Today we are excited to announce the new guided tour for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management. We are also taking this opportunity to talk about businesses’ need for order management solutions to move beyond the limitations of traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and keep pace with the fast-changing landscape of e-commerce.

View of one of the steps of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management guided tour.

Moving beyond traditional ERP

An excellent customer experience is a requirement for organizational success in today’s modern business environment. This is particularly true for retailers, distributors, and manufacturers that are embracing direct-to-consumer business models. When it comes to selling, manufacturing, or distributing physical goods, a critical component of providing an excellent customer experience is ensuring that customer orders are shipped On Time and In Full (OTIF), every time.

And more and more companies are realizing that traditional ERP systems lack the adaptability, agility, and resiliency necessary to keep pace with the ever-evolving demands and growing complexity of modern digital commerce. To meet these challenges, forward-thinking organizations have found that order management solutions provide them the required capability to accept orders from anywhere and fulfill them everywhere in a cost-efficient manner. To this end, let’s look at two ways that Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management allows businesses to move beyond the limitations of traditional ERP systems.

Faster delivery

The accelerated shift to buying online that accompanied the global pandemic came alongside the trend of consumers demanding shorter delivery times. The result is that for companies interested in selling direct-to-consumer, delivering within two daysif not soonerbecame table stakes. It makes sense then that when McKinsey & Company surveyed apparel, hard goods, and specialty retailers in 2021, they found that the overwhelming majority75 percenthad active plans to build out fulfillment networks that offer two-day or faster delivery times by 2022.¹

And this is just one area where traditional ERP systems face challenges and where organizations need advanced solutions to move beyond their limitations. For example, consider that modern digital commerce companies frequently need to add new partners and apps for e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), shipping, billing, tax calculations, etc. To be effective this requires an easy-to-deploy solution that integrates with internal and external ecosystems without the need for costly and time-consuming rip and replace processes. Enter Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, a modern, and open platform that allows organizations to overcome supply chain constraints and disruptions, and capitalize seasonal peak volumes.

Composable approach

Gartner predicts that by 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80 percent in the speed of new feature implementation.² A primary reason for adopting a composable approach is because it provides greater agility and resiliency. Traditional ERP falls short on delivering this agility and resiliency because of their lack of real-time inventory visibility into siloed data. Plus, traditional ERPs don’t have the ability to easily support customized rules for the latest fulfillment methods such as Buy-online, Pickup in-store (BOPIS), and AI and machine learning capabilities.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management seamlessly works with existing ERPs and supply chain solutions to enhance end-to-end visibility. It enables customers to create an execution-based control tower, suited to companies that must delight customers with accurate, timely fulfillment of frequent orders, perhaps using third-party logistics (3PL) providers.

It uses rules based-fulfillment orchestration and AI-based anomaly detection models to proactively identify and address fulfillment constraints and improve delivery times while reducing costs. This helps accelerate decision-making to mitigate the impact of disruptions. As massive amounts of data are generated across the order management processes, technologies such as AI and machine learning are increasingly necessary because businesses must be able to deliver actionable insights at scale.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management enables organizations to extend and operate in complex environments, where there are many internal and external supply chain partners. Moreover, it is designed to easily configure order orchestration flows through low-code or no-code interfaces and quickly scale by adding new partners’ connectors to the best-of-breed solutions for e-commerce, shipping, tax calculation, and more.

At this point, it makes sense to conclude that order management systems need to be open and flexible solutions, capable of handling and integrating with multiple order sources and order orchestration applications. In this way, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is far more flexible than traditional ERPs. It can be used as a started point to build a control tower with this desirable composable approach, as it integrates with existing ERPs, making them much faster and cheaper to customize and support.

In summary, this composable approach is what makes it possible for organizations to connect their existing supply chain systems, enhance these systems with an order management solution, and to integrate all business platforms with new e-commerce, payments, shipping, taxes, and other partners. This is accomplished by using prebuilt connectors to manage the entire order life cycle more efficiently and to provide more organizational agility and resiliency in the process.

Learn more about how to create agile and digital supply chains in this webinar.

What’s next?

