Microsoft Dynamics 365 in Manufacturing | Centredge
Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP is nothing but a software system helping organizations automate and manage their fundamental business processes for the best performance. A cloud ERP solution helps in coordinating data flow between an organization’s processes, offering the only basis of truth and modernizing operations throughout the enterprise. It can connect a company’s operations, financials, commerce, supply chain, manufacturing, reporting, as well as human resource tasks on one platform.
When it comes to an industry like manufacturing, where competence is continuously sought but challenging to find, ERP could be the game-changer. ERP in manufacturing is a centralized technique of handling all aspects of processes and operations, right from production to payroll. An ERP system lets unparalleled visibility, synchronization, and administration across different business processes, eventually resulting in enhanced operational efficiency.
Five Major Challenges in the Manufacturing Industry
The manufacturing sector is rife with challenges, more so since the pandemic and other factors such as tariffs, political reforms, climate changes, and more. However, the manufacturing industry is quite positive concerning the future with the expected industrial production to shoot up by 5 percent in 2022. Though this is an optimistic prediction, manufacturing firms experiencing growth still have some key challenges in the days to come. Here are the five major ones:
Even when manufacturing firms have availability of product raw materials, they do not have sufficient time to build them. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, activities related to shift-based work dipped significantly by over 13 percent, and over 50 percent of American manufacturing businesses affirm that they are finding it difficult to find skilled workers.
There is a need to update facilities with a hi-tech working environment, technological capabilities, comfortable amenities, and break rooms for attracting as well as retaining skilled labor.
2. Disturbance in Supply Chain
Disruptions in the supply chain are one of the greatest challenges in the manufacturing industry. Inventories are at the poorest levels in years, implying a few products just can’t be manufactured. Due to limited inventories, the supply chain in manufacturing has become susceptible to uncertainty. Businesses having financial earnings are focusing on stocking up inventories, increasing demand for additional warehouse space, and reaping the maximum advantages of ERP in supply chain management.
Manufacturing businesses are extremely aware of preventing accidents and protecting their staff from possible health hazards in the facility. Assuring physical well-being and safety from tripping and falling as well as additional OSHA requirements is the top priority.
The requirement for additional space on the production floor is being counterbalanced by a minimized demand for office space. That’s because a few administrative employees continue to work remotely. Several businesses are employing creativity to restructure floor plans, modernize, and invest in additional tech-friendly furnishings to accommodate video calls, virtual meetings, and evolving technologies.
5. Evolving Technologies and Cybersecurity
Manufacturers are trying to overcome labor shortages by leveraging modern technology and making the most out of the benefits of cloud ERP. Again, robotics and IoT (Internet of things) is being used to do certain human tasks in the manufacturing sector. Today, there is new interest in capitalizing more on such emerging technologies.
The pandemic has emphasized the benefits of a good ERP system, cloud, and IoT technology, allowing manufacturing units to implement digital transformation in a business environment. With an increasing number of technological solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and connected devices, there is a requirement for enhanced cybersecurity.
Several manufacturing businesses still function using old or legacy applications, while others completely embraced modern technologies. Both have risks and managing numerous security layers including multi-factor authentication, firewalls, round-the-clock monitoring, facial recognition software, etc. are imperative in the modern digital landscape. Upgrading safe and climate-controlled server rooms are also equally important in shielding sensitive equipment and assuring security.
How Does Microsoft Dynamics 365 Help the Manufacturing Industry?
Even a couple of years ago, manufacturing businesses perceived improving productivity and taking customer satisfaction to the next level in sole isolation. Then, digital disruption is essentially changing the way manufacturers operate or do business, leveraging modern, innovative technology. To be candid, they’re inspiring transformational change throughout the business to enhance product quality, reduce time to market, and meet the changing demands of customers.
Whether it is improving visibility, and efficiency, or cutting back on expenditures, these have been the basic concerns of manufacturing businesses. Fortunately, Dynamics 365 for manufacturing provides profound insights into the supply chain as well as production lifecycles, particulars of warehousing, as well as delivering schedules to meet the challenges.
