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( votes)With the increased e-commerce demand caused by the dependency on online shopping, it is more important than ever to provide seamless customer experiences. If your company sells a product online, you know there’s so much more than just taking orders. A trusted solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management as part of Dynamics 365 CRM helps you manage service, resources and inventory; resolve product issues quickly; mitigate delays and accelerate your time to market.
There are two prominent e-commerce business models. The first — you handle it all. You have your own factory, sales, service and marketing departments and a warehouse. Supply chain management, logistics management, business process management and customer service are typically managed by the CRM. The second model, a rapidly increasing trend, is to outsource parts of the supply chain including manufacturing, and delivery and distribution via a Third-Party Logistics (“3PL”) partner, which typically leaves customer service and marketing to you.
If you operate using the second model, you know that working with the multiple business processes and systems of your partners can create challenges in maintaining an agile supply chain. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management unifies your data, but if you work with multiple supply chain partners, you must also create secure connections to each third-party system, which means multiple connections to manage individually. Integrating your CRM with an Electronic Data Interchange (“EDI”) is an effective solution that enhances visibility and real-time data access across the entire outsourced supply chain.
When Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management integrates with an EDI partner, it creates efficiencies and process improvement in three key ways for logistics, supply chain management, compliance, sales and marketing.
1) Synchronized Data
Even if you never touch your own product, when your data is synchronized across all your partners, you have access to the data you need in real time. You can answer customer inquiries as well as fulfill demand quickly and efficiently. The manufacturer gets timely orders on when to produce product, and 3PLs know exactly when and where to deliver the order. Inventory transparency will help you answer buyer inquiries. Issues like shrinkage and lost orders are communicated so you have full visibility of your inventory and issue resolution.
2) Data Analytics
Access to insights and data analytics aids marketing strategy as well as helps you to better research and respond accordingly to service-related issues. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management delivers fast reporting, analytics, predictive insights and intelligence to help with data-driven decisions that improve operations. Reporting and analytics is available across planning, production, inventory, warehouse and transportation management.
With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and an integrated EDI solution, you can easily access business impact analytics based on data across all supply chain partners that you need to support your own internal analysis. This includes classic financial data such as sales territory, regions, product types and sales.
3) Manage Multiple Data Connections Seamlessly
Whether you work with a couple third-party partners or several, you as the seller must communicate with multiple providers in the supply chain electronically. A standard data integration from your Dynamics 365 would have to be set up with each partner individually. But an EDI integration brokers those connections. This means less for you to manage, and more time and resources that you can spend on customer service or marketing strategies.
Integrating your Dynamics 365 Solutions with an EDI Solution
Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps you to streamline your operations, build agile processes, and optimize resources to consistently deliver your products on time and create the best customer experiences.
If you work with supply chain partners, instead of creating multiple connections, you can work with an EDI that provides one simplified, centralized place to manage and broker all the traffic and transactions back and forth between Dynamics 365 and your various suppliers. Dynamics 365 integrates with the EDI to enhance tracking of all your transactions, inventory management, and fulfillment. The EDI partner already has the connections and transactions established with all the common trade partners in the supply chain. They work with all the online e-commerce sites and common 3PLs and can easily build a new connector as you need. The partner doesn’t just provide EDI connections, they also round out their offering with portal service for vendors and customers.
Get Started with JourneyTEAM
JourneyTEAM was recently awarded Microsoft US Partner of the Year for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (Media & Communications) and the Microsoft Eagle Crystal trophy as a top 5 partner for Dynamics 365 Business Central software implementations. We have heard from many companies looking for a flexible, scalable solution to address their challenges with the eCommerce outsource business model. We can provide demos and full custom introductions to determine if an EDI integration with Dynamics 365 is right for your service and marketing operations. Contact JourneyTEAM today!
Article by: George Sagen – ERP Solution Architect | 801-938-7821
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com
