Customer demands for fast deliveries and ever lower costs, coupled with increasingly difficult government regulations, place many new and unique challenges on chemical manufacturers. Add to that a continual need for innovative product formulas and recipes and ever-changing packaging variations—and the result is escalating complexity in all areas of the business, including development, purchasing, manufacturing, distribution, and sales.

These market pressures require chemical manufacturers to find new ways to streamline every aspect of their business operations, including successfully maintaining many complex formulas and recipes, complying with regulatory and customer mandates, and managing a wealth of compound-specific characteristics such as shelf life, potencies, and unit-of-measure conversions. In addition, ongoing operational and inventory challenges require closer interaction between research and development (R&D) labs, procurement, production, and marketing.

Microsoft Dynamics business software provides powerful and flexible manufacturing, financial, and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that support recipe management and efficient demand planning – making it the ideal system to help you meet these challenges. Microsoft and its partners deliver systems that can help you shrink development cycles, respond quickly to customer trends, and comply with changing regulations. With the right technology in place, you can run your business in ways that can help improve operations, open visibility into the supply chain, and increase your competitiveness—worldwide.

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• Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics solutions for chemical manufacturers
• Customer success story
• Microsoft Dynamics products
• Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics solutions

Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics solutions for chemical manufacturers

Microsoft Dynamics solutions support:

• Recipe and formula management
• Customer and supply chain visibility
• Yield planning and tracking
• Co-product/by-product management
• Batch optimization and balancing
• Detailed product cost analysis
• Dynamic formula adjustment
• Customizable item and dimensionality structure
• Centralized quality control regulation
• Integrated radio frequency identification (RFID) adoption

Microsoft Dynamics can help your chemical manufacturing company:

• Manage formulas and inventory better: Complex product formulas and/or recipes can change frequently to reflect variations in material supply, product packaging, manufacturing processes, raw material characteristics, and product development. A flexible information system such as one based on Microsoft Dynamics and partner solutions can help you move beyond the manual records and spreadsheets often encountered in production and R&D labs to integrate development directly with batch and formula management, inventory information, procurement, and production planning. Once production begins, formulas can be automatically adjusted based on actual raw material characteristics to ensure consistent quality from one lot to the next, with yields tracked by standards identified in the formula.
  
  In addition, people can more effectively select or modify formulas, plan production, replenish inventory, and simplify quality assurance when they can track product-specific materials characteristics such as potency, shelf life, catch weight, classifications, lots, and units of measure. By capturing more complete information early in the product life cycle and integrating it into the order management and financial information systems, your organization can respond more quickly, improve accuracy, and gain insight for better, more confident decision-making.



• Track production, quality, and compliance: Compliance with increasingly complex regulatory and customer mandates requires chemical manufacturers to manage and quickly pinpoint production, raw material, and source information amid a sea of details. A Microsoft Dynamics solution can provide the integrated information, comprehensive lot and production monitoring, and end-to-end transparency necessary for full traceability. You can track materials and production statistics from supplier to customer, identifying every action taken for a specific formula, batch, or operator involved in the manufacture of a given product. And when you can access comprehensive product and production information across the supply chain in this way, compliance documentation and product recalls, if required, become easier and faster to manage.
  
  Quality assurance (QA) also becomes easier with real-time intelligence and configurable alerts that can support fast, proactive, and informed responses to quality variations or unexpected conditions. In the laboratory, you can integrate laboratory and production management systems, which streamlines QA processes for monitoring, testing, quarantine, and product downgrading and enables you to more easily communicate the results to your customers, suppliers, or governmental agencies.



• Connect and automate for greater efficiency: Manual processes meant to overcome disconnected production, laboratory, customer, order entry, procurement, and financial systems can slow product development and production cycles. Using built-in integration capabilities and Web services, Microsoft Dynamics can help you connect internal systems and extend appropriate information to your customers and suppliers. As a result, you can automate business and production processes, speed transactions, and gain the insight you need to make operational improvements. Plus, you can more efficiently schedule production, define routings, and plan for co-products or by-products with complete information about order specifications, recipes and formulas, raw materials, packaging variations, and delivery needs. You can alter formulas on the fly, implement just-in-time or vendor-managed inventory, manage source traceability, give customers rapid access to order status, and enable adoption of RFID in the warehouse.



• Give people the information they need to succeed: From laboratory technicians to the sales team, people across your organization need access to different types of product, process, production, and customer information. Providing centralized access to reliable and up-to-date information can help increase efficiency, enhance customer service, streamline compliance tracking or reporting, and reduce errors resulting from incomplete or outdated information.
  
  With the integration and portal solutions built into Microsoft Dynamics, your people can have a tailored window into the key performance indicators (KPIs), real-time business information, and critical processes they need to work and collaborate more effectively. This secure, role-based information delivery can protect sensitive data while still providing team members and trading partners with the specific information they need to drive your business forward. Portals can also help employees, customers, and suppliers share documents such as formulas, timelines, regulatory requirements, or customer needs, helping to facilitate collaboration between internal research, production, and sales teams and external associates.

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Customer success stories

• Customizations made easy for CERAC
• See more customer stories.

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Microsoft Dynamics products

• Microsoft Dynamics NAV for chemical manufacturers

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Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics solutions
Learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics business software solutions can help you solve your business needs in the chemical manufacturing industry.

• Contact us to request more information or to speak with a Microsoft representative



• Read about Microsoft Dynamics solutions for manufacturing



• Find manufacturing solutions developed by Microsoft Certified Partners to meet the unique needs of your business or industry

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