Improved planning capabilities help clients collaborate with vendors more efficiently

Managing vendors effectively plays a critical role in delivering on client commitments on time and increasing margins on products and services. To solve this challenge, many businesses turn to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The solution provides end-to-end processes to help manufacturers, distributors, consumer product companies, and retailers coordinate vendor relationships. Functions include managing product information, forecasting inventory, planning procurement, asset maintenance, warehousing, coordinating transportation and shipping, and product costing.

With the 2024 release wave 2 plan for Supply Chain Management, Microsoft clients can expect to see many new enhancements between October 2024 and March 2025. This release focuses on applying Microsoft Copilot AI (artificial intelligence) to improve planning, procurement, and product traceability.

The changes demonstrate how Microsoft emphasizes the importance of improved planning. For example, clients will have the ability to calculate vendor CTP (capable-to-promise) on purchase orders faster—without waiting for the next master planning run. Procurement planners can also use forecast models with external signals to increase accuracy, and Microsoft will expand processes to trace products across complex manufacturing lifecycles.

AI innovations facilitate user planning and help inquiries

New embedded capabilities of Copilot in 2024 release wave 2 will help users interact with Supply Chain Management to streamline vendor planning. Here are three examples:

• Customizable conversational help—empower your users by providing tailored, precise help on how to use Supply Chain Management and accomplish daily tasks. System admins can customize the source information indexed by Copilot to ensure guidance is targeted and relevant. This allows for a more personalized and accurate support experience since Copilot bases recommendations on information specific to the context of your company’s processes and needs.
• Efficient demand-planning decisions—Supply Chain Management will include Copilot prompts to guide users in exploring shifts and trends, identifying anomalies, measuring accuracy, and discovering other factors that affect client demand. Copilot presents the results in natural language to help users make informed decisions, improve forecast accuracy, and improve margins.
• Follow-up questions for using Supply Chain Management—With in-product, AI-based, contextual help from Copilot, users can more easily keep conversations going with a single click by selecting among a short list of likely follow-up questions that are automatically generated based on previous queries. Just select a question to receive related information without needing to formulate a new query. This makes the process of learning how to use Supply Chain Management more efficient and intuitive.

With these capabilities leveraging generative AI, Microsoft has reimagined the Supply Chain Management experience. Users will spend less time chasing down information and more time making decisions to improve working relationships with vendors.

Streamlining sales and fulfillment processes

The new inventory and logistics capabilities of Supply Chain Management enable your business to manage the sales and fulfillment processes efficiently. You can also ensure inventory availability matches client demand.

• Add transactions when recalculating weighted average—Gain greater control over the recalculation process by choosing whether to exclude or include specific types of transactions. This ensures report accuracy and streamlines regulation compliance. Additionally, this feature saves time and increases efficiency by streamlining the recalculation process and reducing the need for manual intervention.
• Trace and solve quality issues—When quality assurance finds product issues, Supply Chain Management enhancements will accelerate the time to identify causes—by tracing the history of manufacturing activities that went into producing the faulty items. Users can also identify specific batch and serial numbers for the relevant components and finished products and then combine this information with related data such as manufacturing time and unexpected consumption patterns. AI automatically collects and summarizes relevant information in just a few seconds to improve quality assurance and issue mitigation.

These new capabilities give you more visibility, efficiency, and resiliency in your supply chain operations.

Improved client-demand planning

Demand planning improves with new out-of-the-box forecast models, immersive user experiences, and intelligent analytics. In-memory supply planning offers performance and scalability to get near real-time insights into requirements changes with material requirements planning and production scheduling.

• Calculate capable-to-promise quantities in real time—Give clients realistic dates for when you can promise specific goods. For each sales line, you can provide a date that takes account of existing on-hand inventory, production capacity, and transportation times.
• Collaborate on supply plans within and across teams—Supply Chain simplifies the master planning process by considering a variety of factors when helping procurement teams decide which goods and materials to order. Supply Chain Management now provides greatly improved support for master planning collaboration because it continuously recalculates master plans—refreshing them after each edit. All planners will nearly always see the latest, fully optimized planning results as they evaluate and update each plan.
• Enhance demand forecasting and planning—The latest enhancements for demand planning in Supply Chain Management provide new insights into supply chains. Take advantage of them to optimize your supply chain and boost your financial outcomes. It empowers organizations to build an agile, resilient, and sustainable demand planning practice that’s fueled by intelligence and collaboration.

With these functions providing access to the same, up-to-date information, multiple supply, production, and material planners can collaborate easily while entering relevant data and preparing and reviewing supply plans.

Help for navigating all the new enhancements

As all of these enhancements illustrate, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can transform your business. With real-time information, managers can make data-driven decisions at pivotal points, avoiding supply chain disruptions and strategically routing products to the right staging areas. All of this adds up to an enhanced experience for clients, vendors, and employees.

To navigate all the 2024 Release Wave 2 enhancements, Velosio can help. We are among the largest and most recognized Microsoft Dynamics partners, with thousands of active clients. Many years as a recognized leader in ERP, CRM, cloud productivity, and business intelligence solutions have repeatedly landed us in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics Partners worldwide.

We will be glad to advise you on when each Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enhancement will be available, which enhancements make sense for your environment, and how to sync them with the financial functions you already rely on.  Contact us today to learn more