Microsoft has announced, during Microsoft Ignite, a new manufacturing solution called the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, along with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, a tool designed to give customers more visibility into what’s happening along their supply chain routes and intelligence to deal with issues as they arise.
The Dynamics 365 Supply Chain is designed to help address the persisting global supply chain shortfalls, which have immobilized recovery from pandemic-induced economic strains.
On Sunday, US president Joe Biden had convened a summit during the annual gathering of G-20 leaders, urging them to act to address the supply chain challenge.
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“Supply chains are something that most of our citizens never think twice about until something goes wrong. And during this pandemic, we’ve seen delays and backlogs of goods from automobiles to electronics, from shoes to furniture,” he said.
Many logistics companies caught in the mess have been helplessly seeking a way out. Per TechCrunch, Caglayan Arkan, VP of manufacturing and supply chain at Microsoft, says the company has been thinking about ways to help companies solve these issues, and at the same time evolve into more digitally-focused companies — something that has been a challenge for manufacturers.
Arkan says that Microsoft examined the state of things and saw brittle systems that, when faced with the pressure of the pandemic, didn’t hold up well. “Manufacturing and the supply chain has been very stable; very, very lean, perhaps too lean. They grew very comfortable in their very long cycles and manual siloed data state,” he said.
He added that manufacturers have been working this way for years and they had no real reason to change until the pandemic came along. “Everything stopped. The music stopped, and you couldn’t send employees to the shop floor anymore, supplies were not there. You couldn’t even see your supplier to know where your goods were, and that was a huge disruption,” Arkan explained.
Arkan described the manufacturing cloud as a “system of reality”, being that it is designed to help digitize the factory floor, and also provide a system that will facilitate digital transition.
“That means that manufacturers need to be able to link what’s happening in the marketplace in terms of demand, what’s happening on their shop floor in terms of production and what’s happening in the world in terms of supplies to get a big picture view, so they won’t get caught flat-footed as they did when demand for toilet paper and PPE ballooned early in the pandemic,” TechCrunch said in its report.
The report explains that the manufacturing cloud is designed to help collect these signals and warn manufacturers when they might need additional supplies, while the Supply Chain Insights tool is specifically designed to map out supply chain routes and root out issues that could affect delivery of key raw materials before bottlenecks happen. Together they are designed to bring more agility and flexibility to manufacturing companies.
Arkan says that each project can build on one another and fund the next one through savings and innovation.
“Every step of your digital transformation, every engagement with us creates economic headroom to add funds to the next one because we either give you more top-line revenue, capacity or provide savings or quality improvements in a matter of 8-12 weeks,” he said.
It is hoped that the new tools will help ease the bottlenecks that have almost enveloped manufacturing and supply chain even though it requires more than software.
Biden also announced some domestic measures aimed at curtailing the challenge. They include an executive order geared at streamlining American stockpiling efforts and two initiatives to promote international supply chain among US and allies.