Resiliency for retailers might best be understood by thinking about the delight consumers feel when they order that specific, thoughtful gift online for the holidays or when they come across the perfect gift while shopping at a store. To be successful with consumers in these moments, retailers must have the right products in stock at the right time and deliver them quickly and cost-effectively. This is what resiliency for retailers looks like, but how do you build resiliency into your supply chain?

Microsoft Supply Chain Center

Reduce supply and demand mismatches by running simulations using AI and real-time, advanced analytics.

Try the preview

McKinsey & Company found that 75 percent of consumer packaged goods (CPG) supply chain leaders prioritize supply chain digitalization, suggesting that resiliency through digitalization is one strategy that retailers are exploring.¹ At Microsoft, we believe the path to retail resiliency lies in three interconnected capabilities: connectivity, agility, and sustainability, which we showcase solutions around at this year’s National Retail Federation (NRF) exposition in New York City.

Connectivity

True end-to-end visibility requires a platform capable of connecting and harmonizing data from new and existing sources. According to research commissioned by Microsoft from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 97 percent of executives agree that having a resilient supply chain positively impacts a company’s bottom line.² The same study found that most organizations’ digital infrastructure is composed of a mix of modern and legacy apps, with only 11 percent using a single integrated platform of modern, best-in-class applications.³ This makes any solutions’ connectivity a critical factor in building resilience and agility.

One merchant that is enjoying the benefits of connectivity and visibility is iFIT. iFIT is a leading health and fitness platform that markets several home exercise equipment brands. Recently, iFIT adopted the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform to bring together its systems and data. With this integrated, centralized view, iFIT can reduce the manual effort and guesswork involved in strategically placing inventory in its more than 40 forward-stocking locations. Utilizing built-in AI capabilities, iFIT increased efficiency from 30 to 75 percent on their forward stock inventory resulting in faster delivery times––reduced from a two-week window to two days––and increased customer delight.

Extensible systems increase connectivity, too, such as the ability to leverage highly functional micro-services like the Inventory Visibility Add-in for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Users can enable the Inventory Visibility service free of charge to gain a real-time, global view of on-hand inventory and tracking across all data sources and channels. Additionally, the Inventory Visibility service allows users to avoid overselling by making real-time soft reservations and using the allocation feature to ring-fence valuable on-hand stock for essential customers or channels.

Learn more with the Inventory Visibility Add-in overview.

Another dimension of connectivity is collaboration. Dynamics 365 and Supply Chain Center include Microsoft Teams built-in, unleashing the power of collaborative applications for users, making all your business processes and applications multiplayer. With collaborative applications, team members can connect in real time, surface and act on insights from unified data, and swarm around supply chain issues to mitigate disruptions before they impact customers.

Connected systems and data create the visibility supply chains need to sense risks and illuminate opportunities––the necessary precursors to agility, which we look at next.

Agility

To enable agility, supply chain software needs to increase visibility across data sources, predict and mitigate disruptions, streamline collaboration, and fulfill orders––sustainably and securely. In short, companies need to understand the entire supply chain network. By connecting disparate systems and harmonizing data across the supply chain, companies gain a more comprehensive understanding of supply and demand. With Supply Chain Center, retailers can connect and harmonize data and generate supply and demand insights using AI to uncover patterns and projections based on historical and real-time inventory and order volumes.

One company using Supply Chain Center to build a more agile supply chain is Northern Tool + Equipment, a manufacturing and omnichannel retailer with 130 stores across the United States. Northern Tool + Equipment’s fragmented supply chain technology infrastructure had pushed lead times for the 100,000 items in its product catalog to four to seven days. In addition, many of the company’s products are very large, like generators and air compressors. The sheer size of these items brings further complexity to the challenge of optimizing shipping routes for cost and sustainability. Similarly, Northern Tool + Equipment struggled to provide firm delivery dates for online and in-store product orders. For a business that serves people who do tough jobs and rely on their tools for their livelihood, being competitive means offering delivery in one to three days and providing accurate delivery times.

Northern Tool + Equipment partnered with Microsoft to overcome these challenges with an end-to-end supply chain solution. The selection of Supply Chain Center meant that Northern Tool + Equipment could immediately begin to rationalize and connect every node of its supply chain with a solution designed to create a more resilient and sustainable supply chain through an open, flexible, collaborative, and secured platform. The result? Northern Tool + Equipment can provide customers with a committed delivery date and shipping costs while also ensuring one-day to two-day delivery within a specific proximity of its stores.

A significant factor in Northern Tool + Equipment’s lead time improvement is its use of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management capabilities, which allows organizations to connect and orchestrate order fulfillment across different platforms and apps. But Supply Chain Center has an assortment of capabilities to serve other retailers on the agility journey.

One such capability is the Supply Chain Center news module, which gathers information about world events and presents articles relevant to your business and supply chain. How can this feature be a functional building block of agility?

Let’s consider an example of a retailer selling portable air conditioners. Using the news module, the retailer could receive a news alert that a specific geography is forecasted to have the hottest summer on record. This would likely increase the expected seasonal demand for the product in the affected region. The retailer could capitalize on this intelligence by increasing their forecast during the planning process so that they can be prepared to quickly shift inventory to ensure coverage. 

In addition, Supply Chain Center connects with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, which gives retailers access to advanced warehouse management functionality, such as warehouse automation by integrating with partners like inVia Robotics. It also gives retailers the ability to set up pop-up warehouses in a matter of days in six easy steps. Continuing the example above, our portable air conditioner retailer might utilize the supply chain planning functionality and learn that they have insufficient warehouse capacity to meet the seasonal demand increases. In this case, they could use Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to open a new warehouse in a matter of days by utilizing wizards and templates and quickly deploying the mobile app. Similarly, the retailer could then improve warehouse productivity with InVia Robotics by leveraging robots to do the heavy lifting and traveling across the warehouse, freeing up workers to do the more complex task of sorting and packing. The value of these systems is getting the attention of organizations and analyst firms. Gartner® predicts that by 2026, 75 percent of large enterprises will have adopted some form of intralogistics smart robots in their warehouse operations.⁴

Sustainability, circular economies

In a recent survey, 46 percent of individuals who purchased products online said the most important thing they want brands to do is be socially responsible.⁵ This fact helps explain why 53 percent of organizations plan to increase their focus on sustainable sourcing in 2023.⁶ While there are several dimensions of social responsibility, sustainability is the most relevant to retail supply chain leadership. For retail supply chains, this can be challenging.

For retailers to lead not just the industry but to exceed consumers’ expectations for social responsibility, another challenge beckons—the utilization of circular economies. Even leaders in the EU, who successfully decreased material use by 9 percent and increased products derived from recycled waste by 50 percent,⁷ understand that while their progress is impressive, growth of circular economies is still limited compared to their actual material footprint. Still, the incentive for retailers, beyond the value of doing the right thing, is significant. One survey by Statista expects worldwide revenue of circular economy transactions to more than double from 2022 to 2026, growing from $338 billion to $712 billion.⁸

One way that Microsoft is helping brands meet the challenge is with built-in sustainability features for suppliers. One example is the FedEx integration with Intelligent Order Management––which is included in Supply Chain Center. The FedEx integration allows users to offer boxless returns to their customers by leveraging environmentally friendly QR codes to return items at more than 60,000 retail FedEx locations. Plus, retailers can utilize the self-service return functionality of the FedEx integration to easily manage all returns with complete visibility of every step in an item’s return to the warehouse.

Learn how FedEx and Dynamics 365 reimagine commerce experiences.

What’s next?

As we have seen here, the path to retail resilience in today’s competitive environment revolves around connectivity, agility, and sustainability. Brands should address disruptions and challenges with solutions that can exceed customer expectations, drive profitability, and improve sustainability.

Ready to see how Supply Chain Center can help your business on the path to retail resiliency? Watch our Supply Chain Management guided tour and sign up for a free 180-day trial of Microsoft Supply Chain Center (preview).

For a look back at NRF 2022, check out our previous blog: Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future. And take a look at the following posts to learn more about NRF 2023:

• Transform retail customer experiences with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform
• Resilient Retail
• How Microsoft Teams empowers your retail workers to do more with less

Sources

¹McKinsey & Company, 2022. How consumer-packaged-goods companies can drive resilient growth.

²Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 2022. A Supply Chain Built for Competitive Advantage.

³Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 2022. A Supply Chain Built for Competitive Advantage.

⁴ Gartner, 2022. Gartner Predicts the Future of Supply Chain Technology. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved

⁵GWI, 2022. GWI USA.

⁶KPMG, 2022. The supply chain trends shaking up 2023.

⁷The World Bank, 2022. World Bank Releases Its First Report on the Circular Economy in the EU, Says Decoupling Growth From Resource Use in Europe Achievable Within Decade.

