Merit Matters Blog

An added feature of our new Merit Solutions website is our Resources section which provides free access to a lot of great Microsoft Dynamics and Merit Solutions information! Today we wanted to highlight our Microsoft Dynamics AX Demos page.

Our demo lab contains a variety of demonstrations and tutorials so you can see for yourself how you can grow and transform your business with Microsoft Dynamics AX. And best of all, we don't require you to fill out any forms to view these videos! Demos include:

• The Dynamic Manufacturer
• The Dynamic CFO
• The Dynamic CIO
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Supply Chain Demo
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Workflows demo
• ...and more!

Microsoft Dynamics AX is the complete ERP solution for enterprises that provides a purpose-built foundation across numerous industries, along with comprehensive, core ERP functionality for financial, human resources and operations management. It empowers your people to anticipate and embrace change so your business can thrive. All of this is packaged in a single global solution giving you rapid time to value.

Today, business opportunity can mean enlarging your customer base to include a worldwide audience or expanding across borders into new sites or branch offices. Unfortunately, global business has driven higher levels of product and service customization, both for individual customers and to meet the needs of different cultures, consumers, languages, distribution channels, and market requirements. As a result, manufacturers must juggle increasingly complex product line and supply chain requirements. In addition, retail competition is so fierce that retail customers can, and do, demand tailored products, services such as RFID compliance, and even the ability to specify the materials’ origin and other characteristics of product packaging.

Meanwhile, market conditions change faster than ever, and customers expect their suppliers to help them adapt. Traditional lead times have become irrelevant, orders may be changed at the very last minute, and as a result, traditional sales forecasting and demand planning no longer work. Customers also expect suppliers to provide complete traceability and chain-of-control management, no matter how complex the product or how many times the goods change hands. Meeting these demands requires unprecedented operational flexibility and the free flow of accurate data throughout the supply chain.

Fortunately, every headache of global supply chain management also represents an opportunity for astute business managers to seize an advantage over competitors. Many manufacturing firms are implementing strategies that include demand-driven supply chains focusing on greater real-time interaction, automated inventory replenishment, and increased manufacturing or logistics outsourcing. The successful implementation of such strategies can be greatly facilitated by an integrated business management technology that increases supply chain visibility, connects trade partners to speed interaction and collaboration, fosters greater efficiency, and provides the cross-organizational insight for confident decisions and actions.

Microsoft Dynamics AX is designed to manage the complexities of a global organization by consolidating and standardizing processes and providing visibility across your organization.

• Expand easily across international borders with country specific functionality, including capabilities for multiple languages and currencies; help support compliance with local financial requirements for more than 36 countries.
• Eliminate silos of data and utilize a single ERP software system enables companies to control the details of their businesses by linking all departments together - erasing information boundaries and delivering critical information needed for rapid, effective decision-making.
• Consolidate financial, operational, and customer data while preserving local information—to build your strategic edge and personalized customer, partner, and supplier relationships.
• Unify standards and help ensure quality by centralizing processes, automating standard operating procedures, sharing best practices, and extending supply chain management across multiple sites and divisions.
• Manage and monitor global and local performance with sophisticated yet straightforward reporting and analysis tools. Combine your solution with Microsoft Business Intelligence applications to enhance the analytic capabilities critical to managing a complex business environment.
• Give people access to real-time KPIs, scorecards, and data through Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX. And with Microsoft SharePoint, key decision-makers can work with critical information without logging in to Microsoft Dynamics AX.
• Help ensure efficient, consistent, and rapid deployments with Merit Solutions Rapid On and Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step - a standardized, global methodology and suite of tools that simplify implementation, speed deployment, and ease upgrade processes.

Removing barriers to international growth is essential for business development. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 enables you to expand your operations to new geographies with built-in, country-specific localizations in a single solution to meet regulatory requirements for 36 countries. Enable entities across your multisite, global organization to share the same data, business rules, and processes in order to harmonize and streamline business practices. Also support your business growth by easily adding users and transactions, as well as configuring more complex business scenarios.

