Leverage cloud-based planning to optimize your distribution and logistics business

Powerful insights and intelligent tools included in Dynamics 365 give distributors and logistics companies a competitive advantage by allowing them to accurately anticipate demand, streamline resource scheduling, plan the right inventory volumes, and automate distribution planning. Increase organizational agility and unlock the ability to explore the impacts of potential changes in plan inputs to better equip your organization to combat changes and disruptions.

Agile planning drives business growth by providing critical insights and competitive advantages to your organization. Dynamics 365 planning capabilities can improve your demand planning and forecasting procedures to optimize inventory, resources management, and distribution planning.

Accurate demand planning will transform your distribution and logistics business to streamline sales and operations planning to ensure on-time delivery and customer satisfaction. Infuse your planning process with supply chain, sales, and marketing pipeline data to improve your organization’s demand planning so you can make smarter decisions based on complete and accurate data. Leverage machine learning capabilities that continually sense changes in observed variables, identifies new variables that impact forecast accuracy, automatically adjust forecasts as data is collected, and intuitively learn how to improve the demand forecasting process. Use AI and various statistical methods to create demand forecasts based on historical data for warehouses, customer groups, items, customer accounts, countries, regions, and states.

Eliminate stock outs and automatically prioritize inventory replenishment based on order priorities, forecasts, and stock levels. Utilize a materials requirements planning engine that leverages artificial intelligence to centralize data from multiple sources to predict stock replenishment needs while providing customizable analytics to decision-makers for faster results. Additionally, detect trends in valuation of inventories so you can empower your managers to take action to drive improvements. With Dynamics 365 tailored to your distribution and logistics industry, you can manage inventory across multiple locations with ease, track incoming and outgoing shipments, optimize inventory levels, minimize stockouts, reduce shipping costs due to unplanned replenishment, and automate key processes including warehouse replenishment.

Dynamics 365 is a powerful tool to support your distribution processes. With accurate demand and inventory planning, you can eliminate stockouts with distribution planning in near-real-time. Use dedicated features for distribution planning using stock-keeping units and location transfers. Unlock cost savings through agile planning and distribution.

With Dynamics 365 you can use IoT and mixed reality to perform predictive maintenance based on real-time data so you can effectively manage your assets. This includes capabilities to proactively manage and maintain your fleet with end-to-end visibility into your operations. Additionally, you can plan routes to optimize driver and truck time on the road. Use preventative maintenance to ensure your fleet is in peak operating condition and schedule vehicle downtime before breakdowns occur to cut down on costly wear and tear.

Take your Dynamics 365 implementation to the next level with a powerful planning solution from Rand Group that enhances your existing planning capabilities while adding new functionalities. Solutions like Solver and Power BI seamlessly integrate with your Dynamics 365 applications to increase organizational agility with company-wide planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

Build a superior workforce with workforce planning features included in Solver. Ensure your company can execute its business strategies by aligning human resource needs with organizational needs. HR, finance, and hiring managers are able to easily collaborate to establish budgets, roles, and priorities across the organization to ensure the right number of resources are hired at the right time. As distribution and logistics firms face labor shortage challenges, a solution like Solver can give hiring managers an edge in forecasting job roles that will need filling to deploy the best hiring strategies.

With scenario planning, what-if analysis, and modeling, managers can test how changes in a value will impact the entire business in order to make the most informed decisions and increase organizational agility and resilience by visualizing potential risks and opportunities. Boost your distribution and logistics organization’s ability to react quickly and decisively in a crisis, greatly increasing your competitive advantage. Additionally, take control over your revenue and expenses to align revenue forecasts and sales plans with your corporate objectives by engaging in active revenue planning.

Take control over your revenue and expenses to align revenue forecasts and sales plans with your corporate objectives and empower business users to create driver-based revenue and sales forecasts in collaboration with finance, sales, and service teams. With seamless integration with Dynamics 365, you can automatically collect data across your organization ensuring consistency throughout reports and budgets.

Distribution and logistics companies of all sizes need an active planning process. Rand Group’s team of industry experts, data scientists, accountants, and application specialists can help you create a planning and data strategy to meet the needs of your organization. Contact our team to learn how Dynamics 365 and integrated planning solutions can elevate your operations.