Microsoft Dynamics for Distribution
- Overview
- Consurmer Packaged Foods
- Food & Beverages
- Industrial Goods
Overview
There is no time for rest in distribution. As globalization trends continue, new channels are constantly developing. And existing channels are expanding with new approaches such as global sourcing, cross-sell capabilities, third-party logistics, and radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions.
Companies are shifting to more advanced distribution management processes as increasing competition and disintermediation concerns grow. These trends are driving changes in distributors' business relationships and processes. Customer service expectations are also expanding. Major customers and vendors are requiring specific service-level agreements and compliant technology business processes.
Microsoft Dynamics offers a powerful technology platform that gives distributors the critical resources they need to manage every aspect of their business, from order entry and procurement to sophisticated inventory and shipment management. Integrated applications can be deployed quickly and inexpensively without complicated customization or drawn-out implementation projects.
Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics solutions for distributors
With Microsoft Dynamics, your company can:
Enhance business operations.
For small and mid-sized distributors, information technology (IT) is the most effective way to add greater value while supporting more cost-effective operations. Automating business processes at each touch point from order capture to inventory replenishment helps streamline diverse tasks and simplify business intelligence gathering. With an integrated distribution process, your company can better manage information and materials while controlling costs and performance.
Improve supply-chain processes.
Efficient supply-chain management is essential for meeting customer demands. With an integrated IT infrastructure and a Web-based approach for cross-business communication, your company can operate effectively in an increasingly complex global supply chain. Portals offer greater visibility into product availability and delivery data, while Web-based storefronts simplify selling, improve accuracy, and increase delivery speed.
Streamline inventory management.
Flexible inventory applications help streamline purchasing, order-processing, and inventory management. These tightly integrated solutions can include the use of bar codes and scanners to maintain accurate, real-time inventory data, thereby further reducing errors. A powerful IT environment helps warehouse management employees optimize layout, picking methods, and movement to secure an efficient product flow throughout the warehouse.
You company can then rely on order management software to ensure accurate and on-time order fulfillment. You can also keep up with industry standards, such as advance ship notification (ASN) with container and item level information sent electronically incorporated with UCC128 compliance labeling.
Access accurate information more quickly.
Gain access to up-to-date data by using online inquiries, Web-based reporting, customer self-service tools, sophisticated financial consolidation, and online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis applications. Your salespeople can use this real-time data to help them accurately answer questions on stock availability and pricing. You can also use this timely data to identify buying patterns and then leverage that information to anticipate customer needs and build customer loyalty.
Consumer Packaged Goods
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) distributors face big challenges selling to the fiercely competitive and rapidly evolving retail industry. Intense price stress at the retail level puts downward pressure on distributors and leads to smaller margins. And short product life cycles add to the strain on your profitability.
There is also the growing challenge to traditional distribution methods. Alternatives such as mail order, catalog sales, and direct sales bypass the traditional distribution channels altogether. To counter this trend, distributors have to add increasing value to their customers.
Microsoft Dynamics solutions can help you succeed in the CPG industry with financial, customer relationship management (CRM), radio frequency identification (RFID), and logistics solutions. Deploying a flexible information technology (IT) infrastructure can help give your company a significant competitive advantage by meeting retailers' demands more effectively, lowering the cost of operations with streamlined inventory and integrated shipping capabilities, and considerably improving customer satisfaction.
Microsoft Dynamics can help your company:
Improve business processes
Automate critical business processes to help meet compliance regulations while adding new value for customers and retailers. Automating supply-chain planning and management tasks can dramatically reduce the costs you incur while dealing with suppliers. As a result, your company could end up in a strong position as a highly responsive, low-cost supplier.
Exceed customer requirements
By integrating systems such as financials, inventory, and CRM with automated data collection (ADC) solutions, you can meet and exceed customer expectations. Sales order and logistics solutions can also help you increase the accuracy of customer transactions. When coupled with inventory control technologies, you can increase the speed of delivery, shorten lead times, and reduce inventory. CRM solutions can also offer extensive insight into customer buying patterns, helping you to anticipate and plan for orders in advance thus improving responsiveness and increasing customer loyalty.
Drive down costs
Flexible, integrated solutions can help your company reduce and control internal costs. With the ability to aggregate and summarize real-time and historic data quickly from various operations, you can easily identify inefficient processes. This is especially useful when tracking the success of new products before making additional investments. CPG distributors can also improve employee and departmental accountability by implementing metrics and tracking for individual warehouses, departments, and processes.
Food & Beverages
When you're in the food and beverage distribution industry, your business is defined by strict compliance standards, low profit margins, intense competition, and high customer-service expectations. How effectively you meet these challenges can determine whether or not your company is successful.
To succeed you need fast and effective ordering processes to ensure customer needs are understood and addressed quickly. You also need flexibility to respond to customer demands and market trends. Being able to see information across all of your operation will help speed delivery mechanisms so you can get product where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.
Microsoft Dynamics offers a set of strong applications that deliver a compelling suite of technologies for organizations in the food and beverage distribution industry. This integrated technology platform can help you succeed by speeding products from supplier to the store shelf, removing waste from operations, and meeting the demands of your retail customers and consumers.
Microsoft Dynamics can help your company:
Enhance sales-ordering
Tight integration for all your applications, including financials, inventory, and customer relationship management (CRM), improves sales order-processing. Support for ADC ensures that distribution systems are seamlessly integrated with financial and reporting applications. Accurate data flows throughout your organization can help streamline inventory and shipments and boost your forecasting capabilities. And access to real-time customer information can lead to better customer service the kind of service that help keep the orders rolling in.
Increase responsiveness through greater connectivity
Whether you integrate CRM and accounting systems to support customers or implement a flexible pricing strategy that uses unlimited price lists, price-banding, cost uplift pricing, or quantity break pricing, these agile solutions give you the flexibility to do it all over a secure Internet connection. Well-connected systems also coordinate all aspects of communications when multiple personnel are interacting with one customer.
Improve delivery efficiencies
By using applications that integrate with bar code technologies and radio frequency identification (RFID), you can plan and automate delivery schedules and gain greater insight into the supply chain. Support for ADC sales systems can help you nearly eliminate comprehensive inventory counts, lower the inventory required to service customers, pull customer orders in a fraction of the time typically required, and comply with changing customer demand.
Monitor food safety
Keep your food supply safer by coordinating product-tracking from suppliers, and facilitate traceability from supplier to customer in markets that require it. Improve accountability by implementing metric settings and tracking for individual warehouses, departments, and processes.