Businesses processes as a single comprehensive service and apps developed with the purpose ensure seamless access across all functions including sales, finance, supply chain operations, and customer service. You have essential data with the click of a button, enabling enhanced productivity and business success.
There are many benefits of Dynamics 365 for the manufacturing sector. Increasing efficiency, enhancing visibility, and reducing expenses are the major concerns for manufacturers. Dynamics 365 BC incorporates and modernizes all aspects of the manufacturing process including preparing, scheduling, inventory, as well as distribution.
Dynamics 365 helps the manufacturing industry to:
Did you know that over 11 billion tons of huge waste are created globally each year? That’s why a majority of businesses have embraced lean strategies to make their production process more efficient. Here is how Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help in reducing waste:
Avoiding Overproduction: Purchase only the equipment that your manufacturing unit needs and avoid producing more products than it’s possible to sell by exploiting appropriate inventory control, effective management, and precise timelines.
Get rid of waste by leveraging Microsoft Dynamics for Supply Chain Management by integrating manufacturing workflows and adjusting manufacturing schedules. Additionally, the cloud ERP solution will help you achieve waste reduction goals by utilizing automation to push production, and capacity holdings, and developing planned manufacturing strategies to help you realize the costs of all factory activities.
Using Lean Manufacturing: You can remove waste anywhere and every time possible by employing lean manufacturing for every facet of your business. Be it accounting or payroll, you will find numerous ways to employ an organized way for waste reduction in a manufacturing system without compromising productivity.
Dynamics 365 lets you modernize all business processes as well as helps you track the complete production process of any product or service. D365 is integrated software that helps you to build a factory comprising extraordinary efficiency levels and the removal of activities that don’t add value to your manufacturing business.
Upholding Perspective: You need to uphold customer satisfaction by setting definite goals and strategies to steer your business via a shared objective. Dynamics 365 helps in ensuring that every employee is part of a unified team via:
Data analytics in real-time
Through this collective goal, manufacturers can boost profits by ensuring outstanding customer satisfaction. You can do this by focusing on tasks that add more value from the customer’s viewpoint. For instance, you can increase the competitiveness of your business by cutting down costs for your customers. Improve product value, workforce efficiency, sales, and customer satisfaction by harmonizing customer perception and lean manufacturing techniques.
When it comes to productivity, it’s not simply about producing more but about adding more value to the production process. Manufacturing productivity means having a unified understanding of operations as well as access to virtual reality tools and mobile to monitor and work out problems remotely. When technicians can logically manage tasks and make the most of existing skills, enhanced productivity is achievable with costly activities reduced.
@Designers – Pls customize the image. Source: Microsoft
Better Utilization of Manpower
Based on the findings of the International Labor Organization:
2.3 million men and women around the globe give in to occupational accidents or illnesses each year. It corresponds to more than 6000 deaths daily.
Globally, workplace-related accidents are approximately 340 million, and another 160 million when it comes to occupational illnesses.
When your staff is empowered with precise tools and accurate data, the efficiency of daily activities could be improved. Here is how:
Dynamics 365 helps manufacturers enable intelligent and relevant skills-oriented assignments with resource visibility in real-time.
It could be achieved by employing a scheduling engine, gauging manpower utilization precisely, and making smart, informed decisions to reap the maximum benefits from billable resources.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives access to role-based tools together with a 360-degree view of your organization. Such tools help in bringing out the best in your employees. This way, you can enable outstanding experiences across:
Attraction, skill development
Motivating the workforce to do their best with constant feedback and collective assessments assists in offering personalized services to your customers.
Track and Reduce Accidents
Trips and slips are the mostly occurring causes of workplace injuries. They result in more than one-third of major accidents or injuries, leading to other forms of accidents like falling from a height or falling into manufacturing machinery.
Trips and slips also amount to 50 percent of all reported injuries of the public in their place of work.
Fortunately, there are some plugins with Microsoft Dynamics 365 which can help us to log and track various accidents and help to understand the trends. The Safety Management helps the safety and quality team within D365, providing a structured area in the business system to document factory accidents or sickness.
