Microsoft Dynamics 365 at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ 2022
Although the pandemic exposed our supply chain fragilities, there are other factors that will continue to disrupt our supply chains for the foreseeable future. Geopolitical tensions between world superpowers are forcing companies to change how they trade, source, and manufacture goods, so redesigning your supply chain networks or setting up new supply chains to gain resilience is a common theme we will continue to see over the next few years. Global economies are inching towards recession partly due to the prolonged and ongoing pandemic which will increase cost pressures on businesses, and we all know gaining resilience while reducing costs is just extremely difficult. It will require us to improve our agility and pivot and adapt to changing customer and business needs.
We recently announced new innovations from Microsoft Dynamics 365 that fuels digital transformation of supply chains for a resilient and sustainable future and we are excited to present these innovations to you at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™ on June 6, 2022 to June 8, 2022 in Orlando, Florida.
We will showcase how Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps businesses at our booth #312:
- Increase resilience with a predictive supply chain.
- Manufacture and operate sustainably with minimal waste.
- Transform work with advanced warehousing and robotics.
Microsoft’s supply chain experts will also deliver the must-have insights, strategies, and frameworks for chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) and supply chain leaders to think big, make bold moves, and drive real impact within their organizations1 on June 6, 2022 at 4:00 PM Eastern Time in the Southern Hemisphere II auditorium.
We hope to catch up with you and your teams at the event. Register and attend our session (see details below) for cutting-edge thought leadership about supply chain technology solutions.
Microsoft: CSCO’s role in digitally transforming supply chains with a composable approach
With growing supply chain complexities, leaders need a clear digital transformation strategy that drives visibility across the entire value chain, improves flexibility to meet customer demands, and decreases operational costs. In this session, we will share a new approach to deploying transformative supply chain technologies bespoke to your business by adopting composable characteristics without having to replace your existing supply chain solutions. The composite architecture enables accelerated time-to-value through better interoperability and data harmonization to create a resilient supply chain.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of a composable enterprise.
Composability enables circular manufacturing to advance sustainability initiatives
It’s paramount for enterprises to operate more sustainably. Most organizations have a goal to reduce and offset carbon emissions, including Microsoft. One of the ways to operate sustainably is to drive circularity. Essentially—instead of throwing away goods at the end of their life, finding ways to reuse or recycle them to reduce carbon emissions. To achieve circularity, businesses can customize their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to orchestrate new business processes. A composable system allows you to use low code to customize them easily.
Our own Microsoft Circular Centers have a unique process to optimize warehouse routing and management system to process decommissioned servers from Microsoft datacenters. There were no reverse logistics solutions that were suitable for the circular centers out of the box. By leveraging the low code Microsoft Power Platform solutions, Dynamics 365 was extended to build a reverse logistics solution that helped reuse, resale, and recycle the decommissioned data center assets. This is one of the ways that puts Microsoft on the path to achieving its sustainability goals by 2030. The outcome of this program has exceeded expectations. Our pilot circular center has been able to reuse 83 percent of critical parts and has reduced carbon emissions by 145,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Visit us at booth #312 for a demo and learn more about how our circular centers work and how we leverage a composable approach to run these circular centers efficiently, or check out our webinar on building a sustainable supply chain with circular economy principles.
Composability unlocks enterprise resource planning modernization
The future of business applications is composable. According to Gartner®, “those that have adopted a composable approach will outpace their competition by 80 percent in the speed of new feature implementation.”2 A composable business consists of modular building blocks that can be rapidly connected and orchestrated––allowing organizations to adapt operations and processes to changing market conditions, new business opportunities, and unpredictable disruptions. Composable ERP solutions are, among other things, cloud-based platforms that scale without limits, leverage a modern open system architecture to reduce implementation time, and usually incorporate low-code/no-code interfaces to improve usability and customization.
One of the companies reaping the benefits of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Solutions is Tillamook. Tillamook County Creamery Association is a farmer-owned cooperative based in Tillamook, Oregon, founded in 1909 and owned by about 80 farming families. While best known for its cheese, it has introduced more new dairy products in the past five years than in the previous fifty. At the same time, Tillamook has expanded nationally, and its products can now be found across the United States.
To support its growth and expansion, Tillamook needed a modern solution to scale and enter new distribution and sales markets. This led them to migrate to Dynamics 365 apps for Finance and Supply Chain Management. Tillamook had just begun its ERP modernization journey when the global pandemic disrupted demand and supply almost instantly. Yet despite being live for only four months, once COVID-19 spiked demand for groceries as people ate more at home, Tillamook was able to leverage the flexibility of Dynamics 365 to adapt quickly to new business needs.
“There’s been this thing with ERP over the past few years where you avoid customizations to the software so that you can take upgrades. That’s a thing of the past with Dynamics 365. You can modify the system to meet your unique business processes, adjust the logic and configure, and it still takes the updates seamlessly. We have some unique processes here with our complex supply chain, and we’ve been able to modify the system and still take those upgrades.”—Travis Pierce, Director of Information Technology, Tillamook.
Enhance visibility with digital supply chain solutions
Today, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers can use the right digital supply chain solutions to build or enhance the real-time visibility required to move from reactive decision-making to predictive and proactive decision-making. To maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability, they need to unify data across order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, warehousing, and transportation.
Supply chain leaders know that the earlier potential disruptions and constraints are identified, the more successful the measures to adapt and overcome them can be. Modern improvements in technology, such as applying AI and machine learning to complex data sets, are giving businesses the insight and agility to deploy processes and systems that generate and proactively shape customer demand. These solutions also allow companies to sync and balance supply to demand by continuously optimizing production operations and distribution networks. With real-time, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, organizations can sense, predict, and adapt to constraints and disruptions at the earliest possible opportunity.
Take the Supply Chain Visibility Guided Tour to see how a retailer can enhance supply chain visibility using Dynamics 365. The composable architecture of Dynamics 365 enables businesses to incrementally add functional capabilities that will make their supply chains more resilient without having to replace their legacy systems.
See you at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium XPOTM 2022
Supply chains continue to evolve through the current post-pandemic shift. As they do, Microsoft is committed to empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. We hope you will join us at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium XPOTM 2022 by either catching our session or engaging with one of our supply chain experts. If you are unable to attend this year but are interested in learning how to start optimizing your supply chain, you can get started with a demo today or check out our webinar Create Agile and Digital Supply Chains with Dynamics 365.
Sources:
1Gartner®, 2022. Gartner Supply Chain Symposium Xpo™, June 2022.
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