We have reviewed some of the areas where Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management allows businesses to move beyond the limitations of traditional ERP systems. We invite you to experience a free trial of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management or visit our new guided tour to learn more.

1-McKinsey & Company, Retail’s need for speed: Unlocking value in omnichannel delivery, September 2021.

2-Gartner, Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications, June 2020. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc., in the U.S. and internationally, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management launches new guided tour appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As the retail industry rebounds from the unparalleled disruptions to store operations over the last year, the store’s role in merchant strategy is evolving and being reimagined. For retailers to thrive in ever more competitive marketplaces, they must embrace technology solutions that enable a modern and intelligent store. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce stands ready with the capabilities to accelerate and empower retailers in their digital transformation journey.

Enhance customer shopping experiences

As physical stores return to pre-pandemic operating capacity, retailers realize the extent to which a new normal for store operations has taken hold. The result is that they are searching for opportunities to leverage technology to improve and automate the in-store experience, reduce costs, enhance operational efficiencies, and ultimately, enhance customer shopping experiences.

As the amount of data generated is growing exponentially across the customer journey, from online to in-store and beyond, retailers need to leverage this data to bridge the digital to physical divide in a seamless and frictionless way. Dynamics 365 Commerce assists companies in these efforts with solutions that delivercurated customer interactions, enable contactless selling, maximize physical store revenue, streamline store operations, and reduce loss due to fraud.

Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

Curated customer interactions

We have previously talked about how Dynamics 365 can deliver personalized digital customer engagement. The natural extension of personalized digital customer engagement is to bring the same strategy to the physical store. In this case, we speak about curating customer interactions by augmenting store associates with an unprecedented view of consumers, also known as clienteling.

This strategy is not new. Retailers have long sought ways to build long-term relationships with their most important customers. In the days before box store chains, repeat customers could reasonably expect sales associates to remember who they were, what their preferences were, and even have a good sense of the items in which they might be interested. As retail chains grew and expanded into e-commerce marketplaces, in-store associate turnover and customer mobility also increased. The result is the personalized experiences that customers desire decreased due to a lack of continuity of in-store associates and, to a lesser extent, the different stores that customers may visit. Another factor at work here is the disconnect between e-commerce marketplaces and physical stores, leaving frontline workers lacking critical data about customer purchases and preferences.

At Microsoft, we are actively enabling technologies such as AI and machine learning to change this situation by empowering store associates with better customer insights based on data gathered across every customer touchpoint. And by connecting the once siloed data of digital and physical enterprise systems, we are helping merchants provide an end-to-end digital buying experience across every stage of the customer journey. In physical stores, this means that associates can utilize handheld digital shared devices to access a full 360-degree customer profile. This provides frontline teams with AI-driven recommendations, access to real-time up-sell and cross-sell guidance, and even unlocks customer brand affinity or product preferences.

Enable contactless selling

One of the trends we highlighted in our recent blog on the 4 post-pandemic retail trends was contactless payments. And with good reason. Market studies in recent months found that a large percentage of consumers were still anxious about shopping in stores. One way that retailers can reduce this anxiety is by enabling seamless contactless selling experiences.

By enabling contactless payments, either via store associate handheld devices or with automated checkout systems, consumers have one less physical surface to touch. While no panacea for eliminating consumers’ health risk and associated anxiety, contactless selling has other benefits like reducing time spent in checkout lines and eliminating a point of friction in the purchase process. Ultimately, Dynamics 365 Commerce enables contactless selling with mobile point-of-sale (POS) and contactless payment solutions so that merchants can deliver safe and secure shopping experiences.

Learn more about contactless payments and other retail trends in our recent e-book: The Future of Commerce in a Post-Pandemic World.

Maximize physical store revenue

Successful merchants understand the importance of maximizing physical store revenue. With Dynamics 365 Commerce, retailers have a deeper understanding of purchasing habits that allow them to tailor product selections, offer timely and data-driven recommendations, and access any relevant promotions. Additionally, by developing a single view of customers for use at physical POS and connecting this with a real-time view of cross-store inventory and purchasing options, merchants can enable endless aisles to ensure that they never miss a sales opportunity. This translates into increasing the number of units sold per transaction and maximization of sales per square foot. Plus, Dynamics 365 Commerce also helps boost in-store team member productivity with inventory, shift, and cash drawer management actions across all role-specific workspaces.

