt to changing needs. You are also able to improve proactive planning with Dynamics 365 to mitigate part shortages. With Dynamics 365, organizations can shorten delivery lead times by running material resource planning (MRP) frequently throughout the day in a matter of minutes, optimize inventory with a real-time view of inventory across channels, and fulfill order promises by reserving inventory for high priority orders.

Companies can gain flexible capacity by rapidly deploying pop-up warehouses with robotic automation to meet seasonal demand more effectively, and the warehouse employees can gain additional agility using the mobile warehouse app to execute the warehouse processes.

Improve efficiency and productivity

For many manufacturers, the current state of their operations is disconnected and rigid. With the Supply Chain Platform, companies can take advantage of intelligent automation to reduce costs, maximize operating margins, and improve employee experiences. With Dynamics 365, companies can build connected and intelligent manufacturing processes with an intuitive, touch-friendly production floor execution interface.

The Supply Chain Platform keeps frontline workers safer while accelerating upskilling, reducing errors, and increasing yield with step-by-step holographic work instructions. Use mixed reality and built-in Teams capabilities to collaborate in real-time with experts, improving productivity and reducing environmental impact from unnecessary travel.

Enhance security and sustainability

Organizations are encountering increased volumes and more sophisticated threats to their environments than ever before. Unmanaged Internet of Things (IoT), industrial control system (ICS), and operational technology (OT) devices are a force driving new advances in the industry but have also tripled the size of the attack surface area. Securing these devices is a mission-critical objective for any organization. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform helps organizations create a secure supply chain by detecting and preventing any cyber threat by improving cyber security, physical management, and endpoint security across their entire supply chain network with multiple levels of security and continuous updates and patches.

The Supply Chain Platform also helps accelerate sustainability initiatives all the way from sustainable design, to sourcing, to manufacturing, and fulfillment. With Supply Chain Center order management capabilities, retailers can streamline returns sustainably with out-of-the-box connectors to FedEx. They can implement box-less returns with supporting carriers for less packaging waste and fewer consolidated trips instead of individual customer returns.

Next Steps

If you are interested in learning more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management, contact us here to find out how we can help you grow your business. You can also email us at info@loganconsulting.com or call (312) 345-8817.



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