At the same time, Microsoft has also launched its Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which it describes as a “ready-made command center for supply chain visibility and transformation”.
Microsoft says the Supply Chain Center is designed to work natively with an organization’s supply chain data and applications, with built-in collaboration, supply and demand insights, and order management.
Commenting on the launch, Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Applications and Platform:
“Businesses are dealing with petabytes of data spread across legacy systems, ERP, supply chain management and point solutions, resulting in a fragmented view of the supply chain. Supply chain agility and resilience are directly tied to how well organizations connect and orchestrate their data across all relevant systems. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform and Supply Chain Center enable organizations to make the most of their existing investments to gain insights and act quickly.”
Daniel Newman, founding partner and principal analyst of Futurum Research, added:
“Supply chain solutions are more critical than ever. Our early assessment of the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform and Supply Chain Center is that the company has put its technology, applications and resources together in a way that will serve its customer base well in a wide swath of IT and operations environments, offering flexibility for diverse IT environments and continuous agility for transformation into the future.”
In its press release Microsoft says it will continue to support its customers with a rich partner ecosystem including advisors and implementers like Accenture, Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC and TCS.
In addition, to find the best solution for its customers, the company will continue working with solution providers such as Blue Yonder, Cosmo Tech, Experlogix, Flintfox, InVia Robotics, K3, O9 Solutions, SAS, Sonata, To-Increase Software and many more.
The Microsoft Supply Chain Center, now available in preview, allows practitioners to harmonize data from across existing infrastructure supply chain systems, such as data from Dynamics 365, and other ERP providers, including SAP and Oracle, along with standalone supply chain systems.
The Data Manager in Supply Chain Center enables data ingestion and orchestration to provide visibility across the supply chain and drive action back into systems of execution. Microsoft states that launch partners C.H. Robinson, FedEx, FourKites and Overhaul will offer native experiences within Supply Chain Center.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customers automatically gain access to Supply Chain Center. Supply Chain Center also includes prebuilt modules to address supply chain disruptions across supply and order fulfillment:
“The supply and demand insights module leverages advanced Azure AI models to predict upstream supply constraints and shortages through supply intelligence. Organizations can perform simulations using data from their supply chain network to predict stock-outs, over-stocking or missed-order lines. Combined with smart news insights, which provide relevant news alerts in the Supply Chain Center on external events, supply chain practitioners can make decisions and plan with real-world event information and historical insights for product demands,” says the US software giant.
Moreover, Microsoft claims the order management module in its Supply Chain Center enables organizations “to intelligently orchestrate fulfillment and automate it with a rules-based system using real-time omnichannel inventory data, AI and machine learning.”
According to Microsoft, organisations can also adapt quickly to meet future order volumes and fulfillment complexities by extending their capabilities with prebuilt connectors to the best-of-breed of specialized technology partners for order intake, delivery and third-party logistics services.
Existing Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management customers will automatically get access to Supply Chain Center and the order management module at launch.
“With partner modules built into the Supply Chain Center, customers can unlock specific solutions, such as freight visibility from Overhaul, directly in the experience. Since everything runs off a Dataverse environment, the data is consistent no matter what module is being using. This eliminates pasting information back and forth and reconciling which reports have the most up-to-date information,” concluded the company’s press release.
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