Streamline store operations

Retailers that are seeking to streamline store operations should look to utilize edge-based technology to unlock new insights, such as identifying and responding faster to in-store profit gaps and improving the efficiency of store team members-actions that ultimately serve to improve overall store profitability.

A byproduct of streamlining store operations by adopting innovative and connected technology solutions is that it decreases the time required to open new stores or add new franchises by removing friction from every part of business operations and processes. This is a pivotal area where the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Commerce can help to optimize retail operations and deliver friction-free shopping experiences to customers.

Reduce fraud loss

While retailers are rightly focused on reducing loss due to fraud, they must also focus on delivering data privacy and security. Dynamics 365 Commerce helps merchants maximize profitability by providing loss prevention tools that combat internal fraudulent practices. At the same time, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection provides even greater protection for purchases and accounts with industry-leading enterprise-grade security that also reduces losses due to return fraud.

Learn more: Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

Creating the store of the future

By connecting digital and physical store systems, unifying the data that these systems collect, leveraging that data with AI and machine learning, and connecting that data to in-store team members, Dynamics 365 Commerce is helping retailers to create the store of the future. We believe that the modern and intelligent store is one where retail operations are transformed and reimagined, and we are enabling merchants on this journey to delivercurated customer interactions, enable contactless selling, maximize physical store revenue, streamline store operations, and reduce loss due to fraud.

What’s next?

At Microsoft, we will continue to deliver timely and innovative solutions that help companies enable the modern and intelligent store. If you are ready to start delivering unified, personalized, and seamless buying experiences for your customers and partners, we invite you to try a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce today.

The post Dynamics 365 Commerce enables the modern and intelligent store appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Where and how we work has changed. The hybrid work environment is here to stay, and with it, comes a new set of demands on our sales organizations. The tools that sellers are currently using are not helping meet these new demands.

Yesterday’s tools don’t serve our modern objectives. Sellers can’t afford to work in siloed systems and manually enter data at the end of the day. Manual tracking contributes to poor data quality and prevents sellers from connecting well with customers.

To help our customers thrive in this new normalwe have to break down the silos that not only exist between applications but also those that exist between people across the department, the company, and externally with customers and partners. We need to blur the lines between business applications, productivity tools, and collaboration capabilities so we can help our customers drive efficient and effective customer engagements. Sellers demand this, and their customers expect it.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents the new era of business apps that start from data, use AI, and are built for collaboration.

Given all of this, how does that change what’s top of mind for us as we build and refine our Dynamics 365 Sales app? Our approach is to deliver data first, intelligent, and collaborative business applications. The Dynamics 365 Sales 2021 release wave 2 enhancements can be broken down into three focus areas:

• Conversational intelligence to be more effective in closing dealsEnsuring we support users with valuable, productive experiences that ultimately delight the customer.
• Collaborate anywhere and everywhere to bring deal teams togetherGet better connected across the team with interactions that surface context, and enable easy action and history capture wherever they work.
• Personal productivity to be more efficient and effectiveSave time with prioritization, preparation, and tracking, taken care of for you whether in the office or on the go.

Conversational intelligence to be more effective in closing deals

With the enhancements made with conversational intelligence, sellers can now focus on effectively responding to buying signals to maximize that customer moment. No more selling regrets post-call by missing a trigger. For instance, as sellers prepare for calls, they can quickly review a summary of the previous call, action items, and scan highlights. Using Microsoft Teams within Dynamics 365, sellers can easily make their calls while having access to business data and take notes while the call is being transcribed automatically. Any business-critical insight mentioned during the call is captured and highlighted and suggested actions are surfaced. With all these tips, this approach is so much more effective than having this conversation over Teams aloneeven more effective than doing it face to face. Sellers can now focus on responding to buying signals to maximize that customer moment. No more missing a follow-up or forgetting a customer promise.

