Microsoft’s Dynamics 2022 release wave 1 is a series of automatic updates made across all applications creating hundreds of new features, changes and opportunities. Automatic production deployment for 2022 release wave 1 began on 1st April 2022 and will continue through to September 2022.
Microsoft’s Dynamics 2022 release wave 1 is a series of automatic updates made across all applications creating hundreds of new features, changes and opportunities. Automatic production deployment for 2022 release wave 1 began on 1st April 2022 and will continue through to September 2022.
The 2022 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 brings new innovations that provide Dynamics customers with significant capabilities to transform their business.
In this article, we explore the new features of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helping organisations create a resilient and agile supply chain.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides the end-to-end capabilities that manufacturers, distributors, and retailers require to meet their supply chain needs. Functionality ranges from product information management, planning, inventory, sales, and procurement to complex manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation management.
Increasing resiliency continues to be a priority for organisations as they emerge from the current crisis and reset strategies to anticipate and minimise disruptions. Microsoft believe the investments in this current release will help organisations balance cost and investments in creating a resilient and agile supply chain to ensure business continuity.
What’s new?
New features and improvements introduced to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management during 2022 release wave 1 will help businesses to:
- Enhance operational resilience. The enhanced warehouse workload for cloud and edge scale units adds support for more warehouse processes, including those for packing stations, manufacturing operations, and material handling systems, thereby helping businesses scale mission-critical operations.
- Implement agile production planning. A significantly expanded manufacturing industry footprint enables businesses to use Planning Optimization for production planning and take advantage of the shortened planning cycles to increase manufacturing agility.
- Optimise inventory and service levels. Native Demand Driven Material Requirements Planning (DDMRP) support in Planning Optimisation helps businesses reduce inventory levels while improving customer service.
- Increase fulfilment capability. New inventory allocation and available-to-promise (ATP) capabilities in the Inventory Visibility add-in helps businesses increase order fulfilment rates by preallocating available inventory for key channels and accounts, and by providing visibility into future stock levels.
- Simplify multinational operations. Global Inventory Accounting helps businesses comply with local and global accounting standards. It provides the ability to account inventory in multiple representations by applying the appropriate valuation method and accounting currency per instance.
Gaining visibility, resiliency and efficiency
Microsoft has continued to present the building blocks of a truly powerful, agile and connected Supply Chain Management system. In this release of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft has added several new inventory and logistics features that can help organisations gain visibility, resiliency, and efficiency in their supply chain. What excites us most is Inventory Visibility.
Microsoft recognise that customers are not just single channel/single system customers. It understands that its customers have multiple channels and multiple systems that need the same data that is present in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
The Inventory Visibility service solves the integration issue by allowing near real time access to your stock on-hand so that your 3PL company or other order channels know exactly what stock is available rather than selling something that you don’t have because your on-hand stock data is out of date. This is made available through a number public RESTful API’s and a Model Driven App for visualisation.
Further to the Inventory Visibility service Microsoft has also extended the Warehouse Mobile app by giving it the ability to query data direct from the Warehouse mobile app making it far more user friendly. It removes the need to come out of the app or find a desktop client to get further information on PO’s/SO’s or stock items. This information is available within the app and therefore doesn’t stop the flow of operations.
Manufacturing capabilities
Manufacturing Businesses seeking to digitally transform and empower their production floor workforce, and increase the resilience of their operations, require manufacturing execution processes that operate without interruption and that integrate data from both automated and manual processes. The capabilities added in this release wave are focused on completing the modernisation of core manufacturing execution operations for improved usability and resilience.
- Add process manufacturing support across the production floor execution user experience.
- Enhance integration between manufacturing and warehouse process running on scale units to enable autonomous end to-end execution of production processes, from raw materials picking through finished goods put-away.
- Support continuous manufacturing and warehouse operations even when external connectivity is lost
The game-changer
According to Microsoft, Planning Optimisation is a game-changer that enables businesses to increase their agility and enables them to respond to volatile business environments. Near real-time tactical planning, with runtimes in minutes instead of hours, let businesses update their tactical plans several times a day. This reduces replenishment time, reduces inventory levels, and increases resilience in response to disruptive changes in supply and demand. For manufacturing customers, this release wave delivers a significantly expanded industry footprint for Planning Optimisation, which provides the following benefits:
- Order takers have order-promising information right at their fingertips, even for complex, custom, make-to-order products. End-to-end, finite-capacity planning respects internal factory constraints and helps to manage external subcontractors.
- Manufacturers and retailers having products with limited shelf life can optimize their supply planning.
Customers looking to implement demand-driven planning practices to reduce inventory levels and improve customer service will also benefit from the addition of full DDMRP support, as defined by the Demand Driven Institute. This builds on the priority-based planning capabilities introduced in the previous release wave.
Optimise your solution today
If you are an existing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management user, you may now have access to these exciting features. To ensure you are optimising your use of Dynamics 365 and to discuss extending the capabilities of your current solution, speak to a Microsoft expert.