Today, companies operate facilities and warehouses in multiple locations, across regions, and across time zones to meet consumer demand in the best way possible. Warehouses and manufacturing facilities are spread out to match global operations with shipping needs.

Therefore, any supply chain solution that supports warehouse and manufacturing facilities needs to provide a high level of resilience that delivers reliability, availability, and scale.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management meets these needs for your organization with cloud and edge scale units. Supply Chain Management is a tailored offering that helps businesses of all sizes build resilience.

The hybrid topology for Supply Chain Management using scale units became available for public preview in October 2020, and since then we have added numerous incremental enhancements to the platform and to the warehouse and manufacturing execution workloads for scale units. Now the scale unit platform with its first workload is generally available, and you can purchase the scale units add-in for Supply Chain Management environments in the cloud.

Warehouse execution workloads in cloud scale units generally available

The hybrid topology for Supply Chain Management includes the following elements:

• A platform for a distributed hybrid topology, which is composed of a hub environment in the cloud and subordinate cloud scale unit environments that perform dedicated workload execution and increase your supply chain resilience.
• The warehouse execution workload, which is the first distributed supply chain management workload in general availability.
• The Scale Unit Manager portal, which helps businesses to configure their distributed topology using scale units and workloads.

The first release of the warehouse execution workload provides support for inbound operations, outbound operations, and internal warehouse movement. It utilizes the concept of warehouse orders, which have been added to enable the system to transfer warehouse work to scale units. For more information about the workload capabilities now generally available with version 10.0.17 of Supply Chain Management, see Warehouse management workloads for cloud and edge scale units.

Hybrid topology enhancements available for preview

In addition to the features for scale units, there are several preview features for building hybrid topologies.

Warehouse execution workload capabilities

Version 10.0.19 of Supply Chain Management is now in early access. It provides enhancements for warehouse workloads that have been requested by our customers.

In version 10.0.19, warehouse workload capabilities reach into the shipping processes and are now able to confirm shipments, send advance shipping notices (ASNs), and generate bill of lading on the scale unit.

One of the top demands of our customers is the ability to create provisional packing slips on the scale units, which would provide full end-to-end resiliency for outbound warehouse processes. For most of the standard operations, this will allow you to ship right from the scale unit, even if there is no active connection to your cloud hub. This is great if you run an edge scale unit at a remote facility where the external network is not always available.

In future releases, we want to extend the process responsibility of the warehouse execution workload even more and include parts of the planning phase for outbound processes like shipment creation and ship consolidation.

Manufacturing execution workload

The manufacturing workload continues in preview. In version 10.0.19, now in early access, we are introducing interactive enhancements for our customers validating the capabilities in preview.

In version 10.0.19, the manufacturing workload gains access to inventory information, which means that inventory relevant to the facility workloads is now available on the scale unit. This adds support for putaway work following manufacturing work and lets workers report as finished on the scale unit.

Future iterative enhancements will move raw material picking to the scale unit and extend the use of scale units to support more types of manufacturing processes, such as when production orders are not converted into jobs.

Edge scale units

With the release of version 10.0.19 for early access, we have opened the ability to set up edge scale units on local business data (LBD) deployments. You can now set up LBD deployments on your local hardware appliance and configure the environment as a scale unit on the edge, connected to your cloud hub.

We have released a new version of the infrastructure scripts that are used in LBD deployments and support the specific requirements for edge scale units.

During the preview phase, you will use the deployment tools provided on GitHub to experience edge scale units in a deployment of one-box development environments.

Next steps

To learn more about the distributed hybrid topology for Supply Chain Management and how you can increase the resilience of your supply chain management implementation, check out the documentation.

The post Enable business resilience with cloud and edge scale units in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

If you're responsible for the smooth operation of warehouse operations across your organization, you know that managing inventory, machines, people, and resources efficiently while meeting tight delivery deadlines means that you need to have resilience in your supply chain. To help companies like yours execute mission-critical manufacturing and distribution processes without interruptions, we recently announced a preview for cloud and edge scale unit add-ins for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain management.

