Manufacturers are enjoying the Internet of Things (the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data) because of the incredible connectivity they share with their industrial products, from their home office all the way down the supply chain. However, this connectivity can do more than simple connect the home office to various devices; it will also significantly impact their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the business processes these systems support.
Evert Bos, our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Operations technical fellow, wrote an article for IndustryWeek.com, explaining more about this digitization of manufacturing and how it can do more than what appears on the surface.
The core goal of an ERP system is to provide actionable data and information to company leaders. But collecting accurate data is an ongoing and vexing challenge. The Internet of Things has the potential to massively expand data availability and improve accuracy. This has significant implications for customer service, forecasting, inventory management and business intelligence.
Bos goes on to explain how the Internet of Things (IoT) is also improving customer and field service as well as eliminating complex forecasting models.
The Internet of Things has the potential to almost completely — if not entirely — eliminate this complex and challenging forecasting process by allowing point-of-sale inventory levels to be transmitted directly to the factory. And for configured products, critical information about the popularity of certain configurations could be available. With this information on-hand, a manufacturer could switch to a more profitable “make-to-order” model instead of the forecast-driven “make-to-stock” model and only produce the products that are actually in demand. The same would apply to the replenishment of inventory stored by dealers and managed by vendors.
Read Evert’s full article on Industry Week: “How the Internet of Things Can Boost ERP“
