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.

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.

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.

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.