Microsoft Announces the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, a New Design Approach for Supply Chain Agility, Automation and Sustainability

Microsoft Supply Chain Platform harmonizes the data estate, introduces “command center” for enterprise supply chain

On Monday, Microsoft Corp. announced the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, which helps organizations maximize their supply chain data estate investment with an open approach, bringing the best of Microsoft AI, collaboration, low-code, security and SaaS applications in a composable platform.

The company also announced the preview of Microsoft Supply Chain Center, a ready-made command center for supply chain visibility and transformation and part of the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform. Supply Chain Center is designed to work natively with an organization’s supply chain data and applications, with built-in collaboration, supply and demand insights, and order management.

“Businesses are dealing with petabytes of data spread across legacy systems, ERP, supply chain management and point solutions, resulting in a fragmented view of the supply chain,” said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president, Microsoft Business Applications and Platform. “Supply chain agility and resilience are directly tied to how well organizations connect and orchestrate their data across all relevant systems. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform and Supply Chain Center enable organizations to make the most of their existing investments to gain insights and act quickly.”

“Supply chain solutions are more critical than ever. Our early assessment of the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform and Supply Chain Center is that the company has put its technology, applications and resources together in a way that will serve its customer base well in a wide swath of IT and operations environments, offering flexibility for diverse IT environments and continuous agility for transformation into the future,” said Daniel Newman, founding partner and principal analyst of Futurum Research.

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The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform: An open, collaborative and composable foundation for data and supply chain orchestration

With today’s announcement, we are making it easier for customers to realize the value of the Microsoft Cloud for their supply chain. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform provides the building blocks across Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams and Power Platform for customers to develop or independently adopt capabilities for their supply chain needs. With Dataverse, customers can create thousands of connectors to gain visibility across supply chain, develop custom workflows with low-code solutions in Power Platform, and securely collaborate internally and externally through the power of Teams. With tools and processes that drive positive impact, the platform can enable organizations to gain deeper insights and minimize the carbon impact of their organization and supply chain.

The Microsoft partner ecosystem will continue to play a critical role in enabling customer supply chain resiliency and agility. With the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, partners can bring their industry and domain expertise to create integrated solutions leveraging Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Teams and Power Platform. We will continue to support our customers with a rich partner ecosystem including advisors and implementers like Accenture, Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC and TCS. In addition, to help customers find the best solution for their supply chain needs, we’ll continue working with solution providers such as Blue Yonder, Cosmo Tech, Experlogix, Flintfox, inVia Robotics, K3, O9 Solutions, SAS, Sonata, To-Increase Software and many more.

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Accelerating business agility with the Microsoft Supply Chain Center

At the core of the Supply Chain Platform is the Microsoft Supply Chain Center, now available in preview, which provides a command center experience for practitioners to harmonize data from across existing infrastructure supply chain systems, such as data from Dynamics 365, and other ERP providers, including SAP and Oracle, along with standalone supply chain systems. Data Manager in Supply Chain Center enables data ingestion and orchestration to provide visibility across the supply chain and drive action back into systems of execution. During preview, our launch partners C.H. Robinson, FedEx, FourKites and Overhaul will offer native experiences within Supply Chain Center.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customers automatically gain access to Supply Chain Center. Supply Chain Center also includes prebuilt modules to address supply chain disruptions across supply and order fulfillment:

• The supply and demand insights module leverages advanced Azure AI models to predict upstream supply constraints and shortages through supply intelligence. Organizations can perform simulations using data from their supply chain network to predict stock-outs, over-stocking or missed-order lines. Combined with smart news insights, which provide relevant news alerts in the Supply Chain Center on external events, supply chain practitioners can make decisions and plan with real-world event information and historical insights for product demands.
• The order management module in Supply Chain Center enables organizations to intelligently orchestrate fulfillment and automate it with a rules-based system using real-time omnichannel inventory data, AI and machine learning. Organizations can adapt quickly to meet future order volumes and fulfillment complexities by extending their capabilities with prebuilt connectors to the best-of-breed of specialized technology partners for order intake, delivery and third-party logistics services. Existing Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management customers will automatically get access to Supply Chain Center and the order management module at launch.
• With secure, built-in Teams integration, customers can mitigate supply constraints by collaborating with external suppliers in real time, to secure new supply sources, troubleshoot transportation issues, and communicate upstream and downstream impacts based on changes.
• With partner modules built into the Supply Chain Center, customers can unlock specific solutions, such as freight visibility from Overhaul, directly in the experience. Since everything runs off a Dataverse environment, the data is consistent no matter what module is being using. This eliminates pasting information back and forth and reconciling which reports have the most up-to-date information.

With today’s announcements, Microsoft is taking a significant step toward its commitment to reimagine the supply chain, helping drive efficiency and agility for our customers.