From Dynamics365 Team Blog: Enhance visibility and scale operations without interruptions for your supply chain

Companies often struggle with latency and connectivity when running operations in remote facilities. In fact, network latency is a top connectivity challenge for 30 percent of manufacturers, according to the IDC¹.A leading cause of latency is high volume and resource-intensive processes running in parallel, resulting in reduced productivity.

Operations without interruptions

The new Cloud and Edge Scale Unit add-ins for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, coming to preview in October, brings the power of the intelligent cloud to the edge. It allows organizations to run critical warehousing and manufacturing workloads on the edge in a distributed model using Azure stack devices. This improves resilience and ensures operations without interruptions even when temporarily disconnected from the cloud.

“Edge computing represents the next evolution of distributed systems, complementing datacenter and cloud infrastructure,” said Dave McCarthy, Research Director, Edge Strategies at IDC². “Deploying infrastructure and applications closer to the point of data generation enables organizations to make quicker, more accurate decisions, increasing business agility.”

Scaling production and distribution with agility

Customers can make data-driven decisions before making any investment by easily simulating various factors that impact resilience of their critical manufacturing and warehouse processes, such as network latency, traffic volume, time-outs, or intermittent connectivity. They can then deploy the scale unitsedge or cloudto best overcome these challenges.

Microsoft Azure compute technologies make the deployment of edge scale units seamless with a plug-and-play experience and allows customers to easily scale during usage spikes to ensure high throughput.

In the past, edge deployments have been associated with use cases related to asset management due to the biggest concern associated with latency issues. With the new scale units for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, however, the use cases have expanded to other critical manufacturing and warehouse execution scenarios.

Many manufacturers and distributors are heavily regulated and have strict policy requirements. These customers have been conservative with their migration to the cloud, which has impeded their ability to overcome disruptions like the one caused by the current pandemic. With the ability to run distributed workloads on the edge, these companies can feel more confident running the manufacturing and warehousing workloads on their premises while migrating the rest of their operations to the cloud; thereby digitally transforming their organizations and reducing costs to become more resilient.

Microsoft customer, Monogram Foods, is excited to enhance warehouse operations and create resiliency using edge scale units for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

"Our frozen goods warehouse has a tight time constrained picking process, and it is critical for our warehouse team to have a consistent and reliably quick response throughout the entire picking operation. The architectural design of the solution ensures that these critical warehouse workloads are isolated from the rest of our operations, eliminating points of contention during these time sensitive processes."Turner Foster, Senior Developer Manager, Monogram Foods

Enhancing visibility of your supply chain

Lack of inventory visibility across the different channels in real time is a primary driver for vulnerabilities in the supply chain. In order to build adaptable and flexible distribution and manufacturing processes, organizations need real time cross channel inventory visibility to ensure that they are stocking their distribution centers globally with the right mix and right quantity.

The new Inventory Visibility add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, coming to preview in October, enables large volume retailers and manufacturers to easily handle a high volume of transactions every minute and determine cross-channel inventory accurately in real time. With this add-in, organizations can easily scale to fulfill orders from multiple channels on time and mitigate stock-outs and overstocking.

Inventory visibility is composable, it seamlessly works with third-party systems and uses CDS to gather inventory information from all disparate systems used across different regions, in real time, making it hyper-scalable and hyper-performant. The end user can easily query through their POS systems in the store or their back office systems to retrieve accurate on-hand information in real time and offer a delightful customer experience by promising an accurate delivery date.

Learn more today

Disruption in global supply chains have accelerated the need for operational agility. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management capabilities enables manufacturers, retailers, and distributors adapt quickly to meet changing customer demand and ensure business continuity while staying profitable. Watch the video to learn how Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help you create a resilient supply chain.