Connect people along your supply chain
Use Microsoft Dynamics to help employees, partners, and suppliers get the right goods to the right place at the right time
Updated: March 14, 2006
Many people across your organization are engaged in supply-chain activities—delivering sales or services to customers, shipping products, negotiating with suppliers and trading partners, managing inventory, or other critical tasks. Microsoft Dynamics provides solutions for supply-chain management (SCM) that can help connect information from different teams. In doing so, it can help you empower people to perform with optimal productivity, maintain profitable relationships with vendors and business partners, and satisfy customers.
With familiar software that extends and complements your other systems and even those of other companies, you can reduce barriers to productivity and efficiency, and help your business deliver what customers, when they need it. And by integrating supply chain, customer relationship, and financial management, you can stay in firm control of business events and generate the results you are aiming for.
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Help your team better control your supply chain
Microsoft Dynamics solutions can provide your people with a multitude of ways to plan, coordinate, and executive delivery of goods and services productively. You can realize a strong return on investment as a result of better individual and team productivity, streamlined operations, and more effective collaboration.
| • | Using Microsoft Dynamics, people can effectively improve supply-chain efficiency, with minimal time spent on product training and learning. The user interface is familiar, consistent, and comfortable—just like that of other Microsoft programs people work with. Microsoft Dynamics also features a design based on business roles, helping team members across the chain to quickly find the tools and information they need the most. |
| • | If you wish to tailor the solutions to your specific business conditions, your information technology (IT) team can make adjustments using familiar, proven Microsoft development tools. In addition, a certified Microsoft Dynamics partner can provide customization to meet your company’s unique needs. While your supply chain might become complex and extensive as your company grows, you can rest assured that you’ve invested in technology that can grow with you—all the while providing employees and partners with a familiar software environment. |
| • | Microsoft Dynamics gives people across your supply-chain visibility into customer demand and the delivery of goods—helping them make faster, better business decisions and take the best course of action when adjustments are necessary. With features such as automatic notification, they easily can keep tabs on inventory, helping sustain optimal item levels without tying up funds in the warehouse. Your team can plan purchasing at favorable terms and in a timely manner, controlling costs and ensuring that your organization meets its customer commitments. And they can connect closely with operations to make sure manufacturing has the materials it needs to deliver products on time. |
| • | With Microsoft Dynamics, you can bring supply-chain functions online and make information available for team collaboration—wherever your employees, vendors, partners and suppliers are. Business portal functionality lets you provide supply-chain functions, documents, and information to people across the chain, both inside and outside of the organization. And you can use the same portal technology to let your executives review and augment performance—when, where, and how they need to. 
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Build productive vendor relationships
Microsoft Dynamics solutions can help your people work with business partners and suppliers in such a way that everybody’s business model can advance and key business relationships deliver high value. As you empower your team to work productively with other companies in your supply chain, you also support those vendors and suppliers in attaining their own business goals.
| • | Help your employees improve relationships with vendors and trading partners. Give them access to vendor communications, agreements, and commitments—along with the tools to communicate efficiently with partner companies. Offer partners self-service capabilities to access important business information and documents. You can use Microsoft Dynamics along with other Microsoft technologies that you may already have to streamline relationships further—even collaborating with partners who use electronic data interchange (EDI) without having to incur the expense of implementing EDI in your own business. |
| • | The supply-chain functionality in Microsoft Dynamics can also help your people monitor and report on the actual productivity and business value of vendor and partner engagements, and implement appropriate course corrections. In turn, your team can practice consistent, efficient quality control over the fulfillment of vendor commitments to your company, and record their findings in such a way that it is easy for business managers to evaluate vendor performance, negotiate terms, or initiate new business alliances. Reliable demand-planning capabilities also help to control costs and align vendors firmly behind your business goals. |
Compete successfully by keeping customers happy
The members of your team who work directly with customers play an essential role in your business. Microsoft Dynamics solutions can give those employees the information, capability, and control to satisfy customers and strengthen your company’s competitive advantage.
| • | Microsoft Dynamics’ supply-chain strengths can help your team fulfill customer commitments with greater reliability and accountability, and deliver the products and services customers want, when they need them. Sales associates can set customer expectations realistically and provide customers efficiently with the information they need to make an informed buying decision. Get products to your company and ship to your customers in the most effective time frame to ensure satisfaction while managing costs. And help service staff respond to customer needs efficiently, helping build customer loyalty. |
| • | You want to make sure that your products and services meet customer expectations today and in the future. Business information, reports, and analytical tools provided in Microsoft Dynamics supply-chain management solutions help you identify customer behaviors and market trends, and meet emerging needs before the competition does. Use the same tools to verify that sales and service operations and other supply chain-related business activities are being performed profitably and your people are reaching their individual and team goals. |
Extend and integrate your systems easily for the most effective supply-chain and business management. Microsoft Dynamics solutions work with the technologies familiar to many businesses—they are developed to work with and like other Microsoft products. This allows you to incorporate your technical resources, creativity, and working processes into one flexible SCM infrastructure, deriving the best value from your technology investment.
| • | Once information is entered into your integrated business management solution, it’s accessible where it’s needed. No matter whether your employees in shipping, inventory, or sales are serving customers, working with vendors, or researching business details—they can do so with fewer delays and distractions than finding information in a disconnected system. |
| • | Snap-in software tools bring information such as order status or line-item details directly into e-mail or word processing programs, so employees can help keep the supply chain flowing without switching between complicated applications or having to track down information. |
| • | You can use Microsoft BizTalk Server in SCM, manufacturing, and other lines of business to connect to legacy systems within your own organization or other companies. |
| • | When you integrate Microsoft Dynamics with portal technology, you can offer collaborative business capabilities in a secure manner to individuals inside and outside of your organization. Connect people and processes across companies at the convenience of a Web browser or their desktops for optimal SCM productivity |
| • | Microsoft Dynamics solutions give businesses a cost-effective way to integrate SCM with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology so you can engage effectively even with the largest customers and suppliers. |
Microsoft Dynamics supply-chain management solutions
Each of the following solutions are part of the Microsoft Dynamics family of products (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions), and each provides functionality to automate and help you improve supply-chain management processes. To find a Microsoft partner who can help you choose the solution that’s best for your company, contact us.
Next steps
Find out how solutions for SCM can help your organization meet customer needs and accomplish business goals by practicing productive, streamlined management of the many elements of your supply chain.