Essential data related to the worker, accident, injury, or the type of illness, (for example, a broken arm), the type of medical treatment, body part injured, or data related to physician referrals, are all documented. You can also find an audit trail of the place where the accident occurred, the incident cause, and any preventive measures that were ensured to help in the precise documentation of situations.
To monitor trends and ensure a continuous record of worker-specific incidents, injuries, or ailments, the employee data in Dynamics 365 offers a sequential record of all events for auditing. All of this will help in reducing accidents in the future.
Make Business Competitive
In this digital age of manufacturing, businesses require to work smarter and faster to stay competitive in 2022 and ahead. Microsoft Dynamics 365 bridges the gap between ERP and CRM systems, providing manufacturers with robust tools they require to enhance their speed of operations as well as launch improved products faster than their nearest competitors.
By the unification of numerous aspects across the production lifecycle, D365 increases the required capabilities with robust analytics, convenience, and embedded intelligence that you expect from smart apps on your mobile or tablet. When it comes to digital transformation, it can’t be achieved in a day or two. Therefore, you need to make the best of a unified system such as Dynamics 365 for enhanced manufacturing excellence. Manufacturing businesses helps in enabling:
Powerful project management
Outstanding customized services
Microsoft Dynamics 365 makes sense for your business because it brings to the table exemplary customer experiences, helping your manufacturing unit to become more efficient and productive compared to your competitors.
When you have access to data at your fingertips to rediscover and revolutionize, it not only empowers your workforce but also reduces the time to market. Enhanced collaborations during the research and development phase, intelligent evaluations of expenditures and resources, and streamlined manufacturing processes will help you complete new products in little time, and take advantage of the trends and progress. It will help you stay ahead of your closest competitors.
D365 ensures deeper insights into your manufacturing operations, emphasizing areas that have scope for improvement, shortened processes, and cutting down costs. With ERP solutions, you can analyze product, performance, and customer data in real-time to enjoy greater autonomy and opportunity for improving operations and responding to changes fast.
Be Superior to Other Industry Players with Dynamics 365
The power of Azure: D365 is developed on Azure, Microsoft’s prominent cloud service. Let your business reap the benefits of this cloud platform. Save on data storage, improve data security, meet evolving business challenges, enjoy enhanced access and mobile accessibility, experience enhanced collaboration, make informed and intelligent decisions, and deliver high performances to stay competitive.
Flexibility: You can seamlessly manage your core business operations under one roof with Dynamics 365. It includes applications that help you manage finance, sales, customer service, supply chain, and others. D365 applications can be tailored to the specific needs of your business. You can choose modules that are relevant to the business and as the business grows, you can add modules depending on the changing needs.
Find the right kind of customers: D365 assists agents to discover the right customers by leveraging intelligent tools. Get a unified view of your customers and engage with audiences that matter to your business. Microsoft Dynamics 365 also helps in converting leads into loyal customers, giving your employees additional time to engage with customers. Automation works across marketing, sales, and customer service. This way, your teams get more bandwidth to communicate with potential customers and reinforce business relationships.
To cope with today’s evolving market requirements and trends, manufacturing businesses need a powerful cloud ERP system connecting internal departments, devices, partners, suppliers, and of course customers in one, simply accessible database. Microsoft Dynamics 365 through its modern collaboration, smart features, and productivity help the manufacturing sector to modernize operations and at the same time improve staff productivity, resource utilization, and customer satisfaction, as well as help in reducing waste.
Merging all business operations across the production cycle into a single all-inclusive service, manufacturing units can gain access to the functions that require to ensure enhanced productivity as well as profitability. And as ERP, cloud, AI, IoT, and mobility create the way to build the future of manufacturing, emerging technologies will not just complement business processes. Such technologies will recommend businesses on how to improve processes while being the actual driving power behind the production floor in the days to come.
Would you want to learn more about CENTREDGE’s ERP solutions and services? We would be delighted to provide a free demonstration of how Dynamics 365 helps you gain a competitive edge over your competitors. Visit our website www.centredge.com or reach us at [email protected] or request a free consultation today.