⁸Statista, 2022. Estimated revenue generated from circular economy transactions in 2022 and 2026 worldwide.

The post The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform enables resiliency for retailers appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Although the pandemic exposed our supply chain fragilities, there are other factors that will continue to disrupt our supply chains for the foreseeable future. Geopolitical tensions between world superpowers are forcing companies to change how they trade, source, and manufacture goods, so redesigning your supply chain networks or setting up new supply chains to gain resilience is a common theme we will continue to see over the next few years. Global economies are inching towards recession partly due to the prolonged and ongoing pandemic which will increase cost pressures on businesses, and we all know gaining resilience while reducing costs is just extremely difficult. It will require us to improve our agility and pivot and adapt to changing customer and business needs. 

We recently announced new innovations from Microsoft Dynamics 365 that fuels digital transformation of supply chains for a resilient and sustainable future and we are excited to present these innovations to you at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ on June 6, 2022 to June 8, 2022 in Orlando, Florida.

We will showcase how Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps businesses at our booth #312:

• Increase resilience with a predictive supply chain.
• Manufacture and operate sustainably with minimal waste.
• Transform work with advanced warehousing and robotics.

Microsoft’s supply chain experts will also deliver the must-have insights, strategies, and frameworks for chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) and supply chain leaders to think big, make bold moves, and drive real impact within their organizations¹ on June 6, 2022 at 4:00 PM Eastern Time in the Southern Hemisphere II auditorium.

We hope to catch up with you and your teams at the event. Register and attend our session (see details below) for cutting-edge thought leadership about supply chain technology solutions.

Microsoft: CSCO’s role in digitally transforming supply chains with a composable approach

With growing supply chain complexities, leaders need a clear digital transformation strategy that drives visibility across the entire value chain, improves flexibility to meet customer demands, and decreases operational costs. In this session, we will share a new approach to deploying transformative supply chain technologies bespoke to your business by adopting composable characteristics without having to replace your existing supply chain solutions. The composite architecture enables accelerated time-to-value through better interoperability and data harmonization to create a resilient supply chain.

Let’s look at some of the benefits of a composable enterprise.

Composability enables circular manufacturing to advance sustainability initiatives

It’s paramount for enterprises to operate more sustainably. Most organizations have a goal to reduce and offset carbon emissions, including Microsoft. One of the ways to operate sustainably is to drive circularity. Essentially—instead of throwing away goods at the end of their life, finding ways to reuse or recycle them to reduce carbon emissions. To achieve circularity, businesses can customize their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to orchestrate new business processes. A composable system allows you to use low code to customize them easily. 

Our own Microsoft Circular Centers have a unique process to optimize warehouse routing and management system to process decommissioned servers from Microsoft datacenters. There were no reverse logistics solutions that were suitable for the circular centers out of the box. By leveraging the low code Microsoft Power Platform solutions, Dynamics 365 was extended to build a reverse logistics solution that helped reuse, resale, and recycle the decommissioned data center assets. This is one of the ways that puts Microsoft on the path to achieving its sustainability goals by 2030. The outcome of this program has exceeded expectations. Our pilot circular center has been able to reuse 83 percent of critical parts and has reduced carbon emissions by 145,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

Visit us at booth #312 for a demo and learn more about how our circular centers work and how we leverage a composable approach to run these circular centers efficiently, or check out our webinar on building a sustainable supply chain with circular economy principles.

Composability unlocks enterprise resource planning modernization

The future of business applications is composable. According to Gartner®, “those that have adopted a composable approach will outpace their competition by 80 percent in the speed of new feature implementation.”² A composable business consists of modular building blocks that can be rapidly connected and orchestrated––allowing organizations to adapt operations and processes to changing market conditions, new business opportunities, and unpredictable disruptions. Composable ERP solutions are, among other things, cloud-based platforms that scale without limits, leverage a modern open system architecture to reduce implementation time, and usually incorporate low-code/no-code interfaces to improve usability and customization.

One of the companies reaping the benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Solutions is Tillamook. Tillamook County Creamery Association is a farmer-owned cooperative based in Tillamook, Oregon, founded in 1909 and owned by about 80 farming families. While best known for its cheese, it has introduced more new dairy products in the past five years than in the previous fifty. At the same time, Tillamook has expanded nationally, and its products can now be found across the United States. 

To support its growth and expansion, Tillamook needed a modern solution to scale and enter new distribution and sales markets. This led them to migrate to Dynamics 365 apps for Finance and Supply Chain Management. Tillamook had just begun its ERP modernization journey when the global pandemic disrupted demand and supply almost instantly. Yet despite being live for only four months, once COVID-19 spiked demand for groceries as people ate more at home, Tillamook was able to leverage the flexibility of Dynamics 365 to adapt quickly to new business needs.

“There’s been this thing with ERP over the past few years where you avoid customizations to the software so that you can take upgrades. That’s a thing of the past with Dynamics 365. You can modify the system to meet your unique business processes, adjust the logic and configure, and it still takes the updates seamlessly. We have some unique processes here with our complex supply chain, and we’ve been able to modify the system and still take those upgrades.”—Travis Pierce, Director of Information Technology, Tillamook. 

Enhance visibility with digital supply chain solutions

Today, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers can use the right digital supply chain solutions to build or enhance the real-time visibility required to move from reactive decision-making to predictive and proactive decision-making. To maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability, they need to unify data across order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, warehousing, and transportation. 

Supply chain leaders know that the earlier potential disruptions and constraints are identified, the more successful the measures to adapt and overcome them can be. Modern improvements in technology, such as applying AI and machine learning to complex data sets, are giving businesses the insight and agility to deploy processes and systems that generate and proactively shape customer demand. These solutions also allow companies to sync and balance supply to demand by continuously optimizing production operations and distribution networks. With real-time, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, organizations can sense, predict, and adapt to constraints and disruptions at the earliest possible opportunity.

Take the Supply Chain Visibility Guided Tour to see how a retailer can enhance supply chain visibility using Dynamics 365. The composable architecture of Dynamics 365 enables businesses to incrementally add functional capabilities that will make their supply chains more resilient without having to replace their legacy systems.

See you at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium XPO^TM 2022

Supply chains continue to evolve through the current post-pandemic shift. As they do, Microsoft is committed to empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. We hope you will join us at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium XPO^TM 2022 by either catching our session or engaging with one of our supply chain experts. If you are unable to attend this year but are interested in learning how to start optimizing your supply chain, you can get started with a demo today or check out our webinar Create Agile and Digital Supply Chains with Dynamics 365.

Sources:

¹Gartner®, 2022. Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™, June 2022.

²Gartner Press Release, Gartner Identifies the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022, October 18, 2021.

GARTNER and SUPPLY CHAIN SYMPOSIUM/XPO are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are excited to return to Hannover Messe in person this year between May 30, 2022 and June 2, 2022. The pandemic has been difficult for most manufacturers, and there are still many lingering challenges—yet, manufacturers are intent on digital transformation to drive resilience. There are several emerging trends that we believe are instrumental to manufacturers’ success in how they operate in 2022 and beyond.

At Hannover Messe this year, we will showcase how Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps manufacturers:

• Transform work with advanced warehousing, robotics, and mixed reality.
• Increase resilience with a predictive supply chain.
• Manufacture and operate sustainably with minimal waste.

Based on a commissioned study with Forrester Consulting, more than 30 percent of manufacturing leaders face visibility challenges with inventory of raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished goods in the distributor network.¹ Manufacturers are adopting a data-driven approach to improving operations, and doing so drives more focused improvements to systems and processes. But one-third of respondents surveyed note their organizations struggle with analyzing and applying the data to drive business and process improvements.

Visibility across operations is useful only if the manufacturers can use that data to drive action, hence the importance to driving both visibility and data improvements. Manufacturers are also keen to overcome distribution-related disruptions. Nearly half (48 percent) of manufacturing leaders expect distribution disruptions such as lack of carrier availability to increase.¹ Demand fluctuations are at their peak, and so flexibility is paramount to meet this changing customer demand on time. However, this cannot come at the expense of front-line workers getting burnt out. It is an imperative to improve processes and conditions for frontline employees.

Lastly, environmental sustainability is a growing priority for manufacturing leaders to address in supply chain. Nearly one-quarter of leaders have improving sustainability metrics as a top digital transformation objective. As manufacturers transform, roughly 30 percent expect a reduced environmental impact as a result of their transformation efforts.¹

Overcome disruptions and shortages with robotics and mixed reality

It is no secret that manufacturing operations have faced—and continue to grapple with—multiple sources of ongoing shortages and disruptions. From port congestion, shipping delays, and material and workforce shortages, to extensive and unforeseen swings in customer demand––today’s current challenges are as varied as they are persistent. However, these challenges have also given rise to innovative solutions capable of providing manufacturers and distributors with the capability to improve operations and overcome workforce shortages and skills gaps.

