Merit Matters Blog

In an ever-changing global marketplace, companies are looking for every opportunity to gain a competitive advantage and simultaneously grow revenue, profits, and customer loyalty. Meanwhile, new regulatory requirements, competitive pressures brought on by an increasingly connected global economy, and technologies that “level the playing field” for companies of all sizes are making it more difficult to stay ahead of the competition. However, keep in mind that every challenge also represents an opportunity to beat out the competition.

ERP software - once considered a necessary commodity in the IT infrastructure - is now viewed as a strategic asset for organizations that want to be able to quickly adapt to change and accelerate business performance. Responding quickly to business needs can be the key to gaining and keeping a competitive edge. But inflexible IT systems can get in the way. An ERP system that is flexible and easy to use can play a critical role in helping your business achieve the agility it requires to compete and succeed.

Having one flexible, comprehensive business management solution can help you increase efficiency and reach by bringing together dispersed employees and operations, even when they operate in different languages and countries. It can also enable companies to gather fundamental business information from multiple departments or subsidiaries and analyze productivity, profitability, margins, and trends to help decision-makers understand current operations and resolve problems earlier and more easily.

By integrating business information throughout your supply chain, you can improve the flow of information and gain the insight you need to streamline operations and take advantage of changing conditions. The ability to define and manage items in multiple dimensions and track materials and goods throughout the product life cycle enhances inventory control and enables you to meet the information demands of customers and regulatory bodies. By increasing the flow of information internally and with trading partners, you can improve customer service, improve supply chain coordination, and take advantage of changing market conditions.

Microsoft Dynamics AX can strengthen your position in the marketplace and provide the backbone of an agile, flexible system that helps your business grow, adapt quickly to change, and take advantage of new business opportunities. Simple to use, straightforward to implement, and quick to adapt, Microsoft Dynamics AX can be delivered in the way that works best for your organization—via the cloud or on-premises. You can add staff, enter different geographies, launch new products, and pursue additional lines of business with the assurance that your IT system is there to support and help drive your strategic initiatives.

Traditional business applications evolved as passive, backward-looking systems of record.

Microsoft Dynamics AX already changes that model today, introducing embedded, declarative workflow that brings an understanding of business process optimization into the application and helps guide users forward through their work. When this is combined with pervasive embedded business intelligence that transforms the data captured in the system into insight empowering better decisions, the system becomes a more active, forward looking partner for the people who drive a business toward success.

Microsoft Dynamics AX also delivers innovative application scenarios today. These include, for example, a solution in retail that offers out-of-the-box connection from point of sale to the headquarters business system, and that unifies web and brick and mortar commerce in a single view of customer and transactions; as well as a system for manufacturers that supports discrete, process and lean manufacturing models in a single system instance, with planning and costing capabilities that work across all three models.

This is only the beginning. Microsoft Dynamics AX will evolve to embed constraint optimization and machine learning to deliver even more advanced, forward-looking capability to Dynamic Businesses. For example, Microsoft is currently developing systems that combine transaction history with information about key factors like weather, traffic, local event calendars and demographics to optimize daily order quantities for a retailer, minimizing out of stock and waste to drive greater profitability.

The four IT megatrends of the next decade - “Big data,” social connectedness, cloud computing, and mobility - will present new opportunities for business applications insight, and open up a whole new range of possibilities for business. Modern business applications won’t just make individuals and organizations smarter, but will go beyond this to new directions and new levels of impact we are just beginning to imagine.

Driving impact has always required insight but most systems today only focus on retrospective views and data. They are passive, reactive, and backward looking. Modern business applications will at the onset be proactive. They will inform with insights and possible actions while constantly evolving to point to what comes next.

Data continues to grow exponentially as does the ability to derive meaning from it. Social commentary has accelerated the pace of the review cycle, with likes, links and tweets providing instant clues to success or failure. Capturing this data and being able to tap into its rich and valuable insight is a new requirement.

Microsoft Dynamics AX helps people not only integrate and understand these new data sets, but also get to better answers with suggested actions so they can continually improve business performance. It achieves this by enabling people to calculate and/or recalculate business possibilities in real time. By focusing on connected, forward-looking systems, we can allow people to access actionable information with greater speed and agility – enabling businesses to respond more efficiently, effectively and proactively to changing market conditions.

Merit Solutions believes that many organizations are at a point of profound transformation that won’t be sufficiently addressed via a patchwork of business solutions. That's why we are committed to helping your business be ready for what’s next with the most comprehensive range of integrated solutions today and the most complete vision for the future.

Empowering Your People

For your people, we offer an unparalleled range of integrated, connected solutions that help provide a seamless experience across people’s personal work lives. Our approach is to deliver solutions that are integrated by design across devices and services. From productivity, collaboration, and business apps, to devices and security, our goal is to deliver a connected experience that works together seamlessly and naturally, the way people expect it to work. The result? Get more done, faster, without limits.

We live in an amazing time for technology. At home, when we use our personal devices, we’ve become accustomed to a highly connected experience where all of our apps and information are at our fingertips and the experience has become highly intuitive. It’s easy to watch movies, read books, play games, and share photos and documents. We also know that people consume information in a different way depending on the device they are using—tablets, PCs, or even business whiteboards. In each case, the Microsoft business platform makes it easy to personalize the experience and get it just right. By choosing the Microsoft platform, your company's devices and applications will truly work together - and these connected devices will give you the same version of the truth regardless of the device you are using.

