The evolving global economy presents organizations in every industry with the difficult challenge of maintaining quality, growth, and innovation while concurrently reducing costs in ever-shorter product life cycles. As we attempt to balance these opposing needs, enterprises face new complexities in the modern marketplace: a shortage of skilled resources; greater demand for differentiation from growing competition; global shifts in supply and demand; the evolution of new business models; and the need for sustainability across multiple markets. Streamlining operations is a natural starting point for addressing most of these issues.
Whether your offerings are physical or digital, every enterprise can benefit from the new class of adaptive technology to support core manufacturing, store, branch, or service operations – as well as multi-enterprise supply chains. In evaluating potential solutions, today’s manufacturers look for technologies that can handle increasingly complex business operations as well as anticipate, innovate, and accelerate delivery of world-class products and services. To that end, the most useful operations-focused solutions enable role-based productivity in everyday activities by integrating people, processes, and business systems across organizational boundaries. Simultaneously, the ideal solutions also allow ideas, knowledge, data, and business insights to flow freely during every step of the product or service life cycle.
Over the years, Microsoft technologies have become ubiquitous in the operations arena. In fact, AMR Research estimates that more than 90% of today’s manufacturing execution systems run on Microsoft Windows and SQL Server, and that many point-of-sale (POS) systems are also Microsoft-based. We believe our broad-scale presence will endure: Forrester Research is advocating more “dynamic business applications,” while the Gartner Group points out the need for convergence of enterprise business applications and personal productivity tools through Office-based business applications.
All of our operations software solutions are founded on SQL Server 2008, a high-end, scalable database platform that provides secure, easy access to stored data and can integrate operational data across disparate production and service delivery systems including manufacturing execution systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), POS, and supply-chain management software (SCM). SQL Server also includes powerful reporting and analysis services that can easily handle demanding analytical applications with millions of records and thousands of users.
Another key component in our solution offering is Microsoft Dynamics AX which integrates several Microsoft technologies: BizTalk Server for automated data collection; SharePoint for role-based dashboards; SQL Server for performance management; and Microsoft Unified Communications for real-time collaboration capabilities via phone, mobile devices, live meetings, and more. Dynamics AX is a prime example of what Gartner refers to as a “visionary” breed of operational ERP – one that can support operations and augment a legacy administrative system in a two-tier deployment model.
And building upon these mission-critical, real-time systems, Microsoft and its certified partners have developed a variety of industry-specific solutions to help you leverage investments in core transactional systems while resolving concerns about adapting legacy systems to a modern, dynamic business environment.
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Microsoft Operations Solution Benefits
- Higher efficiency through a familiar, easy-to-use, role-tailored environment
- Connected, collaborative online environments for real-time operational intelligence that spans applications, business processes, and enterprises
- Cost-effective, modern applications that can adapt to dynamic business operations and be scaled for branches, companies, or divisions of any size
- Unified Communications capabilities that provide presence, identity, and collaboration platforms for rapid issue resolution across geographic and organizational boundaries
- Secure storage and retrieval of intellectual property across distributed, multi-enterprise operations via digital rights management (DRM)
- Deeper, more accurate actionable operational intelligence through automated data collection, direct data access, broad reporting, and pervasive performance-management capabilities
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