Robotics and automation are an attractive opportunity in this regard––one that is generating goodwill among industry professionals and driving increases in investment. Most manufacturing executives believe that automation will positively impact their sector. Concurrently, the number of robots sold in North America rose 28 percent in 2021, setting a record of approximately $2 billion in sales.² These points provide the context for our first work transformation innovation that is helping manufacturers and distributors overcome workforce shortages: advances in warehousing with robotics.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is designed to incorporate robotics to improve the automation of warehousing functions. This robotic integration and automation capability allows organizations to rapidly stand up and tear down temporary and flexible warehouse capacities closer to their manufacturing sites. Ultimately, these innovations enable companies to support complex warehousing functions, improve warehouse productivity, and overcome workforce shortages.

Contributing to the workforce shortages that manufacturers face is the retirement of a highly skilled and knowledgeable workforce and, to a lesser extent, normal attrition as workers move on to other roles or companies. The learning curve for new team members in a manufacturing environment can often be steep and challenging due to the complexity of numerous processes and machinery that must be operated. This can cause significant disruption to normal operations. 

A key innovation that is helping manufacturers to overcome workforce shortages and close the talent gap is the application of mixed reality to accelerate the onboarding of new employees and rapidly upskill existing team members. Based on the Microsoft-commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, manufacturing organizations that have deployed mixed-reality solutions have reduced training time by 75 percent, at an average savings of $30 per labor hour.³

With Microsoft’s mixed-reality solutions, including Dynamics 365 Guides, HoloLens 2, and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, manufacturers can deliver interactive learning experiences that increase workforce efficiency and flexibility and improve workforce safety by providing hands-free work instructions directly in the field of vision during task execution. Let us see how Toyota Motor North America is boosting operational and training efficiency and scalability with Microsoft’s mixed-reality solutions.

Interested in learning more about how to improve on-the-job guidance or in the benefits of mixed-reality applications in manufacturing? Give our recent blogs, Improve on-the-job guidance with Dynamics 365 Guides and Azure Object Anchors and Watch how to improve on-the-job guidance with mixed reality a read.

Increasing resilience with visibility, insights, and orchestration

When organizations are slow to digitize, they lack the visibility to predict disruptions. They also lack the insights and agility to proactively mitigate these disruptions. At Hannover Messe, we will showcase our latest investments from Dynamics 365 that enhance end-to-end visibility of your supply chain and the production floor, enable flexible real-time planning, and optimize and automate fulfillment by seamlessly orchestrating business processes to proactively mitigate constraints.

These investments from Dynamics 365 are developed to help manufacturers become a composable enterprise. The capabilities are built such that they are interoperable with the manufacturer’s existing supply chain technology infrastructure. They unify data from disparate systems and leverage AI to drive actionable insights. With Microsoft Teams embedded within the Dynamics 365 supply chain portfolio, collaborating to achieve consensus with internal team members and external partners is more streamlined, quick, and almost in near real time.

Manufacturers can further add new revenue lines by moving from fixed revenue to recurring revenue by adding new service offerings. The Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management works seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Field Service so that manufacturers can predict and proactively maintain their customer’s assets.

Dynamics 365 can also integrate with other third-party manufacturing execution systems. This allows manufacturers to unify data in real time across multiple different systems and contextualize the transaction data you get from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and time series data you get from the production floor to proactively looks for inefficiencies and quality issues so that you can improve the overall equipment effectiveness. At the end of the day, these innovations empower manufacturers to create and run more agile and connected factories and more resilient supply chains.

Circular manufacturing advances sustainability

Manufacturers have diligently worked to minimize waste since the ascendancy of lean manufacturing techniques. Now, as the world, governments, and consumers increasingly focus on sustainability, the push is on for manufacturers to reduce another form of waste––carbon dioxide (CO₂). The leading sustainability initiative that brands are investing in worldwide is circular economy or circular manufacturing. This allows customers to recycle products easily. By setting up reverse logistics flows that allow customers to recycle products, manufacturers can not only drive a more sustainable future that is aligned with evolving consumer expectations but can also realize cost savings by utilizing recycled materials to produce new goods.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides organizations with the platform and tools to design manufacturing systems, processes, and products for reuse, minimize waste and emissions, and introduce new revenue streams like subscriptions and buyback programs. At Microsoft, we use these solutions to help us keep our commitment to zero-waste and carbon-negative operations. Our pilot initiative is the Microsoft Circular Centers program, which facilitates the reuse and recycling of servers and hardware within our data centers. To date, the Circular Centers program has reduced carbon emissions by 14,500 metric tons CO₂ equivalent.

With sustainability being a core focus for Microsoft, we are also pleased to announce the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability on June 1, 2022. Cloud for Sustainability solutions such as the Sustainability Manager gives organizations the ability to better manage their environmental footprint, embed sustainability throughout their value chain, and make strategic business investments that drive more value.

To learn more about strategies for overcoming disruptions and shortages while also improving sustainability through circular manufacturing strategies and Cloud for Sustainability solutions, see us at Hannover Messe.

Engage with Microsoft at Hannover Messe 2022 

Register for Hannover Messe and visit the Microsoft booth Hall 4 Stand E34, where you can join guided tours and book meetings with Microsoft executives and manufacturing experts on hand to discuss how Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing brings together Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform capabilities that help: 

• Build more agile factories. 
• Transform your workforce. 
• Engage customers in new ways. 
• Create more resilient supply chains. 
• Unlock innovation and new services. 
• Secure manufacturing solutions from edge to cloud. 
• Accelerate your sustainability journey.

Sign-up to tour the Microsoft booth.

We will also be showcasing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which brings the anytime, anywhere experience through the self-service capability for manufacturers.  

Want to learn more about manufacturing supply chain transformation in 2022? Check out our recent e-book: Six Trends that Are Shaping Supply Chain Transformation for Manufacturers.

Sources:

¹A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft. March 2022- Building A More Resilient Future for Manufacturers Through Digital Transformation

²Association for Advancing Automation (A3), 2022. Robot Sales in North America Have Strongest Year Ever in 2021

³Forrester. The Total Economic Impact™ of Mixed Reality Using Microsoft HoloLens 2, commissioned by Microsoft

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 at Hannover Messe 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights is now part of Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which is available in preview starting November 16, 2022. Click Introducing the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, a new approach to designing supply chains for agility, automation and sustainability to learn more.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is helping manufacturing organizations tackle the challenges they face today while also preparing them for tomorrow’s opportunities. Whether enabling workforce transformation and enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernization, helping navigate disruptions by increasing supply chain visibility and improving insights, or standing up reverse supply chains and circular economies––we are dedicated to helping manufacturers build the resiliency and agility they need to succeed. The following three success stories showcase how our modern, cloud-based, intelligent business applications are driving improvements in manufacturing supply chains.

Workforce transformation and ERP modernization

The manufacturing sector has faced labor shortages for some time now, but the pandemic has exacerbated this challenge. This has led many to double down on efforts to utilize technology as a means of offsetting the headwinds caused by ongoing labor shortages.

We see this in manufacturers accelerating workforce transformation of shop floor operations and increasing their utilization of industrial robotics, IoT sensors, AI, and intelligent automation. As these organizations create smarter and more connected factories, they are, in effect, increasing the workforce’s productivity, and this is one means of easing the constraint that labor shortages can have on output.

In addition to easing constraints on labor, manufacturers such as ChemTreat are also benefiting from ERP modernization initiatives. ChemTreat, a water treatment systems company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, and in business since 1968, was challenged to overcome the limitations of their in-house, custom-coded, desktop-bound ERP system. While the legacy system had served them well for many years, it now required laborious additional workflows, kept data trapped in spreadsheets, and needed nightly downtime. To keep pace with technology changes in the industry and support its growth, the company implemented Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Today, ChemTreat benefits from real-time, end-to-end supply chain visibility that spans everything from its customers and suppliers to its inventory, expenses, and demand. Direct data visibility is also helping management proactively identify raw material shortages and improve their planning and execution processes. Plus, by modernizing their ERP, ChemTreat has the flexible and composable platform they need to support other digital transformation efforts in the future.

“Dynamics 365 helps us get ahead of challenges, identify potential customer impacts, and determine the best path to the best service.”––Katie Journigan, Director of Business Systems, ChemTreat.

Learn more in our blog, Enhance visibility with Dynamics 365 supply chain solutions.

