Microsoft has announced a range of new features coming to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management on the 1st of April 2020 as part of release wave 1.
The wide range of new features are part of Microsoft’s six-monthly updates and commitment to continual enhancements across the full range of Dynamics 365 products and the Power Platform.
Release wave 1 will provide Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management users with significant capabilities, transforming their organisation through maximising utilisations, minimising inefficiencies and giving users greater visibility throughout the supply chain.
2021’s release wave 1 will improve Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management across five key areas.
1. Asset Management
If you use the asset management add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, release wave 1 will allow you to improve efficiency and transparency throughout the process of billing customers for maintenance work.
A new feature called Bill Customer for Maintenance Work will let you create, process and bill maintenance completed on assets owned by your customers. You will be able to register expenses and fees, hours, items and create an invoice proposal for the customer.
Other new features for Asset Management also include the functionality of tracking asset usages based on Internet of Things (IoT) signals and the ability to plan maintenance. This is based on accumulated asset counter values and will improve the productivity and quality of your assets on the manufacturing floor.
2. Inventory and Logistics
Release wave 1 includes an Inventory Visibility Add-in. This feature is built with the easy-to-use REST API which can handle millions of inventory updates every minute, allowing you to gain real time visibility across your inventory channels.
Mission-critical warehouse executions are enhanced with release wave 1 due to the use of scale units, which can be cloud-based or hardware-based. The cloud-based scale unit will enable you to fulfil your processes without interruption, no matter the scale of the system workload. Hardware-based scaled units, also known as edge scale units, enable you to complete inventory tasks independently from your hub, meaning you can remain operational even during connectivity failures.
A new feature called Landed Cost will enable users to define allocation rules to calculate item costs associated with shipments, inbound orders and associated costs throughout the item journey. This feature will help your organisation improve pricing decision making through the ability to predict item costs and reduce administration and costing errors.
3. Manufacturing
Cloud and edge scale units will also be included for manufacturing in release wave 1. This allows dedicated processing capacity to be allocated, either in the cloud or on your custom hardware. This ultimately builds resilience into your key manufacturing processes.
Other enhancements to manufacturing include the ability to:
- Clock in and out
- Select and start multiple jobs at once
- Start new jobs in parallel
- Report output and scrap
- Register breaks and inactive activities
- And lots more!
Release wave 1 also brings with it the new production floor touch interface, which is modern and customisable. It also brings four new simplified production views in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, which will make frequently used fields available, providing a quicker overview and a streamlined work process.
4. Planning
Planning enhancements for release wave 1 are centred around Material Requirements Planning II, which will help planning managers control their production schedule and help delivery lead times.
Improvements to planning optimisation functionalities will leverage input from purchase requisitions and give more flexibility for item lead times.
Also included in release wave 1 is the ability to have infinite capacity support, which includes:
- Resource and route information
- Suggestion of production schedules
- Enabling planners to view resource load and determine delivery lead time.
5. Product Information Management
Incremental improvements have been made to the Product Information Management module in this release. Improvements to the variant selection forms and product readiness checks will help users ensure that all required fields are set up as needed.
Enhancements have also been made to Engineering Change Management to track engineering products and their relevant changes throughout the products lifecycle.
A new feature, aimed at organisations with a large product assortment, will enable the released product to be shared across multiple legal entities. This will reduce the amount of shared data that must be maintained individually, whilst simplifying the task of maintaining product master data.
Be prepared
As an Inner Circle Microsoft gold partner, Telefónica Tech can help you prepare for release wave 1. If your organisation requires assistance navigating the rollout of Microsoft’s 2021 release wave 1 across Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, get in touch.