Microsoft Dynamics 365 for manufacturing:
core capabilities, products & payoffs

Both solutions provide features for generating accurate demand forecasts, planning material and resource needs, and creating optimized production schedules aligned with the available resources and capacity to reduce lead times and prevent production bottlenecks. In particular, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers advanced material resource planning and shop floor control capabilities for large-scale operations, while Dynamics 365 Business Central provides a smaller scope of features for leaner, simpler workflows.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers functionality for creating and approving purchase requisitions, selecting suppliers based on their past performance and risk assessments, while both solutions allow manufacturers to create purchase orders, choose optimal price offers based on pre-defined policies, and automatically or manually confirm product receipt. In addition, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides a vendor management portal that allows manufacturers to quickly onboard vendors and seamlessly and securely collaborate with them.

Dynamics 365 offers dedicated functionality for tracking raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished goods, with the Supply Chain Management Module allowing real-time inventory monitoring across multiple locations, as well as automatic reservation and allocation of materials for production orders. Beyond that, both Dynamics 365 Business Central and Supply Chain Management allow manufacturers to determine safety stock levels to prevent shortages and calculate the inventory value for financial reporting.

With the help of Dynamics 365, manufacturers can track key production metrics in near real-time, including start and completion of jobs by workers, quantities of produced or scrapped goods, and materials consumed, to optimize the production process in case of deviations from the plan.

Dynamics 365 streamlines quality management with capabilities for optimizing the material and product testing process, managing corrective and preventive actions for detected quality issues, and creating certificates of analysis, while helping manufacturers ensure high product quality and demonstrate compliance with applicable regulations.

Using Dynamics 365, manufacturers can efficiently manage picking, packing, and shipping processes, optimize storage space, automate replenishment, and coordinate inter-warehouse movements and freight staging, ensuring smooth material flow and on-time order fulfillment. The Supply Chain Management application provides advanced features for handling complex, enterprise-scale warehousing scenarios, with Business Central offering a basic, lightweight version for simpler operations.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers features for managing asset lifecycles and optimizing equipment maintenance and repair operations. Using this tool, manufacturers can generate insights from IoT asset sensors to plan predictive maintenance, automate the creation of maintenance work orders, maintain optimal spare parts levels, and provide maintenance teams with visual work instructions for safe task execution.