Supply chain visibility and insights

As businesses continue to forge a path out of the pandemic, many find that their current supply chain technologies are ill-equipped for an environment characterized by ongoing disruptions, constraints, and shortages. A recent survey by McKinsey & Company found that successfully implementing AI-enabled supply-chain management has enabled early adopters to improve logistics costs by 15 percent, inventory levels by 35 percent, and service levels by 65 percent, compared with slower-moving competitors.¹ This has led to increased investment in advanced supply chain solutions that can connect disparate systems, unify data, increase supply chain visibility, and utilize artificial intelligence to push actionable insights to decision-makers. One company benefiting from investments like these is Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA).

DTNA is the leading commercial vehicle manufacturer in the U.S., with a portfolio of distinctive brands like Freightliner and Western Star Trucks. The company has more than 20,000 employees in 91 locations and sources hundreds of thousands of parts from its global supply base. To add to this complexity, DTNA collects data from trucks on the road, its in-house ERP system and supply chain applications, and across its operations and production floor.

Breaking down the siloes of these disparate data sources became necessary for DTNA to meet customer and dealer demand and provide accurate delivery dates. To accomplish this, they needed early visibility into potential time constraints and the ability to collect and share real-time supply chain data with suppliers. With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, DTNA can make better supply chain decisions with proactive risk mitigation via prescriptive insights powered by AI.

Learn more in our recent blog, Mitigate disruptions with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights––now in preview.

Reverse supply chains and circular economies

“Sustainability has become an integral part of all world-class supply chains, and circularity is a leading supply chain sustainability strategy that enables recycling and reuse for the majority of a supply chain’s products.” —Jodi Larson, General Manager of Strategy and Transformation at Microsoft.

More and more companies are working to make our world sustainable by embracing environmental, social, and governance goals. One way that manufacturing organizations are improving sustainability is by standing up circular economies. Circular economy, or circularity, is rooted in reverse supply chain management, which deals with what happens after a product’s useful life. According to a 2022 report from Gartner®, 51 percent of supply chain professionals expect the emphasis on the circular economy to increase in the two years following the COVID-19 crisis.²

As focus ramps up on circular economy strategies, it’s important to understand that reverse supply chain management in manufacturing requires different operational processes. To state the obvious, manufacturers cannot simply accept end-of-life products at existing factories and warehouses. Depending on the complexity of the product and its recoverable raw materials, separate operations are needed to receive, inspect, sort, and refurbish raw materials before they can be reused.

Setting up these circular economy flows can be challenging without an agile and composable supply chain management application. Here at Microsoft, we have first-hand knowledge of the challenges involved as we have recently delivered our first Microsoft Circular Center. The Microsoft Circular Center program is designed to facilitate the reuse and recycling of servers and hardware within our datacenters, which is part of our commitment to achieving zero-waste and carbon-negative operations by 2030.

When planning the pilot of our Circular Center program, we needed a robust and flexible supply chain management platform to support an optimized warehouse routing and processing system to intercept decommissioned servers from Microsoft datacenters. To date, the Circular Centers model has achieved 83 percent reuse and 17 percent recycling of critical parts while contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions by 145,000 metric tons CO2 equivalent.

“We were looking for a warehouse management system that would allow us to model all the product flows that we needed while also connecting to datacenters and other systems used to manage our cloud assets. Dynamics 365 had all of these functionalities to build exactly what we needed.”—Anand Narasimhan, General Manager of Cloud Supply Chain Sustainability, Microsoft.

What’s next?

As we have seen through these customer stories, Dynamics 365 drives improvement in manufacturing supply chains by enabling companies to revamp their existing ERP platform, considerably increase supply chain visibility and insights, and stand-up circular economies through reverse supply chain management practices. It also empowers users to plan better, improves organizational agility, and maximizes asset uptime, allowing companies to operate smoothly and profitably.

If you are ready to see what our modern, cloud-based supply chain management solution can do for your organization, we invite you to start today with a free Dynamics 365 trial. You can watch the on-demand webinar on how to create a resilient and sustainable supply chain and the total economic impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Sources:

1- McKinsey & Company, 2021. Succeeding in the AI supply-chain revolution.

2- Gartner®, 2022. Gartner for Supply Chain 3 Key Trends in Supply Chain Sustainability

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 drives improvement in manufacturing supply chains appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights is now part of Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which is available in preview starting November 16, 2022. Click Introducing the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, a new approach to designing supply chains for agility, automation and sustainability to learn more.

Earlier in 2021, we had discussed how retailers can create an intelligent supply chain to successfully navigate through the disruptions and quickly adapt to changing customer behavior. As our retail customers embarked on the journey to create a resilient and intelligent supply chain, there were three key areas that emerged where our customers prioritized their investments—optimizing fulfillment, predicting supply chain risks, and enhancing supply chain visibility. Let’s take a look at some of Microsoft’s recent innovations in these areas that enable retailers to create a supply chain of the future.

Turning order fulfillment into a competitive advantage

A retailer’s success hinges on having the right inventory at the right place at the right time. As retailers and brands continue to adapt to meeting the growing e-commerce demand, determining where the inventory is fulfilled for e-commerce versus in-store orders becomes critical to ensure that customer demands are met on time and in a profitable manner.

As a recent Gartner® report found, one of the ways to achieve supply chain excellence is by holding distribution center inventory in a channel-agnostic manner for flexible use of inventory to fulfill online and in-store demand effectively¹. To achieve this level of flexibility, retailers need a system that offers rules-based order orchestration leveraging AI and real-time omnichannel inventory data to proactively address constraints and profitably fulfill orders on time and in full.

At Microsoft, we are at the forefront of these efforts, investing in solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management that help retailers reimagine the future of global supply chains and turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage.

Predict risk and enhance visibility with AI-powered insights

According to Gartner®, 76 percent of supply chain executives indicated that compared to three years ago, their company today faces more frequent disruptions in their supply chain. Meanwhile, another 72 percent reported that the impact of disruptive events has increased.²

Retailers have made significant strides in 2021 to create resiliency in their supply chains but the response has still been very reactive in nature. Slow digitization of the supply chain continues to inhibit organizations from proactively planning for changing customer demand and supply challenges. With an increase in e-commerce, it is imperative to gain real-time visibility into inventory at every node of the supply chain, all the way from the manufacturer to shipping ports to distribution centers to stores and finally to the consumer. Brands gain affinity when they consistently deliver on their order promise to their customers.

With this need for increased visibility and consistency in mind, we recently launched Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights in preview that enables organizations to predict risks in their supply chain based on news, weather, geo-political events, etc., and enables them to make better supply chain decisions with proactive risk mitigation via prescriptive insights powered by AI.

With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, retailers and consumer goods companies can create a digital representation of their physical supply chain. This enables them to simulate different scenarios at different nodes along the value chain and make well-informed decisions to mitigate any disruption. They can further gain visibility into the supply chains of their multiple tiers of suppliers, and improve the effectiveness of their demand and supply planning to ensure a delightful customer experience.

We also made significant enhancements to the Inventory Visibility add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Retailers can now get near real-time inventory visibility across all their internal channels and disparate third-party supply chain systems in a single place. Adding multiple systems in a scalable manner allows them to add new third-party integrations as they grow their supplier network or acquire new businesses. The enhanced visibility enables businesses to proactively mitigate any out-of-stock situations. Furthermore, they can perform soft reservations based on omnichannel sales demand so that they do not incorrectly commit to a customer.

Retailers can further leverage enhanced planning capabilities to enable near real-time inventory planning by prioritizing certain orders over others with ease. For example, they can prioritize orders for products that are low on stock versus the ones that are not. Lastly, retailers can optimize and streamline back-of-house operations like receiving and replenishment using the Warehouse Management mobile app. The mobile app empowers distribution centers, warehouses, and brick-and-mortar locations to make inventory decisions like transferring goods from one location to another simply by scanning the items. By running critical warehouse operations on Edge, retailers can ensure business continuity across all locations despite latency or network issues at HQ.

All the supply chain solutions from Dynamics 365 are not only interoperable with each other but also seamlessly work with other third-party ERP, commerce, and supply chain systems.

Take the Supply Chain Visibility Guided Tour to see how a retailer can enhance supply chain visibility using Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

Here are some recent examples of our retail customers who have created a resilient supply chain this past year using Dynamics 365.

Servis Industries Limited powers direct-to-consumer expansion by moving to the cloud

Established more than 50 years ago, Servis Industries Limited (SIL) is a leading manufacturer and exporter in Pakistan. To achieve its goal of becoming a global, world-class, and diversified company, SIL moved its on-premises infrastructure to the cloud by adopting Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Commerce. Now, the company has a holistic overview of its retail stores and an infrastructure management system that can support rapid national and international growth.

