An accurate and reliable inventory view is the basis for many of the decisions you make in your company. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain timely and accurate data. Keeping track of your inventory is the key to making decisions about replenishment, inventory strategy, and the company's financial health. It is important to understand that every action related to the supply chain, at some point, may also affect stocks.

The goal of inventory management is to maintain a flexible inventory level and turnover ratio. However, due to disruptions in the supply chain and delays, forecasting becomes a real problem. This is probably why many supply chain professionals plan to invest in the flexibility and resiliency of their supply chains. In 2021, Gartner conducted a study that showed that more than 80% of respondents want to make their supply chains more flexible and want more resiliency.

To address these issues, Microsoft offers the Inventory Visibility add-in as part of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The way of solving inventory pain points

The Inventory Visibility add-on is designed to transform the supply chain by solving inventory problems. The add-in is a highly scalable microservice. It can be included as an add-on for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and can be integrated with data sources from Microsoft or third-party logistics providers (3PLs). This allows you to provide online inventory visibility so as not to implement a full enterprise resource planning (ERP).

For large retailers, there is no problem in processing a million transactions per minute and accurately determining cross-channel inventory.

Fast response with inventory currency

All businesses need accurate data to make the right decisions. And especially important is the tracking of stocks, since any changes require a quick response. The new Inventory Visibility add-on gives you the ability to view inventory status. Thus, allowing the business to adjust production or sales plans in time.

Maintain fault tolerance through scalability

To increase the sustainability of the supply chain, you can use multiple sales channels and storage locations. Combine online channels, physical channels such as in-store sales. It is the combination that increases sales opportunities. In addition, it is important to create more storage locations closer to local markets. So, there will be no failures during the delivery.

However, companies note that new sales channels have different storage systems, and this burdens the consolidation of data and makes it difficult to get data online. Such data is critical to maintaining business operations. To solve this problem, the Inventory Visibility add-in was created. It allows you to process a huge number of transactions through different channels from different regions in seconds.

Supplier diversification is another strategy that supply chain leaders follow. Having information about suppliers' stocks is also valuable information that facilitates through or direct selling. It can also help to form a more complete picture of potentially available resources. This scenario involves integrating Inventory Visibility with vendor inventory systems.

In the past, updating inventory was extremely time-consuming as data was collected from multiple stores and regions. Now all changes and data are displayed in seconds. Store operations and channel orders have become much more efficient.

Article publication source:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/