Whether an enterprise is selling physical, or digital, products and services, they can’t survive – let alone grow - without adaptive business systems to support their core retailing, store, and warehouse as well as their extended digital or physical supply chains. Solutions in the Retail Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) & Supply Chain Management (SCM) Solution Area provide the core real-time transactional engines; the multi-enterprise collaborative workflows; operational intelligence; and the business productivity tools required to support today's talent starved, dynamically evolving businesses.
The Retail ERP & SCM Solution Area includes a diverse set of Retail Solution, but they do share some common characteristics – they are augmenting legacy headquarters or corporate systems that neither provides real-time visibility nor the ability to adapt to today’s dynamic business operations. Add in the requirement to address workforce talent shortages and actively engage both millennials and the aging workforce in adaptive business processes using Web 2.0 technologies.
SOLUTIONS
Microsoft provides a comprehensive operations management platform allowing our customers to connect their execution systems in subsidiaries, divisions, branches, and line of business (LOB) to their Corporate/HQ (e.g. ‘Administrative ERP’) systems using familiar, flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solutions from the most comprehensive partner ecosystem that includes Merchandising, Forecasting, Supply Chain Management and Distribution ISVs. Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail provides global organizations with a modern and intuitive operations management application for their Retail operations that integrates with execution systems, adapts to local business needs, provides operational intelligence and drives local productivity while also integrating with Corporate/HQ systems to support shared processes and provide global visibility. Dynamics AX for retail with embedded ‘People-Ready’ analytics and role based experiences in the familiar Microsoft UI, along with Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and the Microsoft BI technology stack, bridges the gap between Microsoft ISV execution systems and Corporate/HQ (including Administrative ERP) investments to support today's talent starved, dynamically evolving businesses.
Improve people productivity
Help people in your distributed operations work smarter and faster in your local entities with an operations management solution that is familiar to them, delivers a high degree of scalability, and synergy with other Microsoft technologies and 3rd party execution systems.
Manage Process Change
Manage the demands of growth and change with operations management solutions that easily adapts and is customizable to meet the unique local business processes of your distributed operations - with low total cost of ownership (TCO).
Competitive Global Ecosystem
Compete effectively with a global ecosystem utilizing a proven operations management solution for your distributed sites that connects real-time execution and day to day information about operations to your headquarter solution - drive business process standardization into your operations and global visibility across your organization.
NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR MICROSOFT DYNAMICS AX FOR RETAIL
With growing recognition of the complexity and cost to customize a headquarter ‘Administrative ERP’ solution many enterprises are now weighing the benefits of deploying what Gartner describes as a second tier ‘Operational ERP’ to provide standardized operational intelligence and management across the diverse landscapes of site specific real-time execution systems. However, the damage has been done and many enterprises are now skeptical of deploying ERP in support of operations, believing that deploying a second ERP solution will be too costly, too complex to use, and actually reduce visibility into their global business operations. The Microsoft ecosystem of partners dominate the market for real-time execution solutions, and Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail is a next generation platform for ‘Operations Management’ which can be fully integrated with the headquarters ‘Administrative ERP’ solution and leverage our powerful portfolio of partners in real-time execution.