With Dynamics 365 you get a range of modern business applications with in-built intelligence throughout the platform, designed to help you make a wide range of decisions. In this article, we discuss how you can intelligently manage your inventory with Microsoft’s newest solution, Dynamics 365 Business Central.

For a business that uses a large amount of materials to manufacture or create outputs, inventory management is a tough area. It is a key element of the supply chain and includes aspects such as controlling and overseeing ordering inventory, storage of inventory and controlling the amount of product for sale. It is the ultimate trade-off between having enough stock to meet your customer orders and keeping the capital tied up in stock where it could be better invested elsewhere.

Cortana Intelligence

Dynamics 365 Business Central has Cortana intelligence built-in to the system. This provides you with intelligence capability across all areas of the solution. It can be used to prompt next best actions for your sales teams, identify trends in your expenditure and help with inventory management.

When thinking about inventory management, Cortana Intelligence can be used to forecast your sales inventory requirements. It embeds intelligent predictions for all items and highlights when they are likely to go out of stock. It does this by analysing your current stock level and your historic data, analysing this through several different time series models to provide you with as precise a prediction as possible. The system also takes into account factors such as delivery time from your suppliers.

Cortana offers predictions from an operations perspective but as Business Central has a CRM capability, and can integrate with Dynamics 365 for Sales, it can also provide you with a predicted sales outlook for those items. The ability to have both views is designed to give you as much information as possible to assist your inventory decisions. This information is provided alongside your inventory data in a clear and interactive dashboard that uses Power BI capability.

You can then use this capability to directly create a purchase order for the required vendor. Business Central pre-populates all the information required including the quantity you require to avoid you running out of stock. The solution gives you the ability to edit the quantity to suit your inventory strategy. It also highlights any other items you should also order from this supplier by identifying other products that are on track to be out of stock from the same supplier.

The home page for Dynamics 365 Business Central can be customised at a user level, allowing your inventory manager to get notifications every time there is a potential “stock out” predicted to ensure you never run out of stock again.

This is just one of the many ways that Microsoft Dynamics 365 uses its intelligence to help you deliver for your customers and optimise your business. Inventory management can be easily optimised with the help of Cortana Intelligence to never miss a sales opportunity but limit the level of capital tied up in inventory.