Scale up your inventory management process with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Af: Bjørn Pedersen, Industry Practice Lead i Manufacturing, Columbus

Inventory management entails multiple intrinsic and complex processes starting from storing raw materials for production to warehouse management to the sale of products. Manually streamlining this web of complicated and error-prone operations can be hard for any business irrespective of the size and scale. Especially in the manufacturing industry, inventory management acts as a lifeline to the end-to-end business operations. The inventory department would be responsible for the flow of items for the stage of raw materials to finished goods, which are ready-to-sell.

With more and more manufacturing companies trying to adopt digital transformation to make their businesses resilient, robust, and agile, streamlining inventory management has gained paramount importance. According to Gartner’s Manufacturing IT optimization and modernization primer for 2020, In 2019, 74% of CEOs were planning to scale up the investment in IT capabilities, and 77% were planning to increase investment in digital capabilities. Deploying an efficient ERP such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can bring a positive change in your inventory operations. Implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Manufacturing companies helps diagnose the inventory for any possible issues and provide the best methods to resolve them.

How to identify inventory issues?

Inventory problems can be intertwined with other business issues, which together cause serious inefficiencies in your small business. These inefficiencies may most of the items not identified as inventory problems.

So, how do you know that there is an inventory issue? How can you connect a seemingly unrelated issue to inventory? Here are a few symptoms your business might experience if your inventory management is inefficient:

• Increased incidents of out-of-stock in one or more products
• Regular critically low stock issues
• Storing excessive inventory — more than you can manage
• Extended periods of storing items in inventory
• Overutilization of your warehouse storage capacity
• Struggling to meet customer demand
• Unable to provide what customers need while they visit
• Need to request your customer to revisit when the stock is available

If your business is experiencing any of the above challenges, it is time to transform your inventory management to serve your customers better.

Harness the power of Dynamics 365 for inventory management

With Dynamics 365, inventory management can be transformed at every stage. It leverages automation and digitalization to optimize various complex inventory management operations. Here are the different ways in which Microsoft Dynamics for inventory management can help you address core inventory issues:

Optimize your inbound operations

Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP for inventory management can help you gain end-to-end visibility into your inbound processes. With a better overview of the incoming items, you can manage your receipt orders, update journals, and set up an arrival overview process. As a result, you can better plan your inventory and optimize your warehouse storage capacity.

Improve quality management

By automating the quality control process, you can speed up the quality control cycle. You can set up process triggers and order quality standards, record your results and validate orders, report non-conformances, correlate non-conformances, record collections, and handle corrections. D365 for inventory management makes these complicated steps easier and seamless with automation.

Ease complex inventory activities

In a manufacturing company, inventory goes through multiple processes and movements — manually managing them can be cumbersome and inaccurate. To address these issues, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for inventory management provides numerous types of inventory journals— movement, transfer, inventory adjustment, BOM, production input, item arrival, counting, and tag counting.

Effectively manage your outbound processes

Any discrepancies in fulfilling sales orders or transfer orders can ultimately affect the customer experience. Hence, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for inventory management computerizes core elements of picking processes such as generating output orders and shipments. Apart from setting up output orders effortlessly, you can also quickly make modifications to the order you have set up in the Microsoft Dynamics supply chain management.

Better control over inventory closing

As a part of the inventory closing process, you need to recalculate inventory before settling issue transactions to receipt transactions and update the general ledgers and inventory logs according to it. When done manually, this process can be highly error-prone and cause delays in processing. However, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for inventory management, human intervention is minimized, and these tasks can be performed with improved accuracy and consistency.

As complex as it is, inventory management is the backbone of any manufacturing company. In small and medium businesses, it can get more difficult for management to build agile processes to perform inventory activities. With the help of an effective ERP such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 supply chain management, you can not only optimize your inventory processes but also boost the productivity and efficiency of the entire supply chain.