Supply Chain solutions for manufacturing
Manufacturing supply chains reach far beyond the boundaries of a single company's plant floor operation, organization, and geography. They operate globally, beginning with suppliers and extending to business partners that include transportation firms, outsource manufacturers, sales channels, and customers.
Supply chain management solutions from Microsoft and its extensive partner network address the realities of today's complex global supply chains. They provide a foundation for people to transform and improve their supply chains, moving them into more demand-driven models. Global manufacturing companies are already leveraging the Microsoft environment to empower people to solve business problems. Their experience demonstrates the positive impact of the Microsoft environment on supply chain performance in four major areas: performance, collaboration, planning, and execution.
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Business challenges
Supply chains have grown more complex in response to the basic business realities that all manufacturers face: increased customer demands, a faster pace of global business, shorter product life cycles, and the need for continued cost reduction and constant improvements in operational efficiency. Manufacturing executives are asking critical questions about their supply chain processes, including:
| • | Is our operation demand-driven? |
| • | How much visibility do I have into my extended supply chain? |
| • | Can we respond quickly to supply chain disruptions? |
| • | Are our operations in regulatory compliance? |
| • | How connected are we to suppliers and customers? |
| • | How are we performing against our key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics? |
| • | Do we have access to the right data in real time so that we can make informed decisions? |
Finding solutions that provide people with the right answers to these questions is an important part of manufacturers' ongoing efforts to manage their supply chains better, improve operations, and differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Solutions
Supply chain management solutions that use the Microsoft platform along with offerings from our extensive partner ecosystem give your people the ability to transform and improve supply chains. Built on a foundation of Microsoft collaboration, business intelligence, and integration technology, these solutions make supply chains more demand-driven, adaptive, responsive, and efficient. Global manufacturing leaders are already using the Microsoft environment to effectively and optimally orchestrate their supply chains. Solutions from Microsoft and its partners address the following key supply chain areas:
| • | Supply chain visibility: Monitoring, performance management, analytics, regulatory compliance, and creation of comprehensive scorecards across the extended supply chain and heterogeneous underlying IT systems |
| • | Supply chain collaboration: Flexible business-to-business and application integration, communication, and collaborative process workflows with all supply chain partners |
| • | Supply chain planning: Demand management and sales and operations planning (S&OP) business processes, delivered with an integrated business intelligence and collaboration framework |
| • | Supply chain execution: Logistics, warehouse and transportation management, and supply chain execution solutions—including radio frequency identification (RFID) enablement—that capitalize on common integration across systems to improve your people's visibility into the supply chain and the efficiency of their performance |
Case studies
Read these case studies to learn how manufacturers have benefited from Microsoft supply chain management solutions:
Business benefits
By delivering software that is familiar, easy to use, and easy to connect and integrate with other technologies across the entire supply chain, Microsoft empowers people in manufacturing enterprises to:
| • | Take advantage of common user environments.
Enable supply chain practitioners to work in a familiar user environment to analyze, collaborate, plan, and manage current issues. |
| • | Effectively integrate the extended supply chain.
Create a connected, visible, and actionable supply chain with composite, transactional views, including manufacturing, distribution, supplier, customer, and third-party logistics (3PL) business processes. |
| • | Improve collaboration.
Join both structured and unstructured collaboration under a single architecture to promote deeper levels of interaction across all supply chain partners. |
| • | Facilitate proactive, real-time supply chain planning.
Use monitoring, alerts, live communication, and event management to encourage continual performance improvement. |
| • | Use scorecards across the extended supply chain.
Easily create and manage supply chain scorecards to enable people to identify and prioritize areas for improvement, using integrated business intelligence and KPIs delivered by a user-friendly portal. |
| • | Take advantage of existing supply chain management assets.
Adopt a flexible supply chain platform that uses your existing IT infrastructure. |
| • | Boost business performance.
Drive bottom- and top-line supply chain performance improvements, maintain competitiveness, and improve people's agility and responsiveness. |
| • | Improve customer satisfaction.
Use supply chain performance improvements and real-time visibility into processes—including inventory, orders, and capacity— to boost customer service and customer satisfaction levels. |
Overview
Technology
