Manufacturing

Industry functionality for Manufacturing

Manufacturing for Microsoft Dynamics AX encompasses support for all major key processes from a supply chain point of view; from the customer delivery and invoicing and upstream to the production/assembly to procurement and supplier management all through comprehensive inventory management and accounting and quality assessment and –control.

Traditional Challenges; Manufacturing is a mature industry, so today’s leaders are facing some of the same challenges that their predecessors have encountered over the years. These include:

Cost pressures: As companies compete in a global market, they are under constant pressure to reduce end-item manufacturing costs as well as plant operating costs. This requires streamlining processes and increasing production efficiency. There is a continued need for insight into cost drivers of the operations.

Time to market: Getting products to market faster than your competition gives you a competitive advantage. Reduction in product life cycles caused by technology innovation and changes in consumer behavior force organization to focus on reducing time-to-market of products. This requires a good insight into and grip operations.

Product quality: It is no longer acceptable to deliver defective products. Not only does it damage your reputation but warranty and liability costs can quickly escalate to eliminate all profits.

Inventory visibility: The risks thus costs of inventory are on the rise due to increasing product assortments, shorter product life cycles, and the importance of a healthy cashflow. The visibility into inventory across distributed organizations remains a challenge and continues to challenge the organization’s grip on inventory.

A world-class software solution should help manufacturers address these traditional challenges - but it needs to do more: it must also help them identify and respond to recently emerging challenges. SCALES considers ERP as a strategic tool through which companies can obtain competitive advantages and support for fast adaption to rapidly changing conditions. The answer to this is Microsoft Dynamics AX; Now globalization of supply chains and increasing customer demand for innovation and low cost, growing environmental and social awareness, and the need for instant operational insight are adding new opportunities, as well as challenges. Dynamics 365 helps manufacturers meet these opportunities and challenges with a powerful ERP solution that is purposely built for manufacturing organizations.

Manufacturing key business process: Uniquely Role-Driven

Functionality and security configuration in Dynamics 365 are process-oriented and built upon a role-tailored approach. Every business process is mapped into a process cycle of one or more (typical) sub-processes, which results in a unique role-driven system setup and –use offering option for natural segregation of different main processes into sub-processes aligned with the different organizational roles of the business.

Success: To adapt to ever changing business environment and preserving efficiency in manufacturing is the key!

SCALES believes that keeping up with the ever changing business requirements and –environments in most industries today requires an Agile and powerful platform that can easily be adapted to changing needs in the business and supply chain. This is exactly what is offered within the integrated business capabilities in Dynamics 365.

The ability to adapt to new/changed business processes as well as the flexibility to scale the ERP solution that must support such changes are some of the core capabilities of Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 comes with a numerous out-of-box roles tailored for the manufacturing processes. For example:

• The Sales clerk security role represents a user who documents sales events and responds to sales inquiries. The user also manages ATP/CTP calculation and order update for customer confirmation.
• The Materials manager security role represents a user who enables and reviews processes, maintains master data, and responds to inquiries related to logistics and material management.
• The Purchasing manager security role represents a user who reviews purchasing process performance and enables the purchasing process.
• The Buying agent security role represents a user who documents purchase events and responds to purchase inquiries. Further, the buying agent generates, maintain and firm planned purchase orders.
• The Accounts receivable payments clerk security role represents a user who documents accounts receivable payment events and responds to payment inquiries.
• The Customer security role represents an external user who buys products from legal entities, and who can access and execute business functionality.
• The Chief executive officer security role represents a user who reviews the financial and operational performance of the organization.

Functionality includes:

• Discrete manufacturing
• Formulas and BoM’s; Full featured co/by-product functionality
• Demand Forecasting
• Product Change Management
• Serial Number Tracking Enhancements for Service
• Warranty Scenarios
• Material and capacity planning
• Production scheduling and sequencing
• Ressource management
• Subcontracting
• Pegged supply
• Production bill of materials (BOM), batch orders and formulas (process manufacturing)
• Product configuration
• Routing
• Production and batch orders
• Manufacturing Execution (Shop Floor Control)
• Lean Manufacturing (incl. full-featured Kanban control)
• Quality control
• Comprehensive traceability (extensive batch control)
• Production costing
• Production reporting

Benefits Include:

• Work faster in a familiar interface
• Streamline access to key business process information with Role Centres that present relevant tasks and information, including powerful business intelligence tools for reporting, key performance indicators (KPI's), and data cubes.
• Uniquely traceability of any end-to-end inventory transaction to support faster and fully control of the quality assessment from supplier to customer.
• Quickly match qualified and available resources to tasks with a robust scheduling engine to help maximize profits, reduce costs, and increase client satisfaction.
• Comprehensive costing framework to support standard cost principle and calculating multi-level BoM structures in an automated fashion. Incl. price version maintenance tools.
• ‘All-in-one’ Enterprise resource solution to reduce/eliminate the need for/integration to other resource systems.
• Gantt chart interactive planning features; easy graphical overview of resource scheduling maintenance.
• Fully integrated with comprehensive warehouse and inventory capabilities
• Quality assessment modularity throughout the complete end-to-end material stream.