MANUFACTURING ERP SOFTWARE

Engineering Change Management in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain provides manufacturers with ability to manage new product introductions as well as new versions of existing products. Features include multiple product versions, enhanced product release functionality that lets you maintain product master data in an engineering company and releasing the configured product for use. Associated product documentation, routes, and product attributes with a product. Product readiness checks to validate that required information including product attributes, product categories, production routes and costs are specified before releasing the product. Workflows with approvals for product change requests and change orders.  The Product Information Management capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain provide ability to capture product attributes, costs and store a multi-level bill of materials. Ability to have multiple BOM versions for your items in D365 Inventory Management. Ability for users to request changes to products. Use engineering change orders to assess and document the impact of proposed changes. Add workflows to manage the engineering change process and the release of new versions of a product.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides you with the ability to source raw materials, critical tools, and key components strategically from high quality vendors to minimize supply chain disruption while buying commodity products at the lowest cost. Vendor collaboration portal provides supply chain visibility as vendors can see and accept purchase orders, update the status of shipments online and raise invoices against shipments. RFQ (Request for Quotation) capability provides ability to get bids from multiple suppliers and ability to select a bid based on a multi-parametric weighted score that can factor in price, timeliness, and quality. Vendor agreements in D365 provide capability to commit a certain spend with a vendor and get discounts in return and manage your actual spend versus your committed spend. Automate replenishment using master planning in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain. Master planning looks at your sales forecast, open and committed sales orders, inventory on hand, open purchase orders, factors in transportation lead times and recommends purchase orders to be placed with your vendors to ensure you are buying just the right amount of stock. Automated purchasing models with master planning include min-max, per-requirement and per-period coverage.

Master Planning in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain creates Planned Production Orders after taking into account sales orders, production forecast, sales forecast, open production orders and lead times for the required material in the production process. The planned production orders are created with the dates they will be needed to fulfill the demand with the active bill of materials (BOM) and the relevant production route. Production Planners can review the planned orders and firm up the manufacturing schedule. Planners can also modify or update the planned orders. In addition, Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides auto firming capability that allows Planned orders to be automatically converted to firm Production orders.

 Production Scheduling can be done using operations scheduling and job scheduling in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain. Operations scheduling is used for long-term scheduling at a resource group level while job scheduling is used for short-term scheduling at a specific resource level. Job scheduling splits the different operations into their specific jobs, which are planned in detail for each of the resources. When operations and job scheduling are run together, operations scheduling is typically run first. 

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management ERP designed for Manufacturing supports multiple manufacturing methods including Discrete Manufacturing using Production Orders, Product Manufacturing using Batch Orders and Lean Manufacturing using a Kanban Process. The Production Order has multiple stages including Created, Estimated, Scheduled (via Operations Scheduling, Job Scheduling or Kanban Scheduling), Released (After scheduling is complete and the order is released to the floor for picking/preparation), Started (at which point material and resource consumption can be reported on the order), Reported as Finished (when the Finished goods are complete), Quality Assessment (for quality checks that are required), Put Away or Ship to Order (when the order is moved to a warehouse or a shipping zone), Ended (when all the production and material costs are full recorded on the order). Production Costing can be done based on actual costing, weighted period costs, standard Costing or based on Backflushing principle. D365 provides ability to compare variances between actual and expected costs as well as provides the ability to track yield over time. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 support make to stock manufacturing based on forecast or safety stock, made to order such as for customer-specific jobs and engineer to order that are project specific as well as a combination of these manufacturing principles.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain provides pricing and promotion tools including customer trade agreements which allow you to set Item-specific pricing by customer or customer group e.g. retail, wholesale, dealer. Discounts can be setup for time intervals for customer groups or specific customers. The Unify Dots Dealer Portal provides capability for B2B customers such as dealers, distributors, and wholesalers to buy directly from manufacturers either via credit terms, credit card or other payment methods.  Demand Forecasting in Microsoft Dynamics 365 looks at historical sales by item, seasonality and creates a baseline sales forecast by Item/ Item Group at a total level as well as a customer level that can be used to feed replenishment planning and production planning. The sales forecast can be adjusted before it is finalized. The generated sales forecast can be compared with actuals to look at the error rate and also to optimize the demand forecasting tool.  Sales Quotation capability in D365 allows salespersons to generate quotes and send to customers. Quotes can be converted to sales orders. Salespersons can look at Available to Promise by Item that factors in production time, shipping lead times on a sales quote or sales orders and let customers know when they can expect the item thus building credibility and trust with customers.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service provides functionality to track the installed base of equipment at customers including registering Warranty, recording Service and Support Agreements with start and end dates. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides ability to take incoming calls, emails and customer complaints and inquires and record them as cases with a knowledge based to improve the resolution of these cases. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service allows for scheduling of Field Staff to go out to a customer location to repair or perform preventive maintenance on customer equipment as and when required. Support for both Rental and Customer-owned Equipment with ability to see all history including installation, repairs, maintenance, work orders. Mobile app with offline capability that allows technicians to view their daily schedule, record parts consumed on site, enter time and perform inventory transfers.   

Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives schedulers the ability to manage individuals, teams and assets with flexible scheduling options. A scheduler can view availability of resources and identify and organize appointments.  Appointments/bookings can be made for a specific person or a resource pool. Precise appointment scheduling and ensuring the right person with the right resources is scheduled for the job to increase customer satisfaction.

Embedded Power BI reports in Microsoft Dynamics 365 provide key metrics for tracking performance including Total production orders in a period, On-time & in full % production orders, Incomplete % of orders, Early % and Late % of production orders. Defect rate can be measured by product including Defective rate (ppm), Defective quantity and Total quantity thus allowing you to track defect trends. In addition, defect rates can be looked at by date, date range, by resource, production site, and operation thus allowing you to quickly identify the source of quality issues. Finally cost variances are natively reported by date range, cost group, site. The out of the box dashboard also contains metrics for the Top 10 products with unfavorable production variance and Top 10 unfavorable production variance by resource.