When you have a technological solution that provides closer integration and greater data accuracy, you can automate manual activities and eliminate redundant data entry throughout purchasing, warehouse, and logistics processes that cross organizations or are within a single company. The result can be fewer errors, lower costs, and reduced cycle times. An effective business management solution can also provide automated notifications to keep goods and data flowing smoothly and help ensure prompt actions on changes, delays, or unexpected events.

Read the following white paper for more information: The Value of Microsoft Dynamics AX for Manufacturers

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.

Many manufacturing organizations dread the risks and costs associated with a change in ERP systems. Unfortunately, this mindset often overshadows the fact that old, unsupported hardware and software that was designed 10-20 years ago is expensive to maintain and can rarely serve today’s real-time data exchange requirements. However, a comprehensive, integrated software solution that can be implemented quickly, customized as needed, and used easily by employees can provide a return on investment in just months.

When choosing and implementing a manufacturing ERP solution, decision-makers need to choose the most cost-effective solution that:

• Enables flexible business processes that can be adapted over time to evolving circumstances.
• Provides real-time visibility across all business processes, including interfaces with corporate, customer, and supply partner systems.
• Permits multinational manufacturing companies to take advantage of shared processes and best practices across the value chain.
• Supports advanced manufacturing strategies that help meet the challenges of global business and provide an edge over competitors.

An integrated, effective solution can very quickly deliver a return on investment, reducing IT costs from a total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective and capitalizing on existing productivity tools and IT investments. The right manufacturing solution can also:

• Create a homogeneous platform compatible with existing databases and standard integration and development tools.
• Be easy for employees to learn and use, minimizing training while quickly maximizing productivity.
• Be rapidly deployed for a faster return on investment.
• Support shared services and processes across multiple locations.
• Scale and adapt as the company’s needs grow for a cost-effective solution over the long term.

Microsoft Dynamics AX offers multinational companies a manufacturing management solution and an integration platform that gathers and integrates real-time operational information so business managers can more easily access and analyze critical data, respond to changes, and make decisions with confidence. Whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud, Microsoft Dynamics AX empowers manufacturers to meet the challenges of today’s global markets by reducing costs, enhancing operational flexibility, and connecting the plant floor to the back office in productive new ways.

Most manufacturing organizations already make use of Microsoft technology in everyday activities - such as Microsoft Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Windows Server, and more. Implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX for plant operations takes advantage of those existing investments while increasing overall visibility so that managers and employees can see exactly what is happening on the plant floor; understand how it relates to supply, order, and financial information both locally and across the enterprise; and use that integrated knowledge to reduce costs, react effectively to changes, and delight customers.

Inflexible ERP systems hamper process change. In addition, implementation often involves large, multi-year projects that carry the risk that business processes and supporting IT systems will be obsolete by the time they come on stream. Expand business opportunities, modify processes, and differentiate your business with an ERP solution that provides unprecedented agility.

Here’s how Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 provides business agility:

1. Adapt to changing process and regulatory requirements with model-driven methods: First, improve business visibility with virtually unlimited views on the business via financial dimensions that let you earmark transactions based on system and custom entities. When your business needs changes to business processes, you can configure these with a graphical workflow editor without heavy dependency of IT. In addition, improve product planning and execution flexibility by unifying process, discrete and lean manufacturing operations. And, foster innovation with a unified business process repository. Configure the capabilities supporting generic or industry-specific business processes that you need from a single repository. Lastly, the organizational model help you change your organization structure more easily. For example: a manufacturing organization can implement lean manufacturing for one of the product lines by simply configuring these processes while running the same solution for more classic process or discrete operations.
2. Improve responsiveness to demand: The manufacturing capabilities include a range of capabilities that improve responsiveness to demand. For example: manage customer demand spikes by rapidly onboarding vendors. Or, increase utilization and responsiveness through flexible resource deployments across multiple routings. Fulfill customer demand with the constraints-based product configurator.
3. Enable a green and efficient enterprise: Track waste, water usage, energy consumption, carbon footprint, and related costs with the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard. Gain efficiencies through the “5 R’s” (reduce, recover, reuse, recycle, and renew). Reduce waste and streamline production using lean manufacturing techniques.

