If you’re responsible for the smooth operation of warehouse operations across your organization, you know that managing inventory, machines, people, and resources efficiently while meeting tight delivery deadlines means that you need to have resilience in your supply chain. To help companies like yours execute mission-critical manufacturing and distribution processes without interruptions, we recently announced a preview for cloud and edge scale unit add-ins for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain management.

So how can your company benefit from cloud and edge scale units? One effective tactic is to place scale units near the location where production work is donewhether that’s in the cloud or right inside the four walls of the warehouse facility. That way, you can take advantage of the dedicated capacity that scale units provide.

Monogram Foods Solutions is a leading manufacturer and marketer of value-added meat products, snacks, and appetizers. Their team is participating in the preview. As noted here, they’re having great success with scale units:

“Our frozen goods warehouse has a tighttime constrained picking process, and it is critical for our warehouse team to have a consistent and reliably quick response throughout the entire picking operation. The architectural design of the solution ensures that these critical warehouse workloads are isolated from the rest of our operations, eliminating points of contention during these time-sensitive processes.”

Transition to workloadsforresilientwarehouseexecution

You can find more information about what scale units are and how to set them up for the warehouse executionworkload inthe documentation.In this blog post, we’re going to take a deeper look into how to implement dedicated scale units.

With theworkloadforwarehouseexecution,you cantransition theexecution phase of warehouse processes intodedicatedscale units.The workload definesthescopeof business processes, data, andpoliciesincluding rules, validation, and ownershipfor what runs in thescale unit.Inbound, outbound, and otherwarehouse management processeshave beensplit into decoupled phases for planning, execution, receiving, and shipping.

After you configure the workload, the workers on thewarehousefloorcontinue to go through the work,like choosing the mobile warehousemanagement experience,connecteddirectlyto thededicated processing capacity in thescale unit.

Hybrid multi-node topology makes it all work

Inthehybridmulti-node topology,individual nodes are responsiblefor pieces in the distribution processes.The hub supports data management, warehouse process management, and release of orders to the warehouseand as well as some finalization steps, depending on the scenario.

For inbound warehouse processes, the responsibility of the workload on the scale unit beginswhen thepurchasing agentreleasespurchase ordersto the warehouse.Itusesrecordsofthe newtype ofwarehouseordersto trigger theworkforthe warehouseclerkson thefloor.

A copy of the relevant inventoryisavailable on the scale unit and isconstantly keptin syncwith the central inventory. For temporarily disconnected edge scale units, this local inventory acts as alocal cache, so the warehouse workercancompletework like put-away,independentlyof thescale unit.

As soon as warehouseworkershave completedatask, the cloud hub runs thenext steps.In the public preview,thisincludesthe generation of thereceiptsfor the receiving process.The transition happensinstantaneouslyifthe (edge) scale unithasconnectivity.

Sales clerksfindsupportinoutboundwarehouse processeswhenreleasingsales orders to the warehouse.Theworkload in thescale unit will apply the relevantwave processing methodandwarehouseworkerswillperformtaskslike picking.From there,theshipping processwilltakeover. Tasks likethe packing slip generation willstill continue onthe cloud hubin the previewversion.

The workload for warehouse execution supports additionaloperations that runfullyon the scale unit.Warehouse workers caninquireaboutitems,itemlocations,and license plates,as well as moveitemswithinthe warehouse.

Take away: Scale units help you to build resilient warehouse execution

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management transitions to a multi-node supply chain topology. This allows customers to build resilience by deploying scale units in the cloud or on the edge with built-in redundancy and flexible management.

The warehouse execution workloads in the public preview show how business processes support resilience in this hybrid multi-node topology for supply chain management. Microsoft will continue finetuning the responsibilities of workloads in scale units based on customer feedback to address the most common use cases out of the box.

In the upcoming Spring release updates, you will find several important enhancements. Warehouse workers in outbound scenarios can perform simple picking and loading work for transfer orders on scale units. Label printing will be available on scale units, including support for wave labels. Further enhancements include cluster picking, wave processing for shipments, change of workers, cancelation, location movement, and completion of work for sales and transfer orders.