“To achieve our goal, we need to open 40 to 50 outlets per year. It used to be that with each new store, our team had to be on-site to provide technical support. Now, everything is cloud-based, so we don’t have to travel. The new stores can just access the systems and start their operations almost immediately.”––Faisal Rizvi, Head of IT, Servis Industries Limited.  

Another challenge that SIL encountered in its journey was the need to meet the evolving customer expectation for personalized engagement, omnichannel experiences, and frictionless interactions. For this, the company turned to Distributed Order Management to deliver smooth order processing between its e-commerce platform and physical stores and to optimize order fulfillment across their network by utilizing AI, automation, and real-time inventory.

Khaadi delivers rapid omnichannel success

Founded in 1998, Khaadi is Pakistan’s premier fashion retailer with more than 70 physical stores across Pakistan, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the United Kingdom, and online stores in more than 12 countries. With its growing network of physical and online storefronts, the company needed a solution that could streamline its omnichannel sales delivery and empower its daily operations with actionable store-level insights for managers. The drive towards omnichannel was forced into overdrive when pandemic lockdowns moved all of Khaadi’s operations online. Suddenly, they needed to pivot to leverage a single inventory across the business and use their stores as fulfillment hubs.

To meet this challenge, Khaadi turned to Microsoft Power Apps and Power BI, alongside Dynamics 365 Commerce, Dynamics 365 Finance, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. With this technology in place, Khaadi successfully transitioned to omnichannel.

“We were able to draw up a blueprint for omnichannel sales rapidly and implemented a complete enterprise-level scenario in just in one weekend. IT was able to transform the dynamics of our business within just a week’s time, making Khaadi a truly omnichannel enabled retailer. From there, it was only a matter of three months before we scaled the roll out ten times with help of Dynamics 365 Commerce Distributed Order Management.”––Muhammad Rehan Qadri, Chief Information Officer, Khaadi.

As you can see by these recent customer success stories, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping companies to deliver the retail supply chain of the future by empowering direct-to-consumer expansion and accelerating omnichannel success.

What’s next?

The events of the past two years have made it essential for businesses to invest in technology that can help them sense supply chain constraints and disruptions and predict spikes and troughs in demand. Microsoft Dynamics 365 assists companies in integrating these types of new capabilities, such as real-time, end-to-end visibility, priority-based planning, and AI-empowered insights so that they can effectively compete in this new normal. As we have seen here, this can take the form of accelerating direct-to-consumer and omnichannel success, empowering retailers to turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage, and integrating advanced warehousing solutions to improve distribution processes.  

To learn more, join the Ask the Experts session on how to automate and optimize fulfillment on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. You can watch the on-demand webinar on how to create a resilient and sustainable supply chain and the total economic impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. You can also watch the on-demand webinar on how to enhance the visibility of your supply chain by taking a composable approach to rapidly deploy a Supply Chain Control Tower.

Sources:

1- Gartner®: The Contemporary Guide to Retail Supply Chain Excellence: Part 1 — Inventory and Assortment Published 22 November 2021 – ID G00743960

2- Gartner®, Six Ways Supply Chain Analytics Mitigate Business Disruptions, 2021

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights is now part of Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which is available in preview starting November 16, 2022. Click Introducing the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, a new approach to designing supply chains for agility, automation and sustainability to learn more.

The concept of the global control tower first appeared on the radar of supply chain leaders around 15 years ago. As more and more companies pursued end-to-end visibility for increasingly globalized supply chains, the idea quickly gained momentum. IndustryWeek noted global control towers as one of the hottest supply chain buzzwords of 2008.¹ Still, for an idea that has been buzzing for over a decade, many companies have been challenged to move from concept to reality.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping companies overcome these challenges by equipping them with the tools necessary to create digital supply chains that are highly collaborative, coordinated, agile, and demand-driven. With these new supply chain solutions in place, businesses can achieve real-time, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, breathing new life into concepts like supply chain control towers in the process.

Supply chain control towers

It has quickly become essential for businesses to invest in technology that can help them sense and predict supply chain constraints and disruptions and spikes and troughs in demand. From using advanced forecasting techniques to real-time collaboration between trading partners and commercial teams, business processes are increasingly geared to generate and proactively shape customer demand. Companies must also integrate the agility to continuously optimize supply and production plans in real-time, as forecast and predictions shift into actual customer order receipts. Supply chains control towers help in these efforts by building both agility and resiliency into the supply chain by delivering end-to-end operational visibility, all the way from planning to delivery and back.

Resiliency in this context is about driving business continuity. This can take the form of digitizing production in factories, automating operations on the shop floor, and providing unparallel transparency, in real-time, to leadership. By utilizing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights^preview to create a digital representation of the physical supply chain, whether called a control tower, digital twin, or supply chain nerve center, businesses can reach new levels of agility­ and gain the ability to sense and proactively mitigate disruptions before they occur. And to respond faster when the inevitable happens, such as an unpredictable or unforeseen event.

McKinsey & Company estimates that a $10 billion business with a high-performing supply chain can reduce cost by as much as $50 million annually through digital initiatives such as supply chain nerve centers.² This is because control towers enable supply chain organizations to blur the lines between planning and execution, allowing businesses to uncover and exploit improvement opportunities faster than ever before.

Building blocks

Visibility

Starting with the end in mind, regardless of the mixture of people, processes, data, organization, and technology used to erect a control tower, it must deliver end-to-end visibility across all supply chain nodes to be successful. This visibility should penetrate beyond tier 1 and tier 2 partners.

Agility

While visibility is the starting point, visibility by itself is not sufficient. Supply chain solutions must also deliver improvements to agility so companies can more effectively respond to changing customer demands. In practice, this means going beyond the ability to immediately grasp what is happening (system-wide visibility) and on to making predictions of what is likely to happen next. This way, business leaders can adapt and overcome challenges as they are identified in real-time.

Unified data

The value that a construct such as a supply chain control tower can deliver is proportional to the organizations’ ability to unify data from disparate sources. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, legacy business applications, supplier systems of records, siloed hard drives, PLCs, and even IoT data streams­ all must be incorporated and unified.

Automation

Businesses also need supply chain solutions that incorporate rules-based orchestration to model and automate responses to fulfillment constraints. By leveraging automation in this manner, organizations can proactively address issues with actionable, data-driven insights, allowing them to adapt faster to disruptions and constraints.

Vision

At Microsoft, we see supply chain control towers as a shared service process that can be brought together from a mix of supply chain solutions. For example, a control tower can be assembled using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights ^preview together with Microsoft Power Platform, and our rapidly growing ecosystem of digital supply chain applications.

A supply chain control tower enabled by Dynamics 365 in this fashion positions organizations to respond faster and more intelligently to disruptions and opportunities. With seamless integration to many market-leading API-enabled applications using our configurable pre-built partner connectors, businesses can convert the action signals from what-if analysis into directives sent to the applications that guide day-to-day operational execution.

Organizational benefits

When organizations use Dynamics 365 to create a supply chain control tower, they can realize the benefits of a single platform. One version of truth brings together internal and external stakeholders to visualize constraints and disruptions at any point in the value stream. Then, affected agents and authorities can work together to analyze the upstream or downstream impacts, collaborate in near real-time to formulate and enact optimal responses—all from one location and one pane of glass.

In this way, a supply chain control tower created with Dynamics 365 enables organizations to adapt quickly to demand shifts by deliberately blurring the lines between planning and execution and effectively creating a continuous digital feedback loop across entities and distinct business processes.

Looking forward

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides manufacturers, distributors, and retailers with the real-time visibility and intelligence they need to move from reactive to proactive. It unifies data and uses predictive insights—across order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, warehousing, and transportation—to maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability. And, with innovative technologies, such as AI and machine learning integrated into the solution, it helps organizations accelerate performance even further.

Learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights ^preview enable companies to strengthen and expand the Four Pillars of the Digital Supply Chain. To learn more, check out our recent webinar Create Agile and Digital Supply Chains with Dynamics 365, and join a panel of Microsoft Experts in the live Ask the Expert session scheduled for December 7, 2021, at 10AM Pacific Time.

1- IndustryWeek, A Guide to the Hottest Supply Chain Buzzwords of 2008, January 2008

2- McKinsey & Company, Building a digital bridge across the supply chain with nerve centers, January 2021

The post Enhance visibility with Dynamics 365 digital supply chain solutions appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, consumers are demanding more products and services from retailers in a rapidly evolving number of delivery modes. At the same time, retailers are increasingly asking, “how can we go faster” as they work to refine their retail playbook. To meet the demands of the future of their businesses, retailers must consider how to leverage interoperable ecosystems to enable frictionless processes from order source through orchestration to intelligent fulfillment and delivery. The industry has not overlooked this truth, with Gartner predicting that by 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80 percent¹ in the speed of new initiative implementation.