Expand business opportunities, modify processes, and differentiate your business with comprehensive ERP software that provides unprecedented agility.

• Natural modeling to continuously plan, visualize, and change your processes.
• Flexible deployment options (such as two-tier ERP, or cloud deployment) that can change as you grow.
• Agile technology that makes it easy to change and differentiate your business.

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Manufacturers are struggling to close the gap between their business requirements and the capabilities of their current business systems. In addition, many organizations lack the insight into their global operations due to the wide variety of legacy systems across the organization. The lack of a single system that grows with the business is evident. In addition, they’re challenged to give their people access to relevant information.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 will help you gain more value quickly with a single, powerful solution that supports industry-specific and operational demands across your global enterprise. Let me explain how:

• Purposely built for the manufacturing industry: Meet your manufacturing business requirements with a solution purposely built for these needs. For example: improve production control through a variety of systems: make-to-order, make-to-stock, or engineer-to-order or enhance customer and vendor agreements with flexible contract structures. In addition you can support your organization end-to-end with rich core ERP capabilities, including finance, HR, and compliance management to streamline operations and increase efficiency across your global organizations. All with a single solution!
• Scale your organization quickly with a global manufacturing solution: Run your organization and expand into new geographies using 36 country localizations built into one solution. Packaged localizations to meet local financial regulations in about 36 countries are included and maintained in Microsoft Dynamics AX helping organization meet the changing regulations in specific markets. In addition, it enables entities in your multisite organization to share data, business rules and processes in order to harmonize and streamline business processes. For example, Microsoft Dynamics AX enables global manufacturing planning with a unified operations resources models, or enhance operational efficiency with shared data for general ledger, relationships, and products; and common processes for intercompany trade and shared services. 
• Gain immediate insight and unlock greater productivity with RoleTailored user experiences: Boost productivity with RoleTailored enhancements including new Role Centers, fact boxes, and enriched previews. Provide ad hoc, self-service business intelligence and reporting for key manufacturing operations, including pre-built reports from Microsoft SQL Server® Reporting Services. Provide business process context via notifications and alerts initiated by embedded workflows.

Reduce time to market and respond quickly to changing customer demands with Microsoft Dynamics AX Manufacturing. Real-time insight into business and supply chain information—including inventory, warehouse, and production—helps you optimize production flow by planning effectively, maximizing resource utilization, driving accurate delivery performance, and streamlining business processes.

Business success today involves far more than simply delivering quality products on time. It requires integrated solutions that include service, support, and timely and accurate information, whenever and wherever customers want it, and it demands that companies regularly assess and improve the performance of operations that deliver those solutions. To deliver optimum customer satisfaction and operations performance—and business success—organizations must be able to provide products and efficiently capture, access, and share operations data in the right way with the right entities. These companies — along with their customers and suppliers — need “manufacturing visibility.”

Yet many companies fail to capture even basic production data, either manually or electronically, or to make that data available throughout the business. Even fewer organizations use manufacturing information to benchmark competitiveness (or lack thereof), and fewer still share this information throughout the value chain to improve supply-chain effectiveness and improve customer service.

Manufacturing visibility and its benefits—improved operations and customer service and rising profits—are available only to those organizations that:

• Focus on the right measures—those that enable them to understand how well their processes are functioning, and those that matter most to their customers.
• Capture and share the right information across the supply chain, making sure that both suppliers and customers participate in the visibility process— ensuring optimal value to customers.
• Offer timely access of information to the right people, allowing appropriate employees and partners to manage problems and capitalize on opportunities.

Nucleus Research found that greater visibility into all aspects of operations was the number one benefit Microsoft Dynamics AX customers in manufacturing recognized, particularly those that were moving from disparate systems or individually-owned paper or Microsoft Excel files. The Microsoft Office-like interface, connections with other Microsoft tools, self-service business intelligence and reporting tools, dashboard KPIs, and business analytics within Microsoft Dynamics AX helps users work effectively in a familiar environment so they can make better decisions more quickly.

