Merit Matters Blog

Today’s social connectedness, mobile devices, and growing opportunities for interaction “any time any place” have changed the way many live and work. People are increasingly dependent on connections across the global network—interlocked in this connected reality.

Modern business solutions not only connect people inside and outside the organization, they also give them context and insight which drives better decisions and boosts productivity. An important part of Microsoft’s mission is to drive connections with people, with customers and with business partners across processes, data and the ecosystem in which organizations operate. This commitment to connected organizations includes the vision of anywhere, in-context collaboration services that links people and companies to the right people in the right place, in the right context, at the right time, across multiple avenues of communications. Microsoft business solutions include everything from email to voice to video to presence to social – all designed with a singular goal of giving people and organizations more effective ways of:

• Leveraging the exploding number of channels to connect with customers at the time and place of their choosing;
• Creating an inclusive, listening organization by extending collaboration scenarios that exist internally to include customers;
• Evolving from an organization that engages with individual customers to one that leverages the crowd to benefit the brand

Microsoft’s commitment to connected organizations is about removing the impediments that generate friction within the organization and providing people with a broader array of insights and actions across internal and external connections. With greater transparency, agility, and insight, people can make better, more informed decisions, and transform their organization into a Dynamic Business.

It is the impassioned individual equipped with the right tools that enables companies to stay ahead of the competition in this world of constant change. Microsoft transforms organizations into Dynamic Businesses that enable people to do their best work no matter where they are in the organization. We are already seeing the impact as customers make the transformation, and Microsoft is committed to delivering modern business solutions, built using the broad portfolio of Microsoft technology, with intentional simplicity as a core design element. The solutions are innovative, proactive business applications that help users work in new, more effective ways. Moreover, they deliver tools for a connected organization to drive data to insight to action any time anywhere, with the flexibility to deploy and consume business workloads and suites in a way that delivers on today’s needs while also providing the ultimate flexibility necessary to be ready for the future.

In today's cost-competitive world, Life Sciences companies require ways to sustain enhanced employee productivity. However, in order to truly empower employee productivity, these companies need software solutions that can give their people easy access to accurate, real-time information.

MAXLife ERP enables true productivity for Life Sciences companies by providing a software solution that employees will actually use. With MAXLife, employees are provided a familiar interface that quickly connects internal people—and even external business partners—to the right information and tools to work faster and smarter.

With a tightly integrated Life Sciences Software solution, Pharmaceutical, Medical Device, and Biotechnology companies can successfully:

• Eliminate time-consuming and error-prone data re-entry resulting from multiple, disparate systems.
• Help task workers communicate and collaborate across locations, departments, time zones and organizations.
• Enable employees to work with tools they already know and understand, such as Microsoft Office Outlook and Excel.
• Provide self-service functionality, enabling employees to perform a range of tasks that they would otherwise defer to IT.
• Provide role-based access to information, consolidating common tasks to a single screen.

MAXLife supports your people in their day-to-day tasks, helping them improve communication and collaboration and discover better ways to work with one another. By tying people to the right process in their organization, Life Sciences companies can now achieve new levels of personal productivity and collaboration.

Wholesale distribution operations are becoming more complex, with ever-changing customer requirements, global and electronic marketplaces, multiple distribution channels, and compliance initiatives adding to the perennial challenges of delivering products accurately and on time. Successfully meeting these challenges in ways that provide competitive advantage requires tight synchronization of business processes throughout the supply chain and across the entire enterprise. Traditional warehouse management or enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are not enough.

True distribution effectiveness means streamlined processes and timely access to the information necessary for moving goods at maximum speeds. Tracking technologies such as radio frequency (RF) and radio frequency identification (RFID) eliminate manual labor but by themselves cannot make up for awkward workflows, redundant handling, or errors. Operational efficiency is the key to increasing inventory turns, improving order fulfillment rates, reducing cycle time, and eliminating chargebacks.

