How fast you deliver products to customers goes a long way in bumping up your customer satisfaction scores. Everyone wants their orders to arrive the same day, the next day, or at the most, in three to four days. Go much longer than that, and you just might lose your customer.
The key for consumer-packaged goods companies and distributors to turn products faster is to reduce supply chain issues and set up warehouse processes. This enables items and order components to get into your system quickly and then go out the door just as fast.
This requires real-time insights into sales forecasts and supply chain delivery schedules as well as the production capacity of your warehouses. From there, you need a reporting tool that’s integrated with all your systems so you can pull all the data into one place and get at-a-glance dashboard views.
This tells you when customer demand is greater than your output capacity. You can then make adjustments to your supply chain, your staffing levels, and other assets that help you deliver your products on time.
In-Depth Reports Easy to Set Up
Many businesses have found the answer to these challenges by connecting their ERP platforms to their Dynamics 365 CE system via Microsoft Power BI. You can easily set up reports within Power BI based on the type of data you want to access and share with users across your sales, procurement, production, and distribution workflows.
Setting up the reports requires a little training, but you don’t need coding skills. The tricky part is setting up the table data and consolidating the tables into various report forms—spreadsheets, visuals, graphs, and dashboards.
Once that is done, you can make the reports available to your end-users and give them the ability to drill into the data for the specific information they need. It’s a great way for your production teams to compare open sales orders to production schedules. They can also forecast what’s coming so they can make adjustments before it’s too late.
Managing Multiple Warehouses and Sales Channel Pricing
Real-time reporting with access to sales and supply chain activity is particularly helpful for companies with multiple warehouses. You can make sure you have the right items in the warehouse that’s closest to the region where a product is selling. You thus save on shipping costs and speed up customer deliveries.
Power BI helps you analyze price points according to what's selling in each of your sales channels. For example, you can analyze how a discounted product for one subset of customers compares to not discounting that same product for another subset. How were the sales for each group impacted? This helps you determine the ideal price point for each sales channel.
Are You Ready?
To help determine your readiness to connect your ERP system to Dynamics 365 CE and Power BI, you can tap into the Western Computer Technology Assessment Report to receive recommendations that guide you in ensuring you deploy a successful solution:
- Assess the current state of business processes.
- Envision the future state solution.
- Align the technology spend to the business goals and objectives.
- Share the vision with key stakeholders in the organization.
With the Technology Assessment Report, you receive a clear plan that identifies your required outcomes and how to leverage Microsoft solutions to enhance your operations and exceed your business goals.
If your products are sitting in your warehouse or take too long to arrive at your customer sites, schedule your free Technology Assessment today. We will help you create a path forward to ensure you use the right technologies and the right processes to keep your customers satisfied and coming back for more.
About the Author
More Content by Kayla Rohde