Call summaries with suggested actions

See this demo in action: KEY05 Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Business Applications [approx. min 15:00]

Collaborate anywhere and everywhere to bring deal teams together

With our hybrid work styles, the lines between business productivity and general productivity are forever erased. Business users are using Microsoft Office, Teams, mobile applications, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Selling is messy. As much as we’d like it to, it doesn’t follow a linear process. Many different people need to be involved and it’s a changing environment as new requirements are surfaced or people change roles, or new questions come up. At Microsoft Ignite 2021, we announced “Context IQ” a new set of capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 that enable better collaboration by surfacing information and people in the moment, in context with the task at hand. We will vastly improve the ability for a seller to get a job done with others, retain context before, during, and afterward, no matter what application you are in.

Collaborating with team members from within Dynamics 365

Learn more: BRK203 – Accelerate cross-organization collaboration with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365

Personal productivity to be more efficient and effective

The more data-driven sellers are, the more opportunities they have to work on the right priority deals to close. And who wouldn’t want to remove time spent on data entry and instead focus that time on being more effective in customer interactions? In Dynamics 365 Sales, work items are prioritized based on AI so sellers know what action to take and when. Contact information captured through emails and meetings in Outlook is directly brought into Dynamics 365 Sales, helping sellers to instantly discover new contacts and expand their networks. And so you don’t skip a beat when you’re on the go, you can keep track of everything using the built-in Outlook and Teams integration in the intuitive mobile-friendly UI that allows you to follow up on action items and to update records while being away from your computer. All of this is rolled into seller KPI and manager dashboards that help your sales teams be more data-driven with their decision-making to drive better outcomes.

We have been on an incredible journey with our customershelping them evolve their business applications from systems of record capturing data, to intelligent applications that use data and collaboration to drive action. I am incredibly excited to continue this journey as we blur the lines between business application, collaboration, and productivity tools so that we can empower each user with what they need and where they need it so they can achieve better business outcomes.

Resources and links

Learn more about what’s included in Dynamics 365 2021 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Sales.

Missed a session at Microsoft Ignite? Watch it on-demand. Dynamics 365 Sales is highlighted in the following sessions:

• CTS01 Empower everyone for a new world of hybrid work
• CTS02 Build a hyperconnected business
• KEY05 Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Business Applications
• BRK203 Accelerate cross-organization collaboration with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365
• OD168 Unlock your next best opportunity with digital selling

To learn more about how your organization can supercharge your digital sellers, visit the Dynamics 365 Sales webpage and sign up for a free trial.

The post Revolutionizing the future for sellers in Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

With a growing labor shortage and access to new technologies and processes, businesses are adopting mixed reality to improve how employees learn, work, and understand the world around them. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is driving workforce transformation with hands-on training and step-by-step holographic instructions that are seamless, intuitive, and embedded into everyday workflows, equipping employees with the tools they need to access critical information and receive on-the-job guidance.

Today marks the release of two new features in Dynamics 365 Guides:

• Touch activity menuprovides users with an updated UI experience that introduces a touch-enabled main menu, while maintaining hands-free gaze UX for navigation.
• 1:1 calling (in preview)gives users the ability to make an outgoing call to seamlessly collaborate, knowledge share, and problem solve with a remote expert through task, demo, or inspection scenarios.

With these new features, users can streamline tasks within one application, improve the flow of work, and adapt in real-time, making frontline jobs easier, safer, and more efficient.

Calling (in preview): Solve problems in real-time with expertise and ease

With the new 1:1 calling (in preview) feature, any operator can remotely connect with experts, managers, and colleagues to get real-time support. For customers who already use Microsoft Teams, you can call your favorite contacts and easily share your view with a single click to get the help you need while staying hands-free and in-context.

Here are some common ways you might use the new 1:1 calling feature:

• Support callsmake a 1:1 call to a remote author or expert for discussion and additional guidance.
• Dynamics 365Guides demonstrationmake a 1:1 call to demonstrate product experience or a procedure in a guide.
• Remote inspectionsmake a 1:1 call to get approval from a remote inspector.
• Collaborative authoringmake a 1:1 call to an expert to discuss creating or updating steps within a guide.

