When I come across a great article about Microsoft Dynamics GP, I feel compelled to share it with our blog readers. This is especially true when the article relates to manufacturing and supply chain, which are my areas of expertise. So I want to thank Rakesh Kumar, Global Industry Product Director Manufacturing Industry, at Microsoft Business Solutions for putting together a thoughtful and thought provoking article that sums up so many of the key challenges faced by our manufacturing clients. The article reveals the reasons these manufacturers and distributors cho0se Microsoft Dynamics GP for their businesses.
His article was a bit long, so I’ve taken the liberty of doing some editing and paraphrasing.
The goal for any manufacturing operation – whether it is a discrete or a process manufacturing business – is to produce quality products at the lowest possible cost while striving to exceed customer expectations. Achieving this consistently and cost-effectively depends on gaining deep insight into the supply chain, especially when it comes to managing the complexities of formulating and producing products to custom specifications.
Maintaining market share in today’s ever more competitive landscape requires that manufacturers process orders faster – increasing execution and delivery reliability rates – while giving customers better information on order status and simultaneously managing compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. All of this requires tremendous agility and a truly dynamic operating environment that’s capable of assimilating real-time information flows across supply-chain touch points with ease.
When it comes to joining the supply-chain management “dots,” manufacturers face serious technical challenges in terms of process and data flows – especially when it comes to integrating the “spaghetti soup” of systems controlling individual customer, supplier, and production functions.
To resolve this integration challenge, manufacturers are taking a fresh look at enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
The first commercial ERP software packages exploded onto the market in the 1990s. In today’s world, given the rapid growth and development of technology solutions, 1990 software is as outdated as carbon paper! ERP has changed and today’s out-of-the-box, supply-chain-management-specific ERP solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics GP, have evolved, becoming impressively scalable end-to-end offerings that effectively streamline and automate business processes across the supply chain.
Alongside delivering data unity within the enterprise, today’s ERP solutions use customizable Web services to make it simple and quick to connect with suppliers, logistics providers, and customers and to enable seamless real-time data exchange and process sharing.
Easy to deploy, these systems feature user-friendly, intuitive tools that can be accessed across the manufacturing operation – from the shop floor to the top floor – making end-to-end, streamlined supply-chain management a reality.
It’s this unique ability to integrate external business processes and support application-to-application connectivity across multiple systems in a cost-effective manner that now makes it possible for manufacturers to respond quickly to changing customer and supplier demands.
Supply-chain optimization is now possible. Powerful inventory management tools help to improve forecasting and planning, so supply and inventory levels can be fine-tuned to customer demand. Real-time data gives users faster access to the tasks and critical business intelligence information needed to optimize the supply chain. Finally, ERP makes it easy to simplify government and corporate compliance commitments by defining custom business rules and workflows based on risk scenarios.
Today’s ERP solutions provide the vital backbone on which effective, cost-efficient, and dynamic supply-chain collaboration can take place. Besides unleashing demand-driven production, organizations of any size in any sector can respond faster to change, incorporate new customers and suppliers with ease, and adapt their operations on the fly as business needs change.
By Karen Jernstrom, Altico Advisors, Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner for Manufacturing and Distribution serving New Hampshire (NH)
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