Nextsteps

Learn moreabout cloud andedgescaleunits and other important topics in the documentationfor Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The post Robust warehouse execution with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

With the global disruption of the pandemic, healthcare organizations are particularly challenged to promote telehealth services and engage patients and providers while adhering to strict compliance and security regulations. Marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) tools such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights are expanding the ways in which healthcare organizations can create communications that are personalized and relevant while respecting those regulations.

A centralized system must be secure and speedy

Sharing information across its health network is at the center of Healthdirect Australia’s mission. The nonprofit helps a population of more than 25 million Australians access the right healthcare at the right time by providing government-funded telehealth services through helplines, video calls, an online symptom checker, and a mobile app. It also delivers information to other health organizations about benefits for their customers, including service enhancements, product launches, and other advances.

To build a reliable and flexible engagement platform that could distribute information while maintaining data privacy, Healthdirect Australia chose to move to Dynamics 365 Marketing.

“We needed a centralized system to help us improve consistency and remove the risk of content duplication,” said James Harris, Marketing Manager of Healthdirect Australia. With that system now in place, the organization is further extending its value, as Dynamics 365 Marketing is being used to increase productivity by bringing HealthdirectAustralia’s data together in one place.

“Before using Dynamics 365 Marketing, we couldn’t adequately scale our communications,” says Harris. “Now, we can scale as required to share information and quickly provide Primary Health Networks with the latest messaging about our services. Our speed of delivery has gone from weeks to days [and] we’re able to get our message out to the right contacts much more quickly than we could before. When COVID-19 hit, we used Dynamics 365 Marketing to communicate with the Primary Health Networks, which then distributed that information to health workers on the front line.”

One industry, many concerns

The complexities, dynamics, and regulatory concerns of healthcare organizations are increasingly finding solutions in powerful marketing automation and CRM products.

Microsoft is moving quickly and strongly to meet the demands and requirements of healthcare’s fast-tracked transition to digital. Although many organizations were focused on digital transformation even before the global health crisis of 2020, the pandemic drove rapid innovation from solution providers. Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights increased their focus on the unique needs of healthcare in extraordinary circumstances.

Perhaps the most impact will come from Microsoft‘sfirst industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. This initiative willenhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, improve clinical and operational insights, and make it faster and easier to provide more efficient care. Significantly, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcareis designed with the regulatory guidelines that healthcare is bound by in mind. It helps ensure the end-to-end security, compliance, and interoperability of health data.

Commitment to compliance

Whenever an organization is dealing with people’s healthcare information, security and compliance are top-of-mind concerns. Those organizations should know that Dynamics 365 Marketing helps them meet HIPAA-compliance at the highest level. Microsoft Dynamics 365, along with other Dynamics 365 apps and Microsoft solutions, has received certification for the HITRUST CSF as Microsoft is one of the first hyperscale cloud service providers to receive this certification.

At the company level, this means one large concern is a checked box.

“Because Microsoft helps keep Dynamics 365 Marketing compliant with data protection standards in the Australian Government Information Security Manual, we have complete peace of mind that its data security meets our requirements.”Paul Noone, Office 365 Administrator and Developer, Healthdirect Australia

Stop the siloing: information-sharing made secure

Complying with patient record confidentiality while striving for more personalized in-patient communications is a key challenge of the digital transformation of healthcare, due to the sensitivity of the personal information being handled, including patient demographics and medical histories.

Like many healthcare providers, Dayton Children’s Hospital in Dayton, Ohio used a siloed approach, storing clinical information in one system, managing call logs in another, and handling web registrations and marketing contacts in another.

However, the separation of information hampered both the care teams and the marketing team. Dayton Children’s Hospital decided to address the situation using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to close the gap and establish a scalable, highly-secure, and HIPAA-compliant data foundation that spanned both clinical and marketing information.

Now, the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights foundation allows the marketing team to easily create new dynamic segments based on patient age, guarantor’s address, and other relevant personal activity information such as sports-related injuries. Those segments can then be pushed to Dynamics 365 Marketing for marketing campaigns.