So how can your company benefit from cloud and edge scale units? One effective tactic is to place scale units near the location where production work is donewhether that's in the cloud or right inside the four walls of the warehouse facility. That way, you can take advantage of the dedicated capacity that scale units provide.

Monogram Foods Solutions is a leading manufacturer and marketer of value-added meat products, snacks, and appetizers. Their team is participating in the preview. As noted here, they’re having great success with scale units:

"Our frozen goods warehouse has a tighttime constrained picking process, and it is critical for our warehouse team to have a consistent and reliably quick response throughout the entire picking operation. The architectural design of the solution ensures that these critical warehouse workloads are isolated from the rest of our operations, eliminating points of contention during these time-sensitive processes."

Transition to workloadsforresilientwarehouseexecution

You can find more information about what scale units are and how to set them up for the warehouse executionworkload inthe documentation.In this blog post, we're going to take a deeper look into how to implement dedicated scale units.

With theworkloadforwarehouseexecution,you cantransition theexecution phase of warehouse processes intodedicatedscale units.The workload definesthescopeof business processes, data, andpoliciesincluding rules, validation, and ownershipfor what runs in thescale unit.Inbound, outbound, and otherwarehouse management processeshave beensplit into decoupled phases for planning, execution, receiving, and shipping.

After you configure the workload, the workers on thewarehousefloorcontinue to go through the work,like choosing the mobile warehousemanagement experience,connecteddirectlyto thededicated processing capacity in thescale unit.

Hybrid multi-node topology makes it all work

Inthehybridmulti-node topology,individual nodes are responsiblefor pieces in the distribution processes.The hub supports data management, warehouse process management, and release of orders to the warehouseand as well as some finalization steps, depending on the scenario.

For inbound warehouse processes, the responsibility of the workload on the scale unit beginswhen thepurchasing agentreleasespurchase ordersto the warehouse.Itusesrecordsofthe newtype ofwarehouseordersto trigger theworkforthe warehouseclerkson thefloor.

A copy of the relevant inventoryisavailable on the scale unit and isconstantly keptin syncwith the central inventory. For temporarily disconnected edge scale units, this local inventory acts as alocal cache, so the warehouse workercancompletework like put-away,independentlyof thescale unit.

As soon as warehouseworkershave completedatask, the cloud hub runs thenext steps.In the public preview,thisincludesthe generation of thereceiptsfor the receiving process.The transition happensinstantaneouslyifthe (edge) scale unithasconnectivity.

Sales clerksfindsupportinoutboundwarehouse processeswhenreleasingsales orders to the warehouse.Theworkload in thescale unit will apply the relevantwave processing methodandwarehouseworkerswillperformtaskslike picking.From there,theshipping processwilltakeover. Tasks likethe packing slip generation willstill continue onthe cloud hubin the previewversion.

The workload for warehouse execution supports additionaloperations that runfullyon the scale unit.Warehouse workers caninquireaboutitems,itemlocations,and license plates,as well as moveitemswithinthe warehouse.

Take away: Scale units help you to build resilient warehouse execution

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management transitions to a multi-node supply chain topology. This allows customers to build resilience by deploying scale units in the cloud or on the edge with built-in redundancy and flexible management.

The warehouse execution workloads in the public preview show how business processes support resilience in this hybrid multi-node topology for supply chain management. Microsoft will continue finetuning the responsibilities of workloads in scale units based on customer feedback to address the most common use cases out of the box.

In the upcoming Spring release updates, you will find several important enhancements. Warehouse workers in outbound scenarios can perform simple picking and loading work for transfer orders on scale units. Label printing will be available on scale units, including support for wave labels. Further enhancements include cluster picking, wave processing for shipments, change of workers, cancelation, location movement, and completion of work for sales and transfer orders.

Nextsteps

Learn moreabout cloud andedgescaleunits and other important topics in the documentationfor Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The post Robust warehouse execution with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.