What’s new and of note in the latest Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Releases

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is an end-to-end supply chain solution that enables organizations to gain visibility, resiliency, and efficiency in their supply chain. Here are some top picks from this new features wave we are most excited about and why:

Inventory and Logistics
New features help organizations gain visibility, resiliency, and efficiency in their supply chain: these updates could not have come at a more critical time.

1. Integration framework for material handling equipment for automated warehouse processes (previously MHAX): A smarter way to manage processes and equipment. More easily track usage of material handling equipment based on specific tasks and increase efficiency and optimize maintenance of that equipment.
2. Landed cost: Better predict costs of goods in transit. With this module, you can track goods form the warehouse to their final destination and track all associated costs as well (shipping, customs, brokerage, etc.), gaining actionable visibility into goods with long transportation time, and improving accuracy of supply chain forecasts.
3. Warehouse execution with scale units in the cloud: Improve scalability and resiliency in critical processes. With the Cloud Scale Unit Add-in, warehouses can remain up and running regardless of connectivity failures, outages, or other disruptions. Key workflows (replenishment, purchase orders, and more) are maintained at the warehouse level.
4. Rebate management: Reduce complexity of rebate and deduction programs. An update of the rebates and royalty processing feature, rebate management optimizes creation of client-facing contracts and agreements and optimizes the calculation of rebates, deductions, and royalties. Reduce manual labor and errors with this critical update.
5. Global Inventory Accounting Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: Simplify accounting across multiple ledgers. Ideal for global enterprises, this enhanced functionality enables more complete and efficient compliance with multiple national standards for inventory accounting.
6. Inventory Visibility Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: Enable real-time inventory management. An easy to set up means of managing global inventory that collects data, simultaneously, from multiple points of origin. Essential for global supply chain efficiency in a rapidly changing world.

Manufacturing
This release focuses on enabling customers to execute mission-critical manufacturing processes without interruption and at scale and on building resilience into key manufacturing processes.

7. Override the default reservation principle for materials in production: Speed production by adding flexibility to allocation processes. Replenished items can now be delivered directly to a resource input location and require no reservations or picking work, while other items may be reserved from a warehouse. Enjoy custom, flexible reservation principles by allowing mixed mode reservations on any given production order.

Planning
This release focuses on introducing planning capabilities in the Planning Optimization add-in, including infinite scheduling.

8. Schedule with infinite capacity support for Planning Optimization: Enable master planning with the Planning Optimization Add-in for Supply Chain Management and account for actual lead times (derived from real-time route information). The scheduling engine also finds applicable resources based on operation requirements and the available resource capabilities.

Product Information Management
This release brings incremental improvements to simplify the task of ensuring product master data is complete, to improve the performance of generating product variants, and for adding engineering.

9. Enable change management on existing products: More easily and accurately track changes in products throughout their lifecycle by converting standard products into engineering products, and thereby applying the benefits of versioning and Engineering Change Management to those standard products.
10. Manage changes in formulas and their ingredients: Improve formula management and more easily execute changes to process manufacturing master data. This capability provides the ability to manage changes on:

• Formula and planning items: Manage changes to ingredients in formulas and their co-products and by-products.
• Co-products and by-products: Edit quantities and other information of the co-products and by-products in a formula.
• Catchweight items: Manage changes in catchweight items.

To view complete list of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 2021 release wave updates, download the factsheet available here.