Microsoft Dynamics AX integrates information from your business and the entire supply chain to help synchronize real-time product movement and improve productivity within distribution operations. This comprehensive, fully integrated business solution helps companies to balance the demands of extended supply chains and move product more efficiently to increase sales, improve fill rates, and decrease costs.

Building on the multilanguage, multicurrency functionality, Microsoft Dynamics AX offers a powerful competitive advantage for companies distributing across a global marketplace. The supply chain solution can be most beneficial to organizations that seek to improve current distribution operations or to manage new initiatives for the following:

• Distribution capacity
• Transportation optimization
• Delivery service improvement
• Retail compliance
• International expansion
• Implementation of barcode and RF data collection
• Global supply chain visibility
• Trading partner collaboration

With the ability to handle single-byte and double-byte languages, international currency exchange, various warehouses, and multiple companies, Microsoft Dynamics AX can manage entire supply networks. As organizational needs change, the Microsoft Dynamics AX scalable system architecture makes it easy to tailor the solution both for today’s requirements and for the future growth of the business.

Key solution benefits include:

• Improve order fulfillment and accuracy 
• Eliminate inefficient processes and excess inventory
• Enhance workload balancing and planning
• Enable compliance with industry standards
• Reduce transportation costs

Microsoft Dynamics AX delivers a flexible, modular approach, which offers cost-effective options for taking advantage of the functionality that can best enhance your operations. Warehouse Management options streamline receiving, slotting, picking, and order fulfillment. RFID-enabled technology helps ensure Electronic Product Code (EPC) compliance with customer requirements and increases product visibility to facilitate tracking and inventory management while improving cross docking and expedition of back orders. Strategies and tools for selecting optimal product placement enable you to increase efficiency, shorten order fulfillment cycles, and eliminate user error. By balancing workloads, setting performance targets, and deploying resources, companies can achieve maximum work force productivity. Tracking all warehouse activities, sharing key performance indicators, and measuring against baseline standards help ensure a company’s operations are performing at full potential.

With integrated Transportation Execution options, companies can simplify and speed transportation management tasks. Efficient load building, automated carrier assignments, and quick generation of compliant documentation boost efficiency, eliminate errors, and reduce costs. Shipments can be confirmed and tracked as needed to maintain visibility throughout distribution and help ensure timely delivery and customer satisfaction.

For our 500TH POST on the Merit Matters Blog, let's talk about manufacturing insight.

Accurate information and the ability to respond with fast, informed decisions are key requisites for agile, low-cost manufacturing. Unfortunately, many manufacturers continue to operate with aging and unconnected information systems. Growth through acquisition, plus the valid need for custom manufacturing processes, often results in an inability to gather and roll up data from diverse manufacturing execution and control systems.

Consequently, many manufacturing organizations struggle with insight issues such as:

• Manual forms and unstructured data not readily integrated or understood in relation to other data and systems.
• Limited visibility of manufacturing data in the context of overall enterprise processes and information.
• Critical machine, performance, tracking, and status information trapped in silos.
• Labor-intensive and untimely report generation.

The resulting lack of visibility of key data can greatly hinder an organization’s ability to implement common and shared business processes, practice lean manufacturing, or even understand machine center or process profitability. That’s why many companies are recognizing the need to move to a common and shared manufacturing solution architecture that enables implementation of shared best practices while addressing the needs of local language, regulatory compliance, and integration requirements of each operating unit or location.

When companies integrate data to make a single version of the truth visible across the organization, they can deploy an appropriate manufacturing solution in either an on-premise or cloud model to:

• Support the business across manufacturing, back office, and managerial processes.
• Provide an integration platform for manufacturing execution and control systems.
• Deliver accurate information to people who need it for proactive decisions and actions.
• Facilitate the standardization of data and the optimization of processes and value.
• Help reduce cycle times and costs through the elimination of errors, redundant or manual tasks, and data delays.
• Link to existing or corporate systems to better understand overall performance and plan continuous improvement.

With accurate, integrated data, business managers can more easily measure and analyze performance, run “what-if” scenarios and simulations, and better predict potential problems. When circumstances change, the right business management solution can provide fast access to the historical and plan data needed to assess the right course.

