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New Dynamics 365 Manufacturing Accelerator for supplier management

Following the launch of accelerators in five other industries over the past 18 months, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Manufacturing Accelerator is now in public preview.

Our initial focus is on helping manufacturing organizations adapt to and manage their suppliers. The first solution as part of this accelerator is our supplier relationship management application which enables manufacturers to qualify a supplier, onboard suppliers for data integration, and provide rich data around the health of the supplier relationship. This app is especially useful as manufacturers worldwide cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. The need to radically change the products a factory produces puts tremendous pressure on procurement teams to source and uptake new suppliers for materials and one great example of this is the UK Ventilator Challenge. Microsoft is working with this UK consortium to order parts and oversee the process through to the manufacturer and assembly of their finished ventilators for the NHS. While this consortium is leveraging Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for this effort, and the Supplier Relationship Management App natively works with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, it can also be integrated with a wide variety of back-office systems using the out-of-the-box Common Data Service connectors. Learn more about how Microsoft is supporting the manufacturing community during this challenging time in this blog by Caglayan Arkan.

The Supplier Relationship Management app provides new suppliers access to a guided and easy-to-use role-based tool to qualify a supplier and onboard the supplier’s IT team to enable API data integration. The solution brings together a seamless workflow for a manufacturer to manage both their supplier business relationship and the API data integration, as well as enables them to meet the rapidly growing needs of reassessing a vendor’s performance. The Supplier Relationship Management app leverages the common data model and the full capabilities of the Microsoft Power Platform, Power Portals, Power Apps, and Power Automate to provide a robust end-to-end solution for new supplier registration, API data integration onboarding, supplier management console, and easy to use workflows for manufacturing organizations to manage and score their suppliers. This helps organizations to optimize supplier selection and performance to rapidly produce and deliver better quality products.

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Features of the application include:

  • Initial access request and guide experience: Leverage the portal to manage the initial access requests and guided experience to qualify suppliers who to do business with your organization. This provides you proactive engagement with new suppliers.

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  • Purpose-built supplier management console: The purpose-built role-based console provides account details, technical details, monitoring of electronic data message status, and most importantly, a single view on supplier relationship health. This reporting section can be a powerful conduit to provide information on how well the supplier is performing in relation to the other suppliers to this facility.

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The Supplier Relationship Management app, under the Manufacturing Accelerator, was inspired by numerous customer conversations, over the past several months, regarding their current challenges and how we can help provide an efficient solution to improve the collaboration between manufacturers and their suppliers. We will continue to work together with our customers and partner community to constantly refine and iterate on the application to ensure we are accurately addressing the needs of manufacturing organizations.

Learn more and get started

Read more about the Supplier Relationship Management application and learn how to license, deploy, and use the solution.

Disclaimer
This application is a sample and may be used with Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Power Apps only for the dissemination of reference information and facilitating communication between suppliers and manufacturing organizations. The customer bears the sole risk and responsibility for any use of this template and related services. The application is only intended is provided “as-is”, “with all faults”, and without warranty of any kind.