Maximizing IT Flexibility

Our IT customers are entering a new era - a new era for the way they manage and deploy applications and devices. Between the consumerization of IT and the move to the cloud, a lot of what IT provided, from deployment to systems integration, is being radically revised and simplified. Throughout this transformation, we are here to help our customers maximize the return on your IT existing investment and best position you for the future. Our goal is to enable people to use the devices they want to use in the places they want to work - while also enabling enterprises to protect corporate information.

At the same time, we know that you will have more than just Microsoft solutions in your business, and so we are experienced at building bridges across technology. We believe this builds choice, drives innovation, and creates opportunities.

Accelerating your Business

Finally, we’re committed to helping you maximize the return on your investments in Microsoft solutions. Whether that means saving money, growing revenue, attracting and retaining customers, or driving innovation.

In today’s business climate, people expect the technology they use at work to be as simple as the technology they use at home. Today’s technology is expanding the possibilities for connecting people and helping businesses be more proactive and dynamic to change. For example…

• Across your business, we can help you foster a culture of innovation with a connected supply chain platform that embraces today’s social trends and makes it easier for people to communicate, whether through text, voice, or video.
• We can also help you maximize business performance with technology that enables people to make smarter, faster decisions with democratized business analytics tools and the power of big data. And this same technology can also help you reduce costs.

In summary, Merit Solutions offers companies an unparalleled experience across today’s devices, while maximizing IT flexibility and providing the business platform and process optimization services that can truly accelerate your business.

Please comment below if you have any questions or comments as we’d certainly like to continue this conversation and find more ways that we can continue to help companies differentiate their business.

A while back we discussed some global business and IT trends that are slowly but steadily reshaping the ERP landscape. With our emerging economic climate, these trends are posing additional challenges for business and IT professionals who are struggling to improve profitability and retain IT agility.

Global market trends are creating the need for businesses to:

• Achieve operational insight and better decision making across the organization with faster, easier, and more pervasive access to relevant business information.
  
• Need for business agility to stay ahead of the competition and accelerate business growth.
• Reducing the cost of doing business by optimizing processes and driving productivity.
• Align business objectives with IT priorities and investments to ensure that IT systems and tools are enabling and supporting strategic business priorities and that they address changing business needs.

At the same time, shifting IT trends are creating the need to:

• Increase ERP adoption and access to ERP data across a broader subset of the workforce.
• Reduce IT operational costs by investing in systems that are more flexible and scalable, and simpler to configure, maintain, and upgrade.
  
• Put solutions in place that enable broad business strategies, and that enable IT to respond quickly to specific line-of-business (LOB) requests and industry needs.

When you frame this discussion with the research conducted by Forrester in 2010 detailed in our article, Key Challenges Companies Face with ERP Solutions, you can see how the needs produced by market and IT trends are affecting customers’ expectations of their ERP application.

Today’s world is increasingly flattened by technology, global complexity and new global competition - making it critical for a business to be able to rapidly see and react to signals, threats and opportunities. Going one step further, in this world where the pace of business accelerates, imagine being able to anticipate rather than react to those signals. Success today and tomorrow increasingly depends on information insight and efficient business processes.

So what would the next generation of ERP look like? See for yourself!

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.

In order to gain the insight needed to make better decisions, organizations need an end-to-end business solution that integrates all areas of their business and provides managers - as well as individual team members and contributors - with the information they need to make the right decisions at the right time!

Modern business solutions like Microsoft Dynamics AX 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 focus of Microsoft Dynamics AX is to drive connections with people, with customers and with business partners across processes, data and the ecosystem in which organizations operate. This focus on 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.

By implementing a fully integrated ERP system like Microsoft Dynamics AX - encompassing everything from sales and marketing to production and accounting - organizations can improve the accuracy of the information upon which decisions are based because each module of the software is tied together and information flows freely among them. Everyone from the top floor to the shop floor can have access to the business intelligence information they need to drive business success across the organization:

• Keep current on changing business conditions - Accurately monitor current business activity, and compare it to historical activity and future plans to give people the contextual information they need to keep performance on track. Microsoft Dynamics AX delivers many integrated monitoring tools to help your people access the most relevant, accurate, and timely information about your business.
• Gain insight into your business - It's not enough to gather accurate and timely data—people need powerful and easy-to-use analysis tools to help them understand context and trends. Microsoft Dynamics AX business intelligence functions provide people with the insight they need to take quick action and pursue opportunities.
• Budget, forecast, and plan effectively - Microsoft Dynamics AX offers flexible planning tools to help you compare budgets, forecasts, and plans to actual performance. It also gives you the ability to update budgets and plans on the basis of new data and analyses to help your business stay competitive.

Microsoft Dynamics AX removes the impediments that generate friction within the organization and provides people with a broader array of insights and actions across internal and external connections. With greater transparency, agility, and insight, your people can make better, more informed decisions - enabling you to transform into a Dynamic Business.

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.