The end-to-end integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX means the right information can be available to the right people at the right time, with less data reentry and fewer manual procedures.

• Real-time, consolidated views of customer account and historical information, product data, and production or delivery status can help your sales and service teams step up their responsiveness to customers and deliver faster, more accurate quotes, pricing, and order status reports.
• Detailed inventory and replenishment information based on actual production and materials use data can help you reduce inventories, optimize purchasing processes, and gain leverage with suppliers.
• Automated alerts and workflows can help ensure prompt actions and keep processes on track when conditions change, while automatic posting of materials consumption, work in process, and finished production costs directly to the general ledger means less time spent on routine financial tasks.
• Comprehensive traceability and audit control can help you document components or ingredients and more easily manage source material tracking and chain-of-control compliance.
• Remote access to company data and processes, either directly or through the Web, boosts the productivity of field employees.

Microsoft Dynamics AX helps multisite businesses operate more efficiently with immediate connectivity across locations by using one business application and a single business object data model. You can, for example, create and update sales and purchase orders across your locations in real time. Minimize stockholding costs by making stock-on-hand inquiries in all subsidiaries and sourcing raw materials across locations. Support for multiple companies, locations, languages, currencies, and tax and legal requirements for more than 30 countries is built in. Employees, customers, and suppliers can work in their own languages and currencies, while smooth conversion and reporting functions help ensure full insight and visibility at the highest levels of the organization.

Microsoft Dynamics AX enables companies to reduce time to delivery and increase customer satisfaction by automating procedures and improving connections between all company departments, from sales and customer service through production and delivery to accounting—the entire “order to cash” process.

In a global buyers’ market influenced by low-wage competitors in developing countries, the need to reduce costs drives many manufacturers to seek efficiencies anywhere they can find them, including reductions in inventories, outsourcing, and new partnerships with downstream service and third-party logistics providers. Each can represent an effective strategy for cost or quality control, but also introduce new challenges of transparency and communication. Global manufacturers need to connect not only with their own network of facilities, but also with other key supply chain partners. And as more warehouse and logistics management moves outside the scope of internal control, companies deal with greater risk of misplaced goods, costly transportation mistakes, and traceability errors or gaps through multi-tier distribution systems.

Meeting this - or any other challenges already discussed in previous articles - demands much greater two-way communication and collaboration throughout an organization and between all participants in its supply chain, despite increasing supply chain complexity. Knowledge that exists anywhere in the company or the supply chain must be easily accessible to partners both upstream and downstream so they can respond to changes, improve decision making, and safeguard customer satisfaction.

Microsoft Dynamics AX offers a wealth of tools to streamline and automate processes throughout your supply chain operations, including purchasing, warehouse, and logistics activities. One-time data entry and real-time visibility—both internally and with trading partners in the supply chain—can mean fewer errors and less wasted time. Extend the transparent data delivered by Microsoft Dynamics AX to the people and organizations that help your supply chain succeed. By giving customers, suppliers, and logistics providers direct access to order status, inventory records, load plans, shipment information—whatever data is needed—you can save time, avoid redundant data entry, automate supply chain interactions, respond more quickly to change, and increase customer satisfaction.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX, businesses can:

• Optimize warehouse operations from automated receiving and directed put-away through timely materials draws and electronic Kanban systems.
• Synchronize the movement of goods and materials to achieve just-in-time shop floor or distribution center provisioning.
• Consolidate pick/pack activities, generate labels effortlessly, and easily prepare shipments or build loads.
• Automatically create manifests and send advance shipping notifications (ASNs) and proof of delivery.
• Track shipments and provide customers with self-service access to the status of their goods.
• Reduce order-to-cash and procurement-to-cash cycles by eliminating manual procedures and data delays between supply chain activities and invoicing.