Additionally, minimizing exposure and increasing workplace safety for frontline workers has become increasingly important due to the ongoing effects of COVID-19. Remote calling will make it easier to avoid travel, minimize carbon footprint from unnecessary travel, and reduce the risk of possible delays with remote audits and inspections in real-time.

Quickly navigate and access information at your fingertips

There are many ways to move through workflows using Dynamics 365 Guides, whether it be automatically anchoring digital content with physical objects using Azure Object Anchors or advancing to the next step in your guide using spatial triggers. We’re excited to introduce the latest feature to enhance navigation capabilities: a central menu with advanced touch and gaze functionality.

Using the new touch activity menu, you can efficiently switch between work activities, find the content and contacts you need to get your work done, and quickly launch and complete guides, making it faster, more reliable, and easier than ever. Summon and minimize the call window from anywhere at any time, ensuring your worldview remains focused with only the most important information displayed. While the new main menu is always at your fingertips, the work instruction can still be operated completely hands-free using gaze functionality, true to the original value of HoloLens and Dynamics 365 Guides.

New features spotlight: Toyota Motors North America uses 1:1 calling to author and adapt in real-time

Watch the video below to learn how operators at Toyota Motors North America collaborate with experts and make improvements to step-by-step instructions in real-time using the new calling feature in Dynamics 365 Guides.

Get started today

Transform your workforce, build a more agile factory, unlock innovation, and deliver new services using HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Guides. Ready to empower your frontline employees?

• Try the 30-day free trial of Dynamics 365 Guides.
• Read more about Dynamics 365 Guides capabilities and get your questions answered using our Dynamics 365 Guides documentation.
• Take the Dynamics 365 Guides learning path.
• Learn more about current offers on HoloLens 2.
• Learn how operators at Eaton connect with colleagues around the world to improve operations and optimize learning experiences.

The post Announcing new activity menu and 1:1 calling for Dynamics 365 Guides appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

It is imperative for organizations to create agile, connected, and sustainable manufacturing processes to customize products and services for their customers, accelerate innovation, and adopt to new business models like offering products-as-a-service. This requires hyper-automated processes and enhanced visibility across production floor and supply chains. In addition, more standardization and interoperability of software across plants is a critical capability to support more remote management and control.

Our latest investments in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management are enabling organizations to innovate with intelligent manufacturing operations by easily adapting to new business models, improving planning agility, enhancing visibility of your shop floor, and ensuring round-the-clock uptime and business continuity.

Manufacturers can now seamlessly work with any manufacturing execution system (MES) and eliminate data siloes. They can optimize production processes with enhanced visibility of the shop floor and improve throughput and quality.

Priority-based planning

One of the challenges that manufacturers face when it comes to supply planning occurs when multiple orders for the same items land simultaneously, and there is not enough stock on hand to fulfill all demand. Which distribution center or store orders should be filled and in what order? Which is most important, and how should manufacturers set priority? While it is relatively easy for someone to manually review and determine planning priorities in these situations, manufactures have lacked a systematic process to automate these decisions at scale.

Master planning with Planning Optimization is changing the situation for manufactures. The Priority-based planning feature can be utilized to configure optimal replenishment based on priority, instead of by date only. This enables businesses to increase service levels, reduce on-hand inventory, and optimize their supply chains by prioritizing replenishment orders to ensure that urgent demand is fulfilled before less important demand.

The planning priority is automatically calculated based on a flexible setup that considers inventory levels for minimum, reorder point, maximum, and projected on-hand that includes planned receipts and distributions. This data can be used to compare the importance of any orders across products and locations.

With priority-based planning, organizations gain the capability to:

• Calculate, manually edit, or default on planning priorities.
• Control replenishment by setting reorder point parameters.
• Split and optimize distribution orders using planning ranges.
• Group planned orders at firming.
• Utilize customizable planning priority ranges.
• Apply planning priority capabilities to intercompany orders.