As one customer said, “We have greater visibility in general – not just transaction visibility but a more holistic view of the company. This has led to a lot of insight into things that are more or less profitable, insight into what our actual product time is, and insight into the popularity of different products.”

In a separate study, Nucleus Research found that 75% of Microsoft Dynamics AX customers reported improved operations and visibility as a result of their Microsoft Dynamics AX deployment. Actual returns from better operations and visibility ranged from productivity gains to greater inventory turns to improved time to delivery to changes in working capital.

Remember, though, that manufacturing visibility is merely a tool to achieve business objectives. Although visibility can gauge the progress of operations—hour to hour, day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter—and eventually move the organization toward future targets, the real work still occurs on the plant floor—and in the minds of employees dedicated to improving that work.

Use our Microsoft Dynamics AX ROI Calculator to see the potential annual savings you could achieve by implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Microsoft Dynamics AX is a business management application for mid-sized and larger organizations that is designed to improve operational efficiencies through automation and increased end user productivity. Beyond traditional ERP components such as financials, business intelligence and reporting, sales and marketing, and service management, Microsoft Dynamics AX also includes key functionality to support manufacturing, including:

• Manufacturing management tools including production order management, bill of materials (BOM) management, production tracking and reporting, forecast scheduling, master planning, cost tracking, job monitoring, and shop floor management.
• Supply chain management functionality including order management, trade agreement support, RFID support, logistics and inventory management, multisite and multi-currency support, master planning, quality management, warehouse management, and demand planning.
• New investments include support for lean manufacturing, process manufacturing, and sustainability monitoring.

Microsoft Dynamics AX can be customized using standard integrated development tools to meet the specific needs of manufacturers. Microsoft’s Application Integration Framework allows access to Microsoft Dynamics AX functionality as Web services so it can be easily integrated with both Microsoft and non-Microsoft applications.

Nucleus analysts have analyzed hundreds of Microsoft Dynamics AX deployments over the years and found that organizations broadly achieve returns in areas of increased visibility, increased productivity, and reduced costs. This research note focuses on the specific experiences of manufacturers deploying Microsoft Dynamics AX to support their operations and analyzes the types and scale of returns manufacturers can expect to achieve from deploying Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Read the report: The Value of Microsoft Dynamics AX for Manufacturers

Manufacturing is a mature industry, so today’s leaders are facing some of the same challenges that their predecessors have encountered over the years. These include:

• Cost pressures: As companies compete in a global market, they are under constant pressure to reduce end-item manufacturing costs as well as plant operating costs. This requires streamlining processes and increasing production efficiency. There is a continued need for insight into cost drivers of the operations.
• Time to market: Getting products to market faster than your competition gives you a competitive advantage. Reduction in product life cycles caused by technology innovation and changes in consumer behavior force organization to focus on reducing time-to-market of products. This requires a good insight into and grip operations.
• Product quality: It is no longer acceptable to deliver defective products. Not only does it damage your reputation but warranty and liability costs can quickly escalate to eliminate all profits.
• Inventory visibility: The risks thus costs of inventory are on the rise due to increasing product assortments, shorter product life cycles, and the importance of a healthy cashflow. The visibility into inventory across distributed organizations remains a challenge and continues to challenge the organization’s grip on inventory.

A world-class software solution should help manufacturers address these traditional challenges - but it needs to do more: it must also help them identify and respond to recently emerging challenges.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 was purposely built for Manufacturing Organizations.

We don’t have nearly enough time (or space!) to review all the capabilities built into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 that can help manufacturers meet the challenges they face and efficiently manage their unique set of manufacturing models across multiple sites and geographies. But I can provide a high-level overview. I’ll start by briefly noting the familiar user experience that fosters adoption and use, the robust set of tools that helps streamline workflow and business processes, and the pervasive interoperability that helps you optimize your investment in other Microsoft products and technologies. With that said, let’s look at some of the key manufacturing capabilities built into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

The following General Business Processes are utilized by all corporations independent of their business focus. They provide the corporate infrastructure needed to operate in a modern competitive business environment. These include:

Financial Management:

• General ledger
• Accounts receivable and payable
• Bank management
• Budgetary controls
• Shared support services
• Compliance management