Proactive event management keeps managers and employees on top of the flow of goods and information and helps avoid costly exceptions and missed deliveries. People internally and throughout the supply chain can receive automated alerts and notifications for a variety of conditions ranging from cost changes and order updates to purchase order approval and task completion. When such information quickly reaches the appropriate people and partners, they can take action to keep deliveries on track and provide the service that builds customer loyalty. And since Microsoft Dynamics AX works like and with your familiar Microsoft Office system software, including Outlook, you can save time and money on training and people can get working more effectively after a shorter learning curve. People in your organization can extract and share product and operational information by using familiar desktop tools such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, Microsoft Office Project, Microsoft Office Visio, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint.

When your business management solution is familiar and easy to use, your people are free to focus on customer satisfaction. And when you and your trade partners can swap information in formats and files that they use themselves, everyone is better able to add value and respond to changes.

The capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 work together to help your company quickly respond to changing business needs. Using SharePoint 2010, your people can share ideas and expertise, create custom solutions for specific needs, and find the right business information to make better decisions. For IT, SharePoint 2010 helps you cut training and maintenance costs, save time and effort, and focus on higher business priorities.

Whether you deploy the platform on-premises or as a hosted service, the capabilities of SharePoint 2010 work together to help you quickly respond to business needs using data-driven insights and solutions that are faster to develop and deploy.

Deliver the Best Productivity Experience

SharePoint 2010 helps your people be more productive. It offers a familiar Microsoft Office experience so that people can easily access the business information they need to get their jobs done.

• Faster adoption with a familiar user interface:SharePoint 2010 gives your people a familiar experience with the Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface and a set of capabilities that works across the SharePoint and Office product families. With this familiar and intuitive user experience, your people can use their PCs, browsers, and mobile devices to become more productive and efficient.
• Continued productivity regardless of location: Mobile work isn’t just for the sales force anymore. Today, most companies expect their people to be “always on, always connected,” even when they’re away from the office. SharePoint 2010 offers a full set of capabilities that can help to increase productivity by giving people access to resources, regardless of the tools or devices they have available.
• Rapid results with ready-to-use capabilities: SharePoint 2010 helps your people work together better with out-of-the-box personal SharePoint sites—My Sites—and pre-defined site templates (such as team sites and enterprise wikis). Everyone can easily customize their sites with SharePoint Web Parts and the new theming engine, making everyday tasks easier to accomplish.

Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure

SharePoint 2010 helps you reduce costs by consolidating intranet, extranet, and Internet sites on a single platform, on-premises or in the cloud.

• Reduced costs through platform consolidation: SharePoint 2010 offers a rich set of integrated capabilities and a single, scalable platform, helping your company and customers reduce costs in several ways. As people begin to work together better and faster, IT can focus on higher business priorities. Plus, by consolidating solutions on SharePoint, you can be sure that everyone is using the same resources and the right information to make better business decisions.
• More choice with on-premises and hosted options: Your collaboration platform must be able to scale up and out quickly as your company changes and grows. With SharePoint 2010, you can deploy your environment on-premises or in the cloud, letting you make the decision based on business needs, not technology constraints.
• Proactive platform management: SharePoint 2010 can help IT save time, effort, and cost. A full set of rich administrative tools makes it easier and faster to manage your platform, freeing you to focus on other critical business needs.

Rapidly Respond to Business Needs

SharePoint 2010 gives you the best of both worlds: out-of-the-box applications and a platform for customized solutions. You can use the features of SharePoint 2010 just as they are or quickly create secure and easy-to-use solutions for specific business needs.

• More value with existing tools and skills: Connections between SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2010 mean that your development team can create and deploy custom solutions on the fly. Using familiar tools and interfaces, developers can apply their current programming skills to a specific business need and help to solve it, quickly and effectively.
• Two-way interaction with line-of-business data: SharePoint 2010 allows everyone, regardless of their technical expertise, to interact with information from databases, reports, and business applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. What’s more, people can surface the data in their SharePoint sites, analyze it, and make updates to be reflected in the external source itself.
• No-code custom solutions for specific business needs: With SharePoint 2010, you can quickly create no-code solutions and deploy them in an easy and secure way. From simple sites to complex applications, there’s a code-free solution for almost every business need.

Learn more about Microsoft SharePoint 2010!