RSMUS.comAs manufacturers look to globalization to expand operations and strengthen strategic partnerships, the F&B supply chain is expanded to include touch-points and intermediaries that span regions, countries, and even continents. As such, deep visibility and real-time access to critical data is more important than ever, necessitating an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solution that can bring operations from across the globe into sharp focus, centralizing and storing all company data in a single location, accessible from anywhere at any time.
The built-in tools and capabilities Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP systems bring with them equip F&B executives with the ability to not only track product and customer data across diverse locales, but also adjust processes as required to meet location-specific business requirements, ensuring users always have the resources they need to perform effectively and directly, no matter how expansive the enterprise becomes.
Multi-Site Manufacturing: Leveraging Functionality across Business Environments
As the F&B marketplace grows to encompass a global audience, manufacturers are turning to a more diverse and wide-ranging supply chain and workforce to keep up with supply and demand initiatives. Whereas traditional business models tended to be centered around a single primary site that produced all the goods for each organization, today’s manufacturers establish supply chain operations, including production facilities and warehouses, virtually anywhere in the world that can most profitably serve their needs.
The reasons for this structure are primarily strategic—production facilities may be located in areas that provide lower overhead costs or closer proximity and easier access to raw materials, and distribution centers may be developed to serve specific geographic markets. To unite such disparate locations, no matter what their function or how far-reaching they are, Dynamics AX features multi-site functionality that streamlines process flow, enabling each site to be configured to reflect that organization’s unique business model, allowing business environments to seamlessly operate with one another, boosting productivity, facilitating teamwork, and driving profit.
Multi-Language Capabilities: Communicating and Collaborating across Borders
Another critical aspect of success in a global supply chain and marketplace is efficient, effective communication with every team member, partner, and stakeholder around the world—no matter what their native tongue. Accurate, seamless engagement with every relevant party around every aspect of business operations can be the difference between market domination and inadvertently disenfranchising players critical to the success and longevity of your business.
With localization support for more than 36 countries and translation functionality for more than 40 languages, the Dynamics AX user interface can be adjusted as needed, so business information, including forms, documents, and reports, is displayed in the user’s native language, boosting adoption, encouraging collaboration, and streamlining the critical operations that drive revenue and growth.
Multi-Currency ERP Financial Reporting: Staying Cognizant and Compliant
Staying on top of financial activities across geographic borders is another essential element of ensuring sound and secure organizational operations for F&B leaders. With its Management Reporter tool, Microsoft Dynamics AX makes it easy to translate financial reports based on international currencies, and allows users to set up an unlimited number of reporting currencies to accommodate a wide range of business scenarios. In addition, executives can review financial data, including budget control and budget planning reports, in multiple currencies, as required, for a more accurate view of overall company finances.
Built on a layered architecture, Dynamics AX also enables users to develop region-specific or country-specific localization functionality, including tax structure considerations, into the core SYS layer of the software, enabling faster transactions and helping companies meet geographically unique compliance requirements.
From Global to Personal: Supporting Initiatives for Growth and Expansion
It’s easier than ever to communicate across space and time, and leading F&B manufacturers are leveraging these opportunities to conduct more profitable and sustainable business from virtually anywhere on the planet. But critical to the success of such efforts are robust software tools that reduce the complexity of their operations and bring every piece of relevant information together in a single, centralized system that can be accessed by the people who need it, when they need it, in the language they need it in. Equipped with multi-site, multi-language, and multi-currency ERP features and functionality, Microsoft Dynamics AX is able to tie together every piece of operational data into a tightly interwoven network of resources available to the right people, in a format that meets their unique business needs, so their world is always at their fingertips, no matter how big it grows.
Learn more about the author, Christian Hutter.
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