(whooshing) (gentle music)
- Welcome to Dynamics 365 Essentials for IT.
In the next few minutes, we'll look at how you can build
a more resilient supply chain.
Now more than ever, it's critical to have real-time insights
into supply chain factors like resources,
demand and inventory.
As well as processes like procurement,
production and distribution.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
gives you those insights
by providing unified operations across areas
like warehousing, planning and transportation.
We've also built intelligence on that integrated foundation
to provide insights so you can identify issues
and keep fulfilling orders
even in today's fast changing environment.
Let me give you an overview of what it takes
to set up these kinds of agile and responsive operations
using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
Chances are your current supply chain management
is composed of different applications,
maybe built internally
and connected through custom code and integrations.
This can be a maintenance headache.
If the systems in their data schemes are different,
you may be spending a lot of time
keeping them all in sync and up to date
and duplicating data entry.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
can provide a powerful alternative
to these disparate systems
with one application that handles
all of their functionality.
From the time you receive an order
to fulfilling that order and receiving payment for it,
Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports your business
with intelligent insights and the tools to respond.
And it integrates with your existing back end systems
from your logistics system to your HR system
through the Microsoft Power Platform
and lets you build your own custom experiences.
More on that in a minute.
Supply Chain Management is part
of the larger Dynamics 365 family of apps
and is focused on operations and natively integrates
with all of the Dynamics 365 modules.
Supply Chain Management comprises a broad range
of functionality covering all the areas
of your supply chain,
even beyond areas you might have in place today,
to help you provide solutions to operational challenges
now and in the future.
It includes product information management,
planning, everything from demand forecasting
to supply distribution planning,
inventory and logistics
including warehouse management and vendor collaboration,
manufacturing of all kinds
such as discrete process and mixed manufacturing,
and asset management including preventative
and predictive maintenance supported by IoT sensors.
Supply Chain Management,
which I'll call SCM for short,
works in unison with Dynamics 365 Finance and Commerce,
which handle the accounting
and financial aspects of operations.
SCM helps you fulfill your orders,
for instance by giving you deep visibility
into product inventory.
So you can see inbound and outbound inventory operations
as well as an accurate view of what's in your warehouses.
SCM also helps you streamline the procurement process
by identifying the fastest route
or the least expensive shipment rate,
and provides tools like a collaboration interface
that you and your external vendors can use to stay informed
and respond to orders, ensuring coordination and agility
in your procurement processes.
SCM also provides planning optimization
for your manufacturing fulfillment operations
by using Azure Analytics under the covers to forecast demand
and dynamically plan capacity
using real-time flexible resource management.
You can see the materials and resources needed
to meet current demand, forecast delivery dates
and respond to demand or supply changes
to prevent bottlenecks.
To ensure maximum productivity
SCM offers efficient asset management
with predictive analytics to help determine
maintenance needs and prevent downtime
of business critical equipment,
as well as enabling IoT machines and devices
to monitor and create a digital feedback loop
that informs you of problems
and automatically initiates actions
like a work order for machine repair.
And using the Microsoft Power Platform
you can quickly build scalable web and mobile client apps
and even integrate chatbots
that share a common interface and unify data
so that your workers on the floor
and personnel in the office
are all working from the same information.
SCM also accelerates delivery
with transportation and warehouse management
through tools like the load planning workbench
to create shipments based on sales orders
and hub consolidation to smartly optimize
and consolidate shipments coming from different warehouses,
but going to the same customer.
Finally, SCM's integration with Power BI
provides reporting and powerful analytics
across supply chain management
and connected applications
to give you a full view of your operations.
Now let's take a closer look at the components
that make all of this possible
and what it takes to deploy them.
You can migrate your data through a variety of methods.
For instance, by using data entities from SCM,
which abstracting encapsulate
the underlying table schema for SCM,
and the Data Management suite
to create and manage data import and export jobs.
Then with everything managed by one centralized system,
you can spend less time maintaining connections
between applications
and focus on adding value with new tools,
like leveraging machine learning
for more intelligent operations.
In fact, we built some of those features into SCM.
Let's look at three of them,
designed to address key challenges
in Supply Chain Management:
intelligent demand forecasting,
IoT based asset management
and near real-time planning.
Forecasting demand is critical to your operations.
The more accurately you can predict incoming orders,
the better you're able to plan
for production and fulfillment.
SCM uses Azure Machine Learning
to give you more accurate forecasting
using Microsoft developed models.
By using historical data and machine learning
to extract patterns and extend them into the future
you get predictive models that allow you
to scale operations to match demand.
You have full control of the models
as well as what data is used for forecasting,
and your data scientists can download
demand forecasting experiments from Microsoft
to visualize and manipulate them in Azure Machine Learning.
And then they can connect them
for use within demand forecasting and SCM,
enabling them to be fine tuned
for your specific forecasting needs.
The forecasts that your business users create
from these models can be fed directly
into their production plans.
Planning is the heart of operations.
It ensures enough supplies
are coming in product is being constructed
and orders fulfilled and delivered.
To be agile and resilient,
you need up-to-date information
and the ability to build and review new plans
as often as needed.
But it can take a lot of processing power
to produce these plans, requiring most organizations
to run the job overnight.
Now you can accomplish the same results in minutes
with SCM's planning optimization add-in.
The add-in is installed with life cycle services,
which is the environment used to manage
Dynamics 365 apps and services for finance and operations.
Then your business users can create a plan
and see the results in minutes,
with near real-time visibility into changes
on the demand or supply side and their impact.
When it comes to your equipment,
SCM helps you create that modern digital feedback loop.
If you use IoT devices that connect equipment
to Azure IoT Hub, wizards can help you
configure notifications for different scenarios,
like equipment downtime, product quality
or production delays.
For example, the equipment downtime wizard
guides you through mapping your sensor schema
to the required inputs to associate
the business resources within SCM.
Okay, so we've talked about
how to take advantage
of some of the out-of-box intelligence and IoT features
to increase agility and resilience.
Now let's talk about integrating and extending SCM.
SCM's enablement with the common data service
is optimized through the use of dual writes,
which in effect optimizes performance for key interactions
and supportive scenarios such as prospect to cash.
And at the same time exposes SCM
through a significant number of virtual entities
that enables a citizen developer
to interact through the Power Platform.
Microsoft also provides pre-built connectors
to integrate your systems
and business processes with CDS.
And of course, you can always build your own connector.
To see the connectors available for SCM,
go to aka.ms/SupplyChainConnectors.
You can also use the Microsoft Power Platform
to build custom and automated experiences
around your SCM data and processes using power BI,
Power Apps and Power Automate.
Power Apps in particular
gives you a low code environment
to build custom app experiences.
And it also integrates with your existing developer tools.
So that was an overview
of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
and how you can take advantage of it for your organization.
Keep checking back
to our Dynamics 365 Essentials for IT series
to learn more about how to adopt
specific Dynamics 365 applications and services.
Thanks for watching. (gentle music)
(whooshing)