Deep Dive into D365: Supply Chain Management

Procurement

• SCM offers robust procurement, purchase and contract management functionality, giving you the opportunity to handle the entire purchase lifecycle within the single application, from gathering quotes and awarding contracts, to managing those contracts and processing your orders. 
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• Additionally, the out-of-the-box supplier collaboration workspace can enhance supplier relationships as they’re able to maintain their account and confirm, update and invoice purchase orders directly within your solution.  
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Manufacturing

• SCM capabilities support discrete, lean and process manufacturing operations. Version control of bill of materials (BOMs), routes and formulas support product lifecycle management and customer defined quality control checks, and tests on the output of items help support your businesses quality and regulatory requirements.  
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• Fully integrated with the financial ledgers, SCM allows actual and standard costing principles which supports real-time cost and variance analysis, making it easier to accurately track variances, define your real manufacturing costs and identify potential areas for improvement. 
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Warehouse and stock management

• The warehouse management system (WMS) and stock management functionality is constantly evolving in SCM. Work templates are available to help you define standard working operations for your workers, ensuring consistency of actions across your warehouse activities. 
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• Stock movement and storage rules are handled using location directives. This allows you to safely segregate and control your inventory, define clear pick/put locations specific to the inventory items and also restrict where items can be stored. 
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• Wave management can be used to organise and streamline your daily activities, plus you can deploy the out-of-the-box warehousing app to simplify a worker’s tasks and increase efficiency. 
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Asset management

• The advanced asset management module in SCM is designed specifically to help you manage and maintain your organisation’s business assets. It allows you to track and manage asset locations and usage, automatically schedule preventative maintenance work to reduce machine downtime, track and fault report on corrective maintenance, manage your resource in a schedule board and much more.  
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• Asset management is also fully integrated with Microsoft’s wider finance offering, providing fixed asset, billing and financial analysis where needed.  

Underrated features

Material requirements planning (MRP)

• Perhaps more underutilised than underrated, the MRP engine within SCM consolidates your purchasing, sales, inventory, manufacturing and transport data to provide a reliable demand forecast that helps inform better decisions based on what is going to happen, rather than what has already happened. Pipeline purchase and sales data, what-if scenario analysis and cross-company, region and geographic visibility are all available to provide an end-to-end view of your supply chain. 
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• This is also an area that Microsoft recognise is critical to the operational efficiency of business supply chains and as a result, they’re constantly looking to enhance the functionality to meet customer needs. This has been demonstrated most recently with the addition and continued development of the planning optimisation tool, which provides business users with the ability to run and re-run planning scenarios during peak hours without any impact on wider processes.