With the introduction of Priority-based planning, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping organizations to eliminate stockouts by automatically prioritizing replenishment of high-demand items in near-real-time based on order priorities, current stock levels, and projected inventory. Watch the on-demand session on Innovate with Intelligent Manufacturing Operations to learn more.

MES integration

Recent decades have seen manufacturers invest heavily in two automation layers: production lines and equipment and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. MES resides between these two layers and manages manufacturing’s unique operational requirements. One challenge that manufacturers have faced when it comes to these two separate automation layers is how to keep data synchronized as transactions occur across both.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management’s MES integration solves this problem by providing the means to keep data and transactions synchronized between both systems. Plus, it offers manufacturers a path to realizing their Industry 4.0 ambitions by making it faster and easier to integrate Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with common manufacturing execution systems.

By integrating a third-party MES solution with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, data exchange is fully automated in near real-time. This is important for manufactures not only because it keeps data current in both systems but also because it eliminates the need for error-prone, manual data entry. For example, when material consumption is registered in the MES system, the integration ensures that the same consumption is also registered in Dynamics 365. This keeps inventory records up-to-date in support of other essential processes such as planning, sales, and so on. This is one reason that manufacturers, particularly those with advanced manufacturing requirements, can benefit from MES integration.

For instance, here is the benefit of integrating Dynamics 365 with Aegis Factorylogixone of the MES software that it integrates with:

“Aegis’ IoT-based MES platform orchestrates execution of ERP work-orders in real-time, across highly complex and technical assembly, test and inspection stations, with exact material, product and process traceability that satisfies the most stringent quality assurance requirements. The feedback of live operational data enhances ERP by providing detailed, accurate and timely information related to completions, material consumption and much more.”Jason Spera, CEO and co-founder, Aegis Software

Other benefits of MES integration include enhanced visibility of the production floor, improved throughput and quality by unifying data across ERP and MES, and the ability to track, trace, troubleshoot, and resolve issues by contextualizing MES data. Also, the MES integration solution offers business event interfaces to support key manufacturing execution processes and a centralized dashboard where the event processing history can be monitored.

With the introduction of MES integration, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is reducing overall implementation and operating costs and helping manufacturers to establish end-to-end visibility and control over the production floor. At the same time, we are providing a faster, easier, and cheaper means of integrating Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management with third-party MES systems. Watch the on-demand session on Innovate with Intelligent Manufacturing Operations to learn more.

Total economic impact

Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the business impact of deploying Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. To understand and quantify the economics of implementing the solution, Forrester interviewed six senior decision-makers from five companies ranging in size from $100 million to $1 billion in revenue that had experience using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.¹ The purpose of the study was to discover the decision drivers and financial benefits and compare the cost of implementation to the realized value.

Value drivers

Users reported increased production volume of $24.3 million, reductions in equipment downtime worth $1.5 million, improvements to production quality that reduced costs by $6.8 million, infrastructure cost reductions valued at $11 million, and increased developer productivity of $0.7 million, for a total of $44.33 million in financial savings over a three-year period.

Customers also experienced numerous other unquantified benefits to their organizations. These included increased flexibility to adapt, improved ability to deliver on time, improved customer satisfaction, better forecasting capabilities that improved supplier collaboration and planning, and improvements to team members’ day-to-day work realized by breaking down siloes between teams and functions.

Average payback in under two years

The Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management investment cost an average of $23.27 million, took 22 months to pay back, and produced a return on investment (ROI) of 90 percent and net present value (NPV) of $21.06 million across the three-year benefit study.

Customers also noted an overall streamlining of their supply chain due to the unification of systems, processes, and data. Plus, they were able to scale much faster and far cheaper than their previous environment would allow.

See the full details in the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to understand how your organization might benefit from a move to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Read the full report: A Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

What’s next?

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is an agile and composable ERP solution. It enables manufacturers, retailers, and distributors to create a connected, resilient, and digital supply chain by enhancing operational visibility, improving planning agility, and maximizing asset uptime. In addition, it unifies data from almost any source in real-time and generates intelligence by leveraging AI and machine learning to proactively detect opportunities and develop a long-term competitive advantage.

