As manufacturing supply chains grow longer and more complex, the need for real-time visibility across these extended supply chains grows. People need ways to proactively manage variability and disruptions to more effectively respond to increased customer expectations.
Solutions from Microsoft and its partners provide a high degree of demand and supply visibility, helping people in manufacturing organizations create an efficient supply chain visibility infrastructure that enables them to:
| • | Adapt quickly to supply and demand changes. |
| • | Replace inventory with visibility and quick response. |
| • | Operate more effectively in an increasingly outsourced environment. |
| • | Reduce exposure to supply chain risks. |
On This Page
Business challenge
To provide the needed degree of visibility across an extended supply chain, people at manufacturing firms need a visibility foundation that builds on the considerable infrastructure investments they have already made. They need solutions that link supply chain planning and execution processes, increasing visibility to make plans both actionable and realistic. They also need solutions that meet another visibility challenge: connecting smaller plants and divisions to the manufacturer's corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with a hub-and-spoke model.
Solution
Industry-standard Microsoft technologies—including analytics, integration, portal, and collaboration capabilities—empower people at manufacturing companies to take advantage of and extend their current IT infrastructure to achieve greater visibility across extended supply chains. When used with the wide range of industry-specific solutions available from Microsoft partners, manufacturers gain the ability to provide:
| • | Supply chain analytics and performance management: A complete and integrated business intelligence offering that makes it easy to create a dashboard of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics with monitoring, alerts, and easy access to business details |
| • | Supply chain integration: Integrated supply chain planning and execution processes, providing the required visibility to make plans actionable and realistic |
| • | RFID enablement: Microsoft standards-based radio-frequency identification (RFID) infrastructure, providing plug-and-play device compliance, automation, and business process transformation. |
| • | ERP hub-and-spoke solutions: Scalable solutions that support enterprise-wide implementation or connect smaller plants and divisions to corporate ERP systems. |
Case studies
Read these case studies to learn how Microsoft supply chain management solutions, in concert with offerings from the Microsoft partner ecosystem, improve visibility, increasing your employees' ability to proactively manage supply chains.
Business benefits
Microsoft and its partners' solutions use the latest collaboration, business applications, analytics, and integration technologies to help people within manufacturing organizations see deeper into their supply chains. These solutions empower people with real-time, actionable information to enable a more responsive, smooth, synchronized, and secure global supply network. With these capabilities, manufacturers can:
Reduce inventory.
Greater visibility into where current inventory is, and how long it will take to reach its destination, enables manufacturers to reduce their reliance on safety stock and other inventory-building practices.
Reduce costs.
Greater visibility enables people at manufacturing companies to reduce freight, material, and labor costs.
Implement creation of comprehensive supply chain scorecards.
People at manufacturing companies can take advantage of multiple data sources with standard integration, and make use of real-time exception and alerting capabilities, as well as multilevel measurements and easy access to business details.
Make RFID enablement easier.
With an integrated development environment, a base set of tools for life cycle management, and architecture that enables you to easily add and customize components, people at manufacturing companies can create a flexible, extensible, and scalable framework that supports RFID standards.
Achieve greater supply chain integration.
Flexible architecture integrates data from multiple sources and systems, giving people at manufacturing companies more visibility into actionable data, as well as business workflow and activity monitoring capabilities.
Overview
Technology