Against the backdrop of these challenges, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management provides the dexterity companies require to accept orders from any source, automate orchestration actions across multiple pathways, and flexibly fulfill and deliver—all in harmony with a growing ecosystem of leading service providers.

Order source systems

Order source systems are the intake valves that represent the sources of the orders that you need to fulfill. These sources can vary not only from one merchant to another but dynamically as buying trends fluctuate and new marketplaces come online.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management delivers the flexibility required to rapidly scale and incorporate new sources of order intake, whether these sources are business partners, wholesale customers, distributors, or franchises. This is what Intelligent Order Management’s partnership with Magento from Adobe is all about. The pre-built connector for Intelligent Order Management will give your customers the buying options they desire while allowing for order fulfillment from anywhere: be that online, in-store, curbside, or locker pickup.

Another partnership we are excited to introduce is BigCommerce. The pre-built connector for Intelligent Order Management will enable a real-time flow of all orders generated through the BigCommerce platform to route them to a single order orchestration platform. The combination creates a streamlined and efficient data flow that provides a harmonious online shopping experience across the entire customer journey—from processing to management and finally to the fulfillment of the product.

Retailers can go faster by leveraging this new and expanding ecosystem of leading service providers. With these new tools powering the future of their retail supply chains, brand owners gain real-time visibility into each step of the order journey and fulfillment insights in real-time through customizable and integrated dashboards that enable their supply chain team to overcome constraints and improve operational efficiency.

Fulfillment and delivery

Intelligent Order Management is also partnering with service providers like Körber (formerly Warehouse Advantage) to provide seamless end-to-end supply chain experiences for retailers around the world. Körber is a supply chain software provider that empowers organizations to scale their operations on a global level and keep their inventory moving.

Körber’s supply chain flagship warehouse management solution is known for its flexibility and ease of configuration to adapt to changing business needs. In a world that changes constantly, the dexterity to adjust business processes as necessary has become top of mind for retailers looking to compete in today’s ultra-competitive environment. With the pre-built connector for Intelligent Order Management, organizations can use the order information, optimize orchestration, and facilitate strategic sourcing and slotting to mitigate wasted movement and expedited fulfillment.

Together, Intelligent Order Management and Körber empowers users to streamline orders through to execution—saving retailers time, optimizing throughput, and increasing visibility from order to fulfillment.

Another fulfillment and delivery partnership that we are proud to highlight is with Flexe. With the pre-built connector for Intelligent Order Management, organizations can quickly extend to include a team of logistic experts that are dedicated to supporting their business—day in, day out. Microsoft’s partnership with Flexe also provides retailers with access to the largest scalable network of warehouse and fulfillment service providers. This is the beauty and simplicity of Microsoft Power Platform that runs Intelligent Order Management. If you need it, simply connect it through our powerful and intuitive, drag and drop order orchestration designer interface.

Order orchestration actions

As a trusted Microsoft partner and vendor for more than a decade, Vertex, Inc. is a leading global provider of indirect tax software and solutions that integrate with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 suite. With the pre-built connector for Intelligent Order Management, customers get complete access to Vertex’s tax solutions. Vertex’s innovative solution enables customers to benefit from the automatic posting of sales and use tax and VAT with comprehensive business process support.

“As we collaborate with the team at Microsoft, we remain focused on our mission to deliver the most trusted tax technology, enabling our joint global customers to transact, comply and grow with confidence,” said Nichole Prendergast, Global Partner Leader at Vertex, Inc. “The integration of our tax solutions with Intelligent Order Management is a natural extension of modern supply chain management which requires optimizing tax strategies and efficiency as much as inventory management.”

What’s next?

As we have highlighted with the partnerships announced here, Intelligent Order Management helps businesses go faster by adapting rapidly to complex environments successfully. It gives retailers the ability to get up and running quickly using a range of connectors to existing business applications, order sources, and fulfillment providers. Our next steps are to roll out additional capabilities for Intelligent Order Management in the coming months, including more pre-built connectors, as we continue to develop our partner ecosystem of best-of-breed applications that enhance your ability to capitalize on new order management solutions quickly.

Learn more about how Intelligent Order Management helps companies adapt quickly and fulfill efficiently in this recent blog post or dig deeper into Intelligent Order Management by watching this MyIgnite session on intelligent fulfillment orchestration for optimized delivery.

Further NRF news

• Explore the new wave of cloud innovation at NRF Retail Converge
• 4 post-pandemic retail trends

1- Gartner, Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications, Mike Lowndes, Sandy Shen, 18 June 2020

The post Intelligent Order Management partners with leading service providers to optimize order management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are amid one of the most rapid global transformations of trade that the world has ever seen. The past 30 years were a constant drumbeat of globalization, weaving geographically dispersed markets together with breakthroughs in technology and the widespread adoption of lean thinking. The result was the creation of complex and interconnected global supply chains that controlled costs through practices such as just-in-time (JIT) inventory management. Then COVID-19 forced markets to lock down and trading partners to scramble to deliver products to customers. What has become clear is that our supply chains—while having succeeded at reducing costs, and connecting business and consumer markets worldwide—were far less robust than we had imagined.

Today, there is a new push to improve the world’s supply chains, but the focus is now on resiliency. Cost containment is still a factor, so simply ordering and holding more inventory is not the answer. What holds promise is tighter integration and collaboration with both internal and external trading partners, faster access to data, and a new level of transparency and visibility into the end-to-end value chain made possible by digital transformation. The backdrop to these challenges is an accelerating fourth industrial revolution that brings with it the promise of leveraging more data and automation to produce highly-resilient and globally-optimized supply chain networks.

At Microsoft, we are at the forefront of this historic transformation, providing clients worldwide with the digital solutions they need to remain competitive. The four success stories that follow bring to life how Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps organizations realize supply chain transformation and leverage the benefits of a modern, cloud-based, intelligent platform to deliver versatility, scalability, and rapid time to value.

GWA Group enhances efficiency in end-to-end chain

GWA Group Limited (GWA) was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 1993 and is a leading innovator, designer, and supplier of product solutions, services, and intelligent technology focused on the Bathrooms & Kitchens (B&K) segment.

Like most businesses, GWA Group struggled with multiple challenges through the pandemic as customer demand shifted, markets locked down, and nodes in the supply chain became unreachable. GWA Group leadership faced a choice: continue with its digital transformation agenda or scale back and redeploy resources elsewhere within the business.

The decision to accelerate digital transformation rather than scaling back was an obvious one to GWA. The company viewed digital transformation not only as a mechanism to allow them to efficiently meet shifting customer needs, but also as a step to prepare the company for future growth covered by a global data platform.

GWA Group worked with Microsoft consulting services to reduce complexity from the business by deploying Dynamics 365 as its end-to-end solution for data and actionable insights. Today, GWA Group has gained digital transparency into its operations, transforming the way they do business and the way the business thinks.

“We are deploying Dynamics 365 to manage the entire business ecosystem lifecycle across Customer Care, Warehouse Management, Finance & Operations, Supply Chain, Commerce, and Marketing—we’re not just transforming the way our business works, we’re actually transforming the way our business thinks. Stripping out complexity across business processes introduces greater flexibility and agility as the industry changes.”—Alex Larson, General Manager Technology & Transformation, GWA Group

Read more about how GWA Group embeds innovation culture with Dynamics 365.

Michael Hill optimizes inventory and boosts sales

Founded in New Zealand in 1979, Michael Hill is one of the world’s largest high-end jewelers. Nearing 300 retail locations across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the company has closely maintained exclusive, long-term relationships with its customers for over 40 years.

Michael Hill believes that great in-store retail experiences are the key lever for increasing customer loyalty. To realize its goals for continually improving its support operations and delivering the retail experience it envisions, the company correctly identified the need to increase efficiency in its shipping and warehousing processes.

“Michael Hill has been running a transformation journey to completely change our operating paradigm so that we put the customer first at the very beginning, from production to fulfillment.”—Matt Keays, Chief Information Officer, Michael Hill

The company worked with its implementation partner DXC Technology and Microsoft to replace its legacy retail operations solution. The business needed a solution to manage global store operations and a platform capable of delivering end-to-end multichannel capabilities and connected processes. The company found this solution by building a vastly improved retail platform using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Next, the company launched an internal initiative to optimize operations, customer service, warehousing, inventory, and retail financial processes by implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. The changes were planned for March 2020, but the global pandemic demanded an accelerated plan of action. Indeed, with 300 stores holding high-value inventory, many facing temporary closure, the company confronted logistic complications that forced expensive, indirect, and inefficient shipments to its customers worldwide.

