Dynamics Inventory Management - A Success Story

When implementing a new ERP most people think of a long, potentially painful experience. While that can be the case from time to time (see Under Armour case study) it doesn’t have to be. In fact, Strabo recently helped a company move onto Microsoft Dynamics with a focus on improving their warehouse efficiency. In this post we will take a look at how Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helped get an immediate ROI within the warehouse using the warehouse management module.

Why Dynamics 365?

The first thing you may be asking is, “why did they choose Dynamics 365?” Well, this company is still fairly small with only warehouse and a smaller AR/AP team, but they are growing rapidly and are planning for the future. By going with Dynamics 365 they knew they would be able to bring in new functionality for their business in many areas but were excited about the robust workflows for supply chain management and inventory management.

Before implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, the customer was keeping track of inventory levels by hand and doing paper picking based on a web sales order sheet. These inventory levels sat inside of an Excel spreadsheet and were often incorrect by thousands of dollars in value. Without any type of inventory management system they were often “flying blind” as the saying goes on what was happening in their warehouse.

Another piece of the Dynamics 365 puzzle was order management. While they did not have a complete ERP system before turning on Microsoft Dynamics, they were previously running Quickbooks for accounting and purchase order management. Their outbound sales order management was all exclusively handled inside their e-commerce system, BigCommerce.

While the option to go with many different “best of breed” systems was an option, they ultimately decided using one system was the correct choice. By using one integrated system with such robust warehouse management functionality, they knew they’d have better automation and real-time inventory outlooks system wide. This was also a way to streamline systems and ensure a smoother IT road head.

Inventory Management Optimization

While we talked about a number of reasons for moving to Dynamics 365 above, inventory management and real-time inventory control functionality was top of mind. When Strabo started the implementation, the request was to figure out the best way to bring the warehouse to the modern era and have faster picking and packing times.

One of the first important pieces of the project was to figure out a strategy for picking and how to handle the order management process once it hits the warehouse. With products already on racks, the logical next step was to get barcodes on the warehouse locations to make the use of the warehouse mobile device and allow for mobile picking. From there we came up with a strategy, using sort priority, to ensure pickers were sent in a logical flow through the aisles. Given that this customer transacts in individual each quantities, it was important to automate a pick flow for users so there was less collision and confusion within the warehouse.

With physical locations now equipped with barcodes and location directions set to send pickers in logical order, it was also important to think about procurement and how to deal with managing inventory coming into the warehouse. An important business process for their team was to have quality checks for products coming in. Thanks to the robust warehouse management system built directly into Dynamics 365, the quality checks could happen right on the mobile app during the purchase order receiving process.

Another critical business process for them was getting the correct stock levels and have to ensure they had a handle on how much inventory they have and their total operating costs. Cycling counting was an important part of the total inventory management solution for them as we looked to go live.

Go-live ready

During the testing phase of the project ,we saw immediate operational efficiency happening inside the warehouse. During a single day of parallel testing with their live system, it was found Dynamics 365 was faster than their current process. This test was so successful, the warehouse requested to use their testing environment to allow pickers to run through orders in the month leading up to go-live. The warehouse management system was so much faster for them, even just using the test environment was saving them time over their current business processes!