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. Or you can learn more about the benefits of a digital supply chain in our recent e-book: Four Pillars of the Digital Supply Chain.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sources

¹Forrester, The Total Economic Impact^TM of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, August 2021

The post Optimize production processes with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In supply chain management, when you have an urgent demand, you want it to be prioritized across your planning system. The ability to enable such a broad, yet flexible factor as prioritization, is now available in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Priority-based planning can help businesses optimize their supply chain while increasing service levels and reducing inventory levels. The 2021 release wave 2 includes a public preview of this feature for the Planning Optimization Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Benefits of priority-based planning

This feature adds support for demand-driven planning, which is one of the five steps related to demand driven material requirements planning (DDMRP). With priority-based planning, the optimization of supply to cover demand is based on priorities, not requirement dates, which are used in classic material requirements planning (MRP).

Priority-based planning lets you prioritize replenishment orders to ensure that urgent demand is prioritized over less important demand. For example, a stockout replenishment order will be prioritized over a standard refill replenishment order.

On top of this, the system can automatically split large refill orders into separate, smaller orders, with different priorities assigned to each order. This approach provides coverage of the critical portion of an inventory refill, instead of simply refilling warehouses to maximum with a single supply. This minimizes the risk of stockout by optimizing the use of available supply.

Another benefit of priority-based planning is that priority can be used to compare the importance of relevant orders across products and locations during execution planning.

Broad impact of the planning priority value

The new field, Planning priority, is now available for purchase orders, sales orders, transfer orders, planned orders, and forecast lines. This value is the backbone of priority-based planning; it is used to define the importance of demand and supply.

Planning priority is typically defined by the master planning calculation related to a planned order, or by a default value when manually created. Users can modify the planning priority value when needed. For example, it might be important to adjust the value to honor the importance of a critical sales order. For intercompany orders, the planning priority value is kept in sync between linked purchase and sales orders to ensure transparency of cross-legal entities.

Flexibility with the Priority coverage code

By using the new coverage code of Priority, you can control when Planning Optimization uses planning priority during pegging. This will calculate the derived planning priority on planned orders based on inventory levels and demand priority constraints.

This addition makes possible a flexible approach with a mix of 1) classic date-driven MRP using coverage codes of Min/max, Period, or Requirement, together with 2) item coverage using the new priority-driven approach defined by use of the Priority coverage code.

Planning priority models

The user-defined planning priority models enable a variety of options. One option is to do a standard DDMRP priority calculation, based on projected on-hand supplies as a percent of maximum (see “% of maximum” in the following graphic). However, another option is to use specific planning priority values, based on priority ranges (see “Zone grouping” below).

With priority ranges, you can also choose to split planned orders according to the priority ranges. This ensures that available supply is distributed based on the risk of stockout. With this approach, you seek to fulfill the demand quantity to reach maximum inventory level by creating multiple planned orders, each with individual planning priorities. During firming, it is possible to group planned orders based on priority to limit the number of actual orders to process.

In supply management, sometimes your projected on-hand inventory will reach a critically low level because less important demand orders are repeatedly delayed. Eventually, this triggers a high-importance supply request. When you enable the Consider demand priority setting, a new planned order supply will never be assigned a planning priority that is more important than the demand that triggered the supply. This lets you balance the importance of supply when refilling stock levels in a supply chain with inventory buffers.

How to get started with priority-based planning

• Enable the Planning Optimization functionality. For more information, see Get started with Planning Optimization.
• In Feature management, turn on “(Preview) Priority driven MRP support for Planning Optimization”. For more information, see the priority-based planning documentation.
• Set up your first planning priority model to control the planning priority calculation and the default value of planning priority on new orders and forecast lines.
• Set up a coverage group that includes your planning priority model.
• Ensure that at least one product includes item coverage with coverage code Priority.
• Add the planning priority fields prominently to relevant forms like planned orders.
• Run master planning and try out the planning priority model setup to see the impact on the calculated planning priority on planned orders.

Next steps

Watch this video about the highlights of priority-based planning: Planning optimization support for priority-based planning in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The post Optimize your supply chain with priority-based planning appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.