The international jeweler moved quickly to avoid harm to its business and its brand. Dynamics 365 was deployed rapidly and almost immediately began providing increased visibility into inventory availability across its supply chain. This gave Michael Hill the ability to treat each of its stores as a warehouse location, which seamlessly allowed customers to order items online with the option to pick up at the site of their choice or ship direct from that location.

Today, Michael Hill powers its new retail operating platform to generate better insights about what customers are looking for, transforming their approach to customer service and improving their ability to respond to changing business needs and new market conditions.

“The really exciting part about using Dynamics 365 is how fast we can adapt to changing business needs. We are driving efficiencies in our warehouse, trialing new fulfillment models, and unlocking deeper insights into customer experiences faster than ever before.”—Ian Dallas, Program Manager of Supply Chain and Finance, Michael Hill

Read more about how Michael Hill optimizes inventory allocation and boosts sales with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce.

TBM digitizes processes for efficient reporting

Tan Boon Ming Sdn Bhd (TBM) is Malaysia’s one-stop appliances superstore. Founded in 1945 as a neighborhood bicycle store, the company quickly expanded its offerings to appliances, furniture, and radios. From the beginning, the company was founded with a vision to be the best-in-class service retailer, striving to deliver quality in everything it does, from the products it sells to the services it offers. It was this vision that compelled TBM to begin a journey of digital transformation in 2016.

The company’s key challenge was the lack of data synchronization and integration with its existing Warehouse Management System (WMS). Because the existing WMS was not integrated, the company was forced to use heavy manual processes to take stock across 40 locations— printing stock sheets and manually tallying the results. To overcome this challenge, TBM implemented Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to enable greater visibility into its warehouse and inventory while simultaneously reducing the effort required to access this critical data.

TBM has since adopted other Dynamics 365 modules across its business to bring all business processes under control into a single, integrated, and seamless platform. Dynamics 365 Finance was implemented and now allows the company to enjoy efficient accounting and reporting. Dynamics 365 Commerce enabled TBM to overcome the challenges of the pandemic and continue to serve customers without delays during Malaysia’s Movement Control Order period.

With Dynamics 365, TBM has a cohesive view of its warehouse, logistics, and inventory integrated with an agile storefront, allowing them to provide consistent and scalable customer experiences.

Read more about how this Malaysian appliances store digitizes processes and enables more efficient reporting using Dynamic 365.

Chemist Warehouse migrates to the cloud for enhanced customer experiences

Over the last 16 years, Chemist Warehouse has grown from a single shop in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs to become one of Australia’s top 10 retailers. Today, the group has over 400 stores across Australia, serves more than 1.5 million customers, and dispenses more than 500,000 prescriptions a week.

The rapid growth and success of Chemist Warehouse compelled the company to take on a business transformation aimed at improving customer experiences. As a longstanding user of Microsoft Dynamics AX on-premises, the company was interested in moving to Dynamics 365 in the cloud. This aspect of its business transformation would support international expansion goals by providing a scalable and agile end-to-end ERP platform capable of leveraging the cloud’s benefits.

Chemist Warehouse began its international expansion in Ireland in 2019. The company quickly realized that to support local and global operations, everyone, including its network of over 500 franchisees, needed to work on a single information system. The company decided to implement Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and point of sale. This change would provide the necessary foundation to support international expansion and serve to underpin the deployment of an array of new health-related services and ultimately create an entirely different class of customer experience.

“The main reason to leverage the Dynamics 365 platform is time to value-add. The mantra for us is scalability, agility—they’re the two things that we bear in mind with everything we do. It’s really to be able to provide a better experience to the customer.”—Jules Cardinale, CIO, Chemist Warehouse

After implementation, Cardinale and his team rapidly transformed how they operate and moved to roll out many process improvements across the value chain. Today, Chemist Warehouse can offer a true omnichannel retail experience. With the integration of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, the business has greater visibility into what products are on order and when items are shipped and received. These improvements created the necessary infrastructure to allow the company to introduce a new click-to-deliver option for their customers and to provide it seamlessly, side-by-side with its traditional click and collect.

Read more about how Chemist Warehouse prescribes cloud transformation to boost customer wellbeing.

Connect with us to transform your supply chain

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps organizations meet the fast-changing customer demand, by performing distribution planning in a matter of minutes. It enables companies to resolve demand and supply imbalances by enhancing visibility of their supply chain and inventory in real time. They can easily scale to handle large volumes of transactions while fulfilling orders from multiple channels, mitigate stock-outs and overstocking, and seamlessly integrate with third-party systems.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers an integrated out-of-the-box warehouse management system that enables companies to consistently deliver products on time. Companies can create no-code or low-code customized heatmaps and automate workflows to optimize capacity, layout, consumption, and flow of raw and finished goods in real time. Also, it further helps create resiliency by keeping critical warehouse processes running around-the-clock at high throughput on the edge and ensure business continuity in remote locations when disconnected from the cloud. It helps organizations increase competitive advantage, overcome adversity, and proactively detect opportunities all the way from planning to procurement to manufacturing to distribution, order orchestration, and delivery.

Learn more

You can learn more about Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, how to build resilience with an agile supply chain, or if you are ready to take the first step towards implementing the one of the most forward-thinking ERP solution available, then contact us today to see a demo or start a free trial.

You can also learn what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and listen to our recent podcast “Preparing for your supply chain’s next normal” with Frank Della Rosa and Simon Ellis.

The post 4 successful supply chain transformation stories with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Truly engaged, always connected

As digital commerce continues to evolve and become an integral revenue stream for retailers and consumer goods companies, it is paramount for these companies to digitally transform their supply chain as well. They need the agility to rapidly plan and adapt to changing customer needs, use AI and machine learning to automate order orchestration, fulfilment, and delivery, and lastly, seamlessly add new fulfilment methods like buy online pick up in store (BOPIS) or curbside pick-up. Customer shopping behaviors are constantly changing, but customers continue to seek near-instant gratification when buying online or in-store. If a product is not on the shelf when they need it, they will order it from another retailer instantly using their cell phone.

According to a recent study by Forrester Consulting commissioned by Microsoft, 69 percent of retail businesses were impacted due to disruptions in supply chain and shifting customer demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and only 51 percent of retail decision makers felt their supply chains are prepared to meet growing digital commerce needs. One of the ways to achieve agility is to enhance end-to-end visibility of their supply chain and have access to real-time omnichannel inventory data. Creating a digital supply chain twin is a starting point to help businesses gain visibility all the way from the supplier upstream to the customer downstream. With the digital twin, the supply chain leaders can predict disruptions, simulate different countermeasures to overcome them, and automate the execution of these countermeasures to resolve the issues in a timely manner. Further, with real-time visibility into their inventory, retailers can drive demand for overstock products and expedite replenishment of out-of-stock items in a cost-effective manner.

Companies like Michael Hill are using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to be more agile in responding to changing market needs. With their stores impacted by lockdowns due to the pandemic, Michael Hill accelerated their roll out of Microsoft Dynamics 365 to gain end-to-end supply chain visibility and improve availability of their valuable inventory. They overcame complications related to shipping to global customers and seamlessly shifted to using each retail store as a warehouse location so that customers can order jewelry online and pick up at the store of their choice.

“Moving our supply chain onto Dynamics 365 was a major step-change from our legacy platform, but the really exciting part is the speed with which we are now adapting to changing business needs be they driving incremental efficiencies in our warehouse, trialing new fulfilment models or unlocking deeper insights into customer experiences. We are able to trial and mature new models faster than ever before.”—Ian Dallas, Program Manager Supply Chain and Finance, Michael Hill

They can take the customer-first approach using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to support its warehouse management system (WMS), transform its supply chain, and connect production, inventory, and distribution directly to in-store operations and customer fulfilment. They are now able to expand their fulfilment choice to their customers including curbside pickup as a contactless option in Canada.

“Now that we have established Dynamics 365 as our operating WMS, the world is our oyster—tactically, we are able to deliver agile flow solutions that we could only dream of with our legacy systems. Strategically, we have a foundation for our expanding supply chain transformation endeavors, enabling integration with best of breed partners to deliver outstanding customer experiences.”—Nat Cooper, GM Global Logistics, Michael Hill

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps companies close the gap between demand and fulfilment to deliver a delightful customer experience. Companies can rapidly re-plan supply and distribution of products in near real-time within minutes with in-memory microservice to effectively adapt to shifting customer demand.

“It’s like magic. With Planning Optimization, our master planning went from five to seven hours to less than five minutes and the on boarding couldn’t have gone any smoother.”—Andy Lee, IT Operations Manager, Fenwick

The intelligent distributed order management system can manage, automate, and optimize order fulfillment to ensure on-time delivery in a cost-effective manner. This ensures that the inventory is not only stored closest to where the customer demand is, but also in the right quantity to reduce the time to fulfillment. It helps drive down excess inventory.

