Here are the top benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for your manufacturing company.
Supply chain disruptions and constraints have increased over the past couple of years for many reasons, including a global pandemic, natural disasters, wars, and more. Now is the time to get the right technology in place to improve real-time visibility across your supply chain so that you can pivot and mitigate risks.
A cloud ERP solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help you create a resilient supply chain much needed to thrive in today's unpredictable world. In this blog post, we've rounded up the benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for your mid to large manufacturing organization.
What is Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning solution designed to help organizations streamline manufacturing and supply chain processes and build a resilient, intelligent supply chain.
It offers a comprehensive view of your enterprise, empowering your organization to shift from reactive to proactive operations. The solution unifies data and uses predictive insights, manufacturing productivity, and supply chain agility through IoT and AI across order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, logistics, warehousing, and transportation to boost operational effectiveness, product quality, and profitability. While ensuring a seamless flow of information among purchasers, providers, and customers, D365 supply chain offers robust capabilities to improve the production process.
10 Benefits of D365 Supply Chain Management
This agile application allows customers to form a resilient supply chain by increasing visibility, planning agility, and maximizing asset uptime to generate profits during disruptions. Following are the ten main benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for your business:
✅ Automated Supply Chain
D365 Supply Chain lets you analyze your supply chain with sales and purchasing integration with production, logistics, inventory, transportation, and warehouse management systems disregarding time zones. It also rationalizes your procurement via straightforward procure-to-pay and adjusts performance and contracts with various stakeholders. By identifying demand and worker capacity management changes through the planning optimization feature, you can improve overall cash flow. Reduced lost time of important assets is another added benefit that can be achieved by automating field service operations.
✅ Improved Warehouse Management
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enables users to develop and maintain efficient warehouse operations for quickly and accurately picking and packing orders. It makes the management of processes of manufacturing, distribution, retail firms, transportation, purchase, sales, and returns easier. Guidance enhanced by machine learning helps resolve out-of-stock or overstock situations for more effective stock management. In addition, the solution provides access to real-time insights on warehouse performance with Microsoft Power BI warehousing analytics.
✅ Increased Longevity of Your Assets
The success of your processes is based on your assets, in addition to your operations and workforce. So, they must be working efficiently, which keeps the downtime to a minimum. The tool enables you to increase the visibility of your processes and bring asset data into a centralized location. Basic management of assets in different geographic regions is also achieved by integrating it. You can maximize the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by analyzing real-time data derived from IoT and field data obtained and performing forecast maintenance over assets.
Moreover, the power of predictive maintenance increases the life of high-value assets, irrespective of the presence of capable workers. It can be achieved through informative guides and training practices for new employees. Reduced downtime with proactive equipment management also becomes easier with the ability to access different types of maintenance. Asset Management Add-in enables maintenance, including predictive, corrective, and preventative varieties.
✅ Maximized Production Performance
While Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management has many benefits, this one stands out. Better uptime levels, quality, and throughput are achieved using real-time insights via IoT to handle shop floor and machine operations. Also, it makes the assets and processes systematically through machine learning and AI to forecast and give recommendations that help achieve optimal solutions. An upsurge in employee safety and productivity is achieved as well to maintain crucial business assets.
✅ More Smart Factory Capabilities
Companies can take advantage of their raw data with Sensor Data Intelligence. It lets you digitally transform your supply chain operations using Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the sensors and data signals to track critical points along the supply chain. The analytic capabilities allow you to become more predictive than reactive while managing business processes.
You can reduce the amount of manual data that workers must input, thereby reducing time and improving information accuracy. Some other advantages of using Senor Data Intelligence are monitoring operations at varying locations within the supply chain, shifting to paperless procedures with IoT sensors, and increasing production uptime.
✅ Centralized Inventory Management
This feature provides a better understanding of what is happening with your company's inventory. You can use actionable intelligence to leverage data obtained from previous sales, purchases, and supply chain functions. Consequently, you can optimize your inventory replenishment processes, reduce carrying costs, and meet and exceed customer expectations. What's more, your company becomes able to automate inventory processes to avoid overstocking and get a better understanding of the actual value of your inventory.
✅ Improved Demand Forecasting
Keeping up with competitors means companies must do something to predict future demand more accurately. D365 Supply Chain Management's Demand Forecasting solution uses AI and machine learning to help organizations generate more accurate forecasts. Your company, as a result, can increase inventory turns, improve cash-to-cash cycles, and avoid carrying extra inventory.
✅ More Innovation through Process Insights and Operation Analysis
You can monitor and test the product quality and match them with a certain supplier in the D365 Supply Chain Management application. It enables you to submit requests for quotations (RFQ) for the latest demands and check suppliers with the help of a scoring system and questionnaire responses to work with the best provider. Also, track all orders, quantities, and activities at every stage of the process, and see the status of order, delivery, or invoice in this tool. The app space is available for including useful information, such as supplier performance evaluation.
Additionally, you can track supply chain or production operations activities with the latest business analytics. D365 Supply Chain Management application, in tandem with Power BI, gives real-time information and sees processes and their performance. You can also track shipping and transportation performance in the SCM application. With the right information, you can estimate the timing of the goods delivery.
✅ Greater Flexibility through Order Management
The Engineering Change Management function lets you manage orders and gain control over business order management. You can create and release important products for specific customers while ensuring process consistency and time savings. The tool supports multiple manufacturing and distribution scenarios and workspaces for configuring price quotes (CPQ). It makes overseeing everyday tasks and complete order with the right details just with a single application.
You can also personalize information shown to app users and focus on the required details. A full view of stock and production status for an item while order processing is also obtainable. These insights enable you to respond quickly to employee and customer inquiries. The functionality of configuration, tracking and testing each item for distribution with the product lifecycle. Also, every item can be configured for process manufacturing.
✅ Proactive Management with IoT Intelligence
The tool is designed to help you connect with machines in the shop with production assets in a single application. You can manage your IoT network and respond to different device notifications. As a result, it gives continuous control of process and product quality, rapid production, and lessened downtime caused due to machine failures. With this application, you can also link IoT notifications with certain production operations via a simple creator, which will inform your operators about events on the production line and enable them to create a production strategy. Thorough device monitoring and data analysis support aid troubleshooting decisions.
There is also a scheduling optimization feature that can be used in case of 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.
Takeaway
There are many benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for mid to large sized manufacturing companies to build a strong and flexible supply chain. It is an agile application designed to seamlessly integrate with your current enterprise resource planning system and centralize data from various sources in real-time. In the long run, this can help you identify opportunities, boost competitive advantage, and deal with adversity.
If you're looking to transform your business operations, the team at Kwixand Solutions can help. Based in Vancouver, Canada, we are a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner, and ERP consultancy that helps manufacturers across Canada and USA digitally transform and achieve their long-term business goals. Book a free consultation today or drop us a line at info@kwixand.com
