Inefficient supply chains cost companies big time. Very often, these costs are hidden and are difficult to quantify. In many cases, companies just don’t have the end-to-end visibility of their supply chains to make them aware they even have a problem.
It’s the symptoms that bite them first. For example, rising transportation and warehousing costs, increased capital tied up in inventory, unhappy customers and account attrition due to more agile competition.
So, what can you do? It starts with investing in the right technology.
Digital innovation plays a big part in transforming your supply chain. Your choice of technology matters - such as an ERP solution.
For instance, Microsoft Dynamics Supply Chain Management software offers exceptional visibility and insight into your businesses supply chains together with deep functionality to enable streamlining of processes, cost savings and increased efficiencies.
If your business includes combinations of manufacturing, distribution and retail companies, spread globally and relying on each other for the supply of goods and services, then Dynamics Supply Chain Management software is the ideal solution.
Using the Inter-company planning functionality, you’re able to set up the trading relationships between these companies and configure master planning so that sales demand created within one company automatically passes back through the supply chain to the final source of supply.
Parameters can easily be defined to create lean supply chains with minimal excess inventory where this is viable. Alternatively, where constraints are present such as minimum order quantities and box multiples, these can automatically be taken into consideration when master planning runs.
This ensures that minimal manual intervention is required to manage the supply chain.
Visibility of the demand/supply situation for a product is also easy to track and allows the user to quickly determine the source of any requirement (for example a sales order, forecast or safety stock replenishment).
This can be traced within and across companies so that end-to-end management of the supply chain is easy to achieve.
System alerts can also be created by a user to flag exceptional supply chain situations that need investigating. This could be for circumstances such as product inventory levels that are below target minimums or actual supplier lead times that exceed those planned.
The Supplier Collaboration module within Dynamics Supply Chain Management enables you to share with your suppliers your purchase requirements and any changes that you may want to make. Via security-controlled access to your Dynamics system, your vendors are able to quickly advise of their ability to meet your requirements, and any variations from these.
What makes a company world class? The way it’s managed, the strength of its financial foundations and the quality of the people it employs - of course, they’re all important. But the efficiency of the supply chain must rank right up there too as a key differentiator between the best and the rest.
Managing supply chains efficiently is all about having accurate up-to-date information regarding the demand and supply situation, presented in an easily digestible form. This coupled with appropriate user defined alerts to automatically flag exceptional situations needing a planner’s attention delivers world class supply chain management.
And Dynamics Supply Chain Management software lets you do this.
Visibility is essential if you want to successfully manage your business-critical operations. Microsoft Dynamics Supply Chain is just one half of the full ERP picture that is Dynamics Finance & Operations.
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