Companies like Dr. Martens have implemented virtual warehouses using real-time omnichannel inventory data and together with their overnight store replenishment capability, they are able to get the right products to the right store within a short lead time.

Also, according to the study by Forrester, retailers are building redundancy into their supplier network to gain agility and become more resilient. Forty-five percent of the retailers are planning to increase the size of the distribution networks, and 42 percent of the retailers plan to onboard more suppliers to ensure greater flexibility going forward. This includes adding transportation partners to alleviate bottlenecks in getting goods to customers as demand fluctuates. Forty-eight percent of retailers consider last-mile delivery to be one of the top five most important components of supply chain agility. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps retailers optimize their sourcing and fulfillment strategy with a fast and sophisticated supplier qualification process. It enhances collaboration with vendors using portals and streamlines planning of inbound and outbound shipments to ensure on time delivery to the customer.

As retailers embark on their journey to the next normal, they can improve resilience and easily scale with cloud and edge computing enabling faster decision making in a compressed timeframe.

A company like Chemist Warehouse, a large regional retailer with 500 franchise stores and 20,000 products, digitally transformed to the cloud to be able to offer a true omnichannel retail experience to its customers. Chemist Warehouse integrated the enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business-to-business offerings from Dynamics 365 to achieve complete transparency about which products are on order, who is delivering what, when it will be delivered, and who has ordered it. This has helped them streamline delivery and pave the way for expanding its online customer offering from click and collect, to click and deliver, while the customer experience at the point of purchase (whether in-store or online) is made as friction free as possible.

“The main reason to leverage the Dynamics 365 platform is time to value-add. The mantra for us is scalability and agility—they’re the two things that we bear in mind with everything we do. It’s really to be able to provide a better experience to the customer.“—Jules Cardinale, Chief Information Officer, Chemist Warehouse

Learn more

• Learn more about how Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps retailers and distributors improve resiliency and enhance visibility and scale operations, and learn how Dynamics 365 enables the future of retail.
• Read additional details in our recent blog post from Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Industry, “NRF 2021: enabling retailers to reimagine the road ahead with Microsoft Business Applications.”
• Read additional details in our recent blog post from Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, WW Retail and Consumer Goods Industry, “Introducing Microsoft Cloud for Retail.”
• If you are at NRF, visit our booth for more information and to engage with our knowledgeable staff.

The post Quickly respond to changing retail needs with an intelligent supply chain appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Even before the pandemic, organizations across industries, from manufacturing to retailers, felt the squeeze to modernize supply chain operations. The historic supply chain shock of 2020 has accelerated the need to both respond to immediate disruptions while building resilience into every layer of the supply chain.

In the past, rapidly overhauling a supply chain operation has been no easy feat. Today, cloud solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management are dramatically shortening the time and effort to get up and running on a modern, intelligent cloud-based solution—reducing a once-massive months long effort to just weeks.

Let’s look at three organizations that transformed supply chain operations in a remarkably short time, while building in a level of resilience that provides the agility to weather any future disruption.

Wahl Clipper Corporation

In 1911, Leo J. Wahl invented the first practical electric hair clipper. One hundred years later, the Wahl family is carrying forward the tradition of innovation and superior service with 3,000 associates and a partner network that distributes product in virtually every country worldwide.

With different on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems across global locations, the team faced increasing challenges managing the complexities of a global supply chain. “The system we’ve been using for the last 30 years: we’ve outgrown it. It can’t keep up with the changing business needs that we have,” explained Brian Wahl, CEO. Among the culprits of inefficiency—data inconsistencies across offices. “Our data wasn’t rationalized,” according to John Payton, Director of Information Technology. “It didn’t mean the same thing in each country or in each ERP system.”

By migrating to a single cloud platform, Wahl is able to execute uniformly across global resources instead of operating as individual units tied to disparate systems.

“We can already see that Dynamics 365, along with Office, is allowing us to process information, to move information to people much more quickly in a way that they can understand, absorb and make decisions on almost immediately. So we really appreciate the integration of those products along with the balance of Microsoft’s vision around the modern workplace, of having other tools available to us like Power BI and Power Apps, and we can bring solutions to the business in hours that used to take us days or weeks previously.”—Brian Wahl, CEO

Takeaway

Fractured point solutions and siloed, disparate data sources can be a major source of inefficiency as organizations scale supply chain operations in the digital age. By migrating on-premises and legacy solutions to Microsoft Dynamics 365, Wahl Clipper Corporation broke down technological barriers to deliver a universally agile, collaborative and insight-driven way of doing business across global operations. Harmonized data available across point solutions, including Microsoft Office, enables faster decision making and opportunities to collaborate and share information more freely. And access to Microsoft Power Platform drives the speed and agility to solve challenges more effectively by enabling those closest to problems to solve them.

Read additional details on how this hair clipper manufacturer migrated to the cloud to adapt to growing business needs and innovations.

The JB Hi-Fi Group

Fulfilling bulky commercial goods can be tricky—a logistical puzzle that requires an efficient warehousing, inventory management, and fulfillment that can keep product moving. For JB Hi-Fi, a modern warehouse management system is essential to fulfill an extensive range of consumer electronics, appliances, and home entertainment products across 300 JB Hi-Fi and The Good Guys retail locations in Australia and New Zealand.

JB Hi-Fi needed a new warehouse management system to boost the efficiency of inventory flow, management of back-of-house processes such as goods storage, and route to market for big and bulky goods. The modern system needed to ensure data transparency across the organization, as well as seamlessly coordinate logistics across two retailers, each with unique point of sale systems and unique stock codes.

Thanks to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, JB Hi-Fi not only found an intelligent solution that met all the Group’s needs but was able to deploy the solution for warehouse management in Sydney in just four months.

“It’s definitely an accelerated timeframe for this type of project, but it is actually quite achievable with a modern tech stack—the fact that the core environment is cloud based, software as a service. You can integrate quickly to Azure.”—Simon Page, Technology Director

In addition to a faster time to value, Dynamics 365 provided the agility to seamlessly integrate with JB Hi-Fi and The Good Guys host systems—solving the logistical challenge posed by two separate systems for each retailer.

“One of the things we had to do is focus on the end process that the customer experiences. All the stages that an order flows through and a delivery flows through, right from where the sales person is having a conversation through to getting it to your door, that process needed to be harmonized for both brands. We’ve effectively managed to do that by creating this group model, which then translates back into statuses that the host systems understand without having to rewrite all the host systems.”—Simon Page, Technology Director

Takeaway

With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in place as the warehouse management foundations, JB Hi-Fi Group can focus all its efforts to ensure bulky goods are warehoused, picked, dispatched, and delivered safely, efficiently, and fast—and in the process ensure it remains at the forefront of modern retail. The move has also made the business more resilient to disruptions, including COVID-19. The Group has been able to support a shift in how people shopped during lockdown, while seamlessly delivering from warehouses and stores.

Read additional details how JB Hi-Fi accelerates efficiency and customer experiences in the transformation to cloud native warehouse management.

Invitalia

Invitalia coordinates economic development in Italy. When COVID-19 spread to Italy, the agency took on additional responsibility for coordinating the acquisition and distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE), medicines, medical devices, and other supplies from international suppliers. Invitalia took over the program at a critical time: international buyers were chasing a limited supply of equipment. Adding to the complexity, each hospital in Italy ordered medical supplies in a decentralized, unstructured way, causing procurement delays and frequent partial or missing orders.

In need of a logistics platform capable of simplifying the complex process of purchasing and distributing PPE and COVID-19 supplies, Invitalia rapidly deployed Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Microsoft Services and Agic Technology, a Microsoft Gold Partner, helped them set up a system for managing hundreds of international suppliers and transporting equipment to hospitals in just two weeks.

Takeaway

Invitalia was able to achieve remarkable time to value with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, providing a centralized solution that helps the agency assess medical needs across the country and then quickly provision and distribute critical medical equipment. They’ve also adopted a platform that delivers the agility to easily extend across other departments and uses.

“It will be straight forward to expand our use of Dynamics 365 into other areas of public administration. It connects easily with other Microsoft products, giving us the opportunity to create end-to-end solutions for enterprise resource planning.”—Fabrizio Bellezza, Chief Information Officer

Read additional details how Invitalia streamlines procurement and distribution of vital medical supplies with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Build resiliency into your supply chain

These three stories bring to life how modern, cloud-based intelligent solutions can deliver versatility, scalability, and rapid time to value, even during globally-disruptive events. We’ll share more stories from the supply chain frontlines in the next few weeks. Until then, learn more about Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, see what’s new and planned in the next few months, learn how to build resilience with an agile supply chain, and contact us to today to see a demo or start a free trial.

The post 3 unique success stories—building resilience into the supply chain appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.