Whether you run an airline, a neighborhood café, or an iconic mountain resort like Snowshoe Mountain in West Virginia as pictured below, supply chain management is integral to your business. If you do not possess the raw materials to manufacture your products, or your retail store’s shelves are frequently empty, the consequences can be dire. For example, suppose you run a corner grocery store and your customers frequently cannot find the items they need. In this case, customers will abandon your business en masse in favor of your competitors who do have the items they need in stock. Now, you may ask yourself, “How can I better manage my business’s supply chain?”
(Image courtesy of https://wvtourism.com/company/snowshoe-mountain/)
Meet Dynamics 365. Microsoft’s all-in-one, cloud-based platform offers a Supply Chain Management platform that can help you predict and overcome any disruptions to your company’s supply chain, so you can constantly meet customer demand and increase your profits¹. In this article, we will highlight the benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for your business.
One major benefit of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is that it gives you the tools you need to manage your supply chain more confidently than ever before². By harnessing Microsoft’s unparalleled AI (Artificial Intelligence) capabilities, you can easily predict demand for your company’s products over time². Additionally, with priority-based supply planning capabilities built right in, you need not worry about overstocking or stockouts². Dynamics 365 also offers Azure Machine Learning-powered AI predictions so you can enrich your company’s historical demand data and improve forecasting so you can better meet customer demand². In short, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps you manage supply and demand while saving time and reducing headaches.
Another advantage of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is that it lets you procure production materials strategically and cost-effectively². For example, Dynamics 365 gives you a single view of inventory across all your channels, with the ability to allocate inventory to specific customers or for specific needs². You can also use Teams directly in the Dynamics 365 interface to collaboratively streamline your sales and operations planning processes². One company harnessing these capabilities is Alterra Mountain Resorts. Alterra owns 15 year-round mountain resorts across the U.S. and Canada, from Stratton in Vermont to Big Bear Mountain Resort in southern California³. The company uses Dynamics 365 for its procure-to-pay process, which starts with a purchase requisition³. If requests exceed a specific maximum dollar amount, Alterra then routes them to the requester’s manager³. Alterra currently utilizes Dynamics 365 to process 4,000 to 5,000 requisitions every month³. Additionally, by connecting Dynamics 365 requisitioning and purchasing to vendor punchout catalogs, Alterra’s employees can seamlessly purchase items from any approved vendor catalog³. This in turn lets Alterra centralize its purchasing process, allowing the company to consolidate purchase orders from its most heavily used vendors³. In short, if Dynamics 365 can help Alterra streamline its purchasing processes, it can do likewise for your business.
With an increased emphasis on innovation and sustainability in manufacturing, Dynamics 365 can help you achieve these goals if you are a manufacturer². For instance, you can integrate Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with IoT (Internet of Things) devices and mixed reality capabilities to build agile and predictably awesome manufacturing processes². Additionally, Dynamics 365 lets you view your factory’s stock and production in real time so you can better manage the shop floor and in turn improve quality, increase throughput, and most importantly, reduce downtime to keep your production running like clockwork². Furthermore, you can utilize the holographic experiences in Dynamics 365 Guides to provide your employees with interactive training materials directly on the production line, reducing errors and improving safety so they can focus on the task at hand, thus increasing efficiency². In summary, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is essential for any manufacturing business.
Still another benefit of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is that it helps you better manage your assets over their entire respective lifecycles¹. With Dynamics 365, you can harness AI-powered scheduling, mixed reality, and sensor data intelligence to perform predictably awesome predictive maintenance for everything from delivery trucks to assembly line machinery¹. Returning to the Alterra Mountain Resorts example, the company’s Mont-Tremblant Resort in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, Canada recently implemented Dynamics 365’s Supply Chain Management Asset Management add-in³. This deployment encompasses 125 mobile workers and 24,000 assets – including ski lifts, snowmaking machines, golf carts, and hotel buildings – across the entire Tremblant resort³. To better support maintenance work, Alterra’s Tremblant team also implemented production information and inventory management in Dynamics 365 for an inventory of 16,000 spare parts, so that they always have the parts they need whenever they need them most³. This demonstrates the importance of Dynamics 365 for managing your company’s most valuable assets.
Finally, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps you deliver your products to customers consistently, quickly, and reliably². For example, the Dynamics 365 platform lets you automate warehouse operations, increase throughput, and optimize inventory². You can also use real-time inventory and available-to-promise (ATP) data to provide your customers with accurate inventory information 24/7². Additionally, by offering flexible rebate calculations as shown below, plus trade allowance management capabilities, Dynamics 365 helps you build and maintain valuable customer relationships². Not to be overlooked, Dynamics 365’s robotic automation capabilities help keep your warehouse operations running smoothly even if you are short-staffed². This shows that any way you slice it, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps you manage every aspect of your supply chain, from procurement to distribution and asset management, with confidence.
(Image courtesy of https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/supply-chain-management/capabilities/)
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Sources:
¹Microsoft. “Supply Chain Products | Microsoft Dynamics 365.” Retrieved from https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/digital-supply-chain/.
²Microsoft. “Supply Chain Management Capabilities | Microsoft Dynamics 365.” Retrieved from https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/supply-chain-management/capabilities/.
³Microsoft. “Microsoft Customer Story – Alterra Mountain Company: Dynamics 365 fuels growth for the newly formed, fast-growing company.” Retrieved from https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/1462545754977009469-alterramountaincompany-entertainment.
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