Human capital management:

• Organization and workforce management
• Recruiting and selection
• Development, training and performance
• Skill mapping
• Employee self-service portal
• Expense management

Business intelligence and reporting:

• Standard, ad-hoc, and analytical reports with Microsoft SQL Reporting Services
• Role tailored, pre-defined, multi-dimensional data cubes
• Dashboard views of KPI’s

The following Key Manufacturing Business Processes are purposely built to provide manufacturers with the tools needed to run their discrete, process, or hybrid manufacturing operations. These include:

Procurement and sourcing:

• Direct and indirect procurement
• Purchase requisitions
• Supplier relationship management
• Vendor self-service portal

Manufacturing:

• Material and capacity planning
• Resource management
• Job scheduling and sequencing
• Product configuration
• Shop floor management

Distribution:

• Inventory management
• Multi-site warehouse management
• Order handling with trade agreements
• Order promising
• Distribution planning
• Quality management

Sales and marketing:

• Sales force and marketing automation
• Lead and opportunity management
• Telemarketing and telesales
• Sales management
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM connector

Service management:

• Service orders and contracts
• Service calls and dispatching
• Repair management
• Service subscription

So, who do we have in mind for this solution? Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 has been built with discrete, process and lean manufacturing organizations in mind. The solution serves organizations of different sizes differently – two popular scenarios are:

• Large enterprises utilize Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 as part of a Two-Tier ERP implementation: Large enterprises are striving to balance business agility and costs by standardizing on two ERP standards. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is used by these organizations in subsidiaries, divisions and specific HQ “workloads” (such as manufacturing plants or corporate purchasing) of large international organizations. These organizations often have a central corporate (Administrative) ERP and are seeking to standardize on a more flexible, lower-cost ERP for use in a variety of units. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is extremely well-positioned for this “tier”. Due to the differences in nature of these units (Retail, purchasing function, plant), the solution has to support these different needs with a single technology to take advantage of the standardization. In addition the organization will benefit from the interoperability with the Microsoft platform. A popular manufacturing scenario involves connecting local manufacturing sites to corporate HQ (see Two-Tier presentation for more details).
• Distributed enterprises support the organization end-to-end: This scenario addresses the needs of mid-market companies and small enterprises that operate global, multi-plant organizations and are looking for a single centralized ERP that can accommodate multiple entities in one or multiple countries. These organizations seek a good match of the ERP solution with the primary business processes. In addition they would like to benefit from the networking effect of ERP and extend the footprint of ERP within the organizations to more business processes and people. Examples of these are the deployment of Human Capital Management, Time and Attendance, Compliance and internal controls, etc….

Are you a manufacturing organization that fits into one of these two scenarios? If so, sign up for your Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Free Trial today!

Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX can provide significant value opportunities across your business.

Let’s look at some of these.

Value Opportunity	Range	Enablers
IT maintenance and support costs	Reduce by up to 40%	· Improved ease of use; reduction in systems management requirements and in-house support; reduced maintenance and upgrade costs
Order lead times	Reduce by up to 35%	·  Better visibility of on-hand and in-process inventory; more efficient production; shelf life management and first expired/first out (FEFO) inventory management
Work-in-progress inventories	Reduce by up to 30%	·  Reduced production cycle times; increased utilization; improved routing and scheduling accuracy
Obsolete, expired, or perishable inventory	Reduce by up to 30%	·  FEFO inventory management, shelf life management
Changeover and setup times	Reduce by up to 20%	·  Better order sequencing and batch management; improved visibility of production setup and changeover requirements
Finished goods inventory	Reduce by up to 25%	·  Overall reduction in cycle times; improved order accuracy and forecast accuracy
Planning cycle time	Reduce by up to 80%	·  Weekly, daily, and hourly supply/demand netting; what-if planning and simulation; improved granularity of resources constraints by formula, dimension, or other attributes
Forecast accuracy	Improve by 5% to 15%	·  More complete and accurate order data; integrated forecast netting against inbound orders and rework orders
Temporary labor requirements	Reduce by up to 25%	·  Greater visibility of actual production requirements; improvement in planning accuracy