As a result, Dayton Children’s Hospital has gained the ability to give its marketing campaigns the information to create personalized messaging while being fully confident of its HIPAA compliance: a closed-loop marketing process between Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

A successful healthcare organization has information management challenges as part of its ongoing operations. Optimizing all its information to communicate and serve patients while providing safeguards for privacy is a delicate balance that is readily achievable using Dynamics 365.

Learn more

• Gain an overview into Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Explore additional business continuity solutions and resources from Microsoft.
• Contact your Microsoft sales representative or our sales team.

The post How healthcare organizations can share information securely appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s modern sales environment a trend is surfacing among B2B sellers and buyers: the desire for more authentic, personalized relationships. But despite the desire for personalized relationships, purchasing involves more people than ever, and successful sales require sellers to navigate an increasingly large group of stakeholders.

While increasingly large groups of stakeholders may create complexity in relationship building, it also opens the door to uncovering additional customer needs. If your organization is equipped with the tools needed to successfully implement a customer-centric perspective, you can turn complexity into opportunity, and not only build trusted relationships with your customers but also uncover the insights needed to turn relationships into revenue.

C.H. Robinson improves visibility into customer needs with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Global logistics company C.H. Robison is no stranger to solving complex problems for their more than 119,000 customers. When they needed a better way to capture customer needs and catalog them centrally, they turned to Microsoft.

C.H. Robinson empowered their organization to dive deeper into uncovering what their customers need and better articulate all that they can do for their customers by deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Power Apps, and Microsoft Power BI. C.H. Robison realized the benefits at a rapid pace, and achieved full ROI in 11 months, a full six months ahead of the projected schedule.

With Dynamics 365, C.H. Robinson implemented a digital transformation that resulted in 5 key takeaways:

1. Increased focus on the customer and potential opportunities: C.H. Robinson utilized Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Apps to create a canvas app that could streamline the capture of detailed customer data. Salespeople can use Dynamics 365 Sales to fluidly input and access detailed customer data at any point while talking to customers, which helps salespeople maintain focus on the customer and opportunity.
2. Immediate visibility into unmet customer needs: Just as important as solving surfaced problems is not missing the chance to solve for additional unmet needs. Using a Power BI dashboard embedded in Dynamics 365, C.H. Robinson’s salespeople and account managers can more efficiently identify opportunities and plan out the next actions to take to meet customer needs.
3. Full deployment in six months, training included: Over the course of three “go lives” beginning in June 2019, Dynamics 365 Sales was deployed to 3,000 people at C.H. Robinson, 90 percent of whom use it at least once a month. PowerObjects, an HCL Technologies company and a Microsoft Partner Network member with Gold competencies, facilitated the rollout with a series of “leadership change workshops” and training sessions, ensuring everyone understood the “why” in addition to the “what” and “how.”
4. A foundation for further business transformation: As just the first phase of all-up digital transformation, C.H. Robinson now has insights into Microsoft features, functionality, and technology that can expand their innovation and outcomes. James Santy, Vice President of Sales Operations at C.H. Robinson, notes that, “Throughout our journey, Microsoft has been by our side every step of the way. Based on our tremendous success to date, we’re eager to consider other business applications from Microsoft.”
5. A centralized, 360-degree view of each customer: The deployment of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform has resulted in C.H. Robinson creating and capturing 14,000 individuals sales opportunities in the first six months, and an increase in the quality of data by 89 percent. They owe it all to the centralized repository of accurate and trusted data within Dynamics 365 Sales that can be used to identify, prioritize, and close opportunities.

In addition to opportunities, ROI, and data quality, C.H. Robinson is seeing another key metric increase: customer happiness.

“We embarked on our digital transformation because our customers were giving us feedback that they needed us to help them in new ways … we still have work to do, but today, with Dynamics 365, we now have the foundation we need to get there.”James Santy, Vice President of Sales Operations, C.H. Robinson

Learn more

Read the full story to learn how C.H. Robinson gained actionable insights into their customers’ needs.

Watch a demo or take a guided tour to see how Dynamics 365 Sales can empower your sellers with actionable insights.

The post 5 takeaways how a company turned needs into opportunities 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 solutionreducing 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 inefficiencydata 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 trickya 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 stackthe 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 systemssolving 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 fastand 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 injust 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 a 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.