Merit Matters Blog

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.

Welcome to the next generation of ERP - Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, a new ERP model enabling new levels of usability and business application productivity. Let’s take a look.

Business Process Library:First, the Business Process Library consists of the core ERP capabilities, industry-specific capabilities (for 5 industries), and any additional capabilities that customers need to implement to address specific needs. All these capabilities coexist in one cohesive solution, offering customers a solution that fits their needs today and tomorrow.

For example: A manufacturing organization that decides to start a retail operation can easily support that with the same solution. Or an organization that is primarily active in one industry, but has some operations with characteristics of a different industry (e.g.: IT service provider with small assembly line for hardware) can still support all their critical business processes without having to implement a second solution.

So, no duplicated data structures or functionality in different applications. All capabilities are in one solution by design! This will help to minimize integration efforts, ease configuration, and utilize a single tool set – UI, Security, platform support - to interact with this single business logic. And all this while driving down costs.

Role-based Security:Role-based security enables you to quickly create and re-use standard security permissions for individual roles within your company, which helps simplify implementation and ongoing maintenance. The security can also be applied to the customer and partner extension since these are included in the same solution. No separate system is required.

Single sign-on for users enables easier, more secure access to relevant functionalities and information from the different UIs. The security settings have only to be maintained in Microsoft Dynamics AX, and will be enforced by single sign-on when information is accessed outside the ERP environment or through a different client (Office client).

Microsoft Application Platform:Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is relying more and more on the Microsoft Application Platform and their ecosystems. Here are some of the more important tools:

• Database – SQL EE
• BI/Reporting – SQL EE + Office
• Workflow – Windows Workflow Foundation
• Development – Visual Studio (also X++)
• Integration services – Biztalk (in addition to AIF)
• Windows Communication Foundation

These are tools that most of the customers are already familiar with and use for other applications today. More over MBS is leveraging the R&D investments from other groups for the development of these tools and can re-allocate these investments into ERP application development.

Easy-to-use UI:The user will have multiple choices on how to interact with the solution – thru the ERP client, a SharePoint-based client or from Microsoft Office (Excel and Word). So based on the user’s preferences and activities the user will select a UI driving up adoption of the system.

An enhanced RoleTailored user interface includes additional Role Centers and enhanced data visualization, and preview and navigation features. It also provides a more consistent user experience across the Microsoft Dynamics AX Windows client and Microsoft SharePoint® Client for Enterprise Portal access. These improvements help drive productivity and business insight through the familiar Dynamics user experience and integrate them with key business processes. Finally, bidirectional interoperability with familiar Microsoft Office products enables users to access and refresh data in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 without leaving Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office Word.

As with previous Microsoft Dynamics AX releases, simplicity has been a primary design theme and development tenet for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. This constant emphasis has put simplicity at the center of everything: The way we develop and architect the solution; the way our partners can augment and enhance the powerful capabilities available in the solution for particular industry, vertical, or individual customer needs; and of course the way our customers can use and interact with the solution to drive business agility on a daily basis.

As of yesterday - August 1, 2011 - we are very excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, the Next Generation in ERP.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is “Powerfully Simple” because it has been designed to empower people to anticipate and embrace change, enabling businesses of all sizes to thrive and grow. Through our early adoption programs we already have evidence from customers and partners on the incredible value they are realizing from this latest version. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 delivers:

• A powerful foundation of prebuilt industry capabilities and comprehensive, core ERP functionality for financial, human resources and operations management. It supports more than 40 roles within an organization from the shop floor to the top floor in both commercial businesses and public sector organizations. One of our Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 customers, Hydra-Power Systems, is primarily a national distributor of hydraulic and pneumatic systems, but the company also manufactures custom hydraulic manifolds and power units and offers installation and training services. “Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 provides us with so many new capabilities that are critical for Hydra-Power, so we customize less and remain much closer to the solution’s standard functionality,” explains Bob Jablonski, operations manager at Hydra-Power Systems.
• A new level of agility through a set of tools like our Unified Natural Models, which serve as a library of business processes that reflect real-world situations. The Royal Canadian Mint looked at other leading ERP solutions but wanted something that could deliver the maximum value to them, the shortest implementation time, the best TCO while letting them manage their infrastructure without “an army of consultants.” As CIO Greg Smith put it, “For us, it’s all about agility – if we can’t deliver in weeks, what used to take months, we’re holding back the business.”
• Simplicity across the board, allowing amazing flexibility in configuration and customization while lowering total cost of ownership to our customers. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is focused on making every process for both IT administrators and end users simpler, easier and more intuitive. Earlier this month at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, we took simplicity a HUGE step further and announced Microsoft Dynamics ERP RapidStart Services. RapidStart Services, build on the Windows Azure platform, is designed to decrease the time-to-value of ERP deployments by simplifying the configuration of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to meet customer requirements through a simple questionnaire based approach to guiding system setup.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, deploying, configuring and managing a mission critical business application in your organization has never been easier. To learn more about this powerfully simple ERP solution that is a game-changer, browse the resources below or contact Merit Solutions!

• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Features Demo
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Employee Self Service Demo
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Preview White Paper
• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 White Paper