Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in 2021 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
Overview
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides the end-to-end capabilities that manufacturers, distributors, and retailers require to meet their supply chain needs. Functionality ranges from product information management, planning, inventory, sales, and procurement to complex manufacturing, warehouse, and transportation management.
Companies need to be agile and change rapidly to meet the new business reality. One of the biggest impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the disruption in supply chains driven by a historical emphasis on efficiency versus resiliency. Enhanced supply chain visibility, multiple business platform support, optimized workforce, agile planning and distribution processes, combined with maximized asset uptime to ensure safe and cost-efficient business continuity, will be key components with investments as follows:
Continue to provide comprehensive core capabilities. Provide enhanced capabilities across product information management, planning, inventory and logistics, manufacturing, and asset management. Enable businesses to scale mission-critical operations in the factory and warehouses using cloud and edge scale units. We'll continue our investments through organic and inorganic means to expand core supply chain capabilities.
Enable resilient supply chain and visibility. Increasing resiliency continues to be a priority for organizations as they emerge from the current crisis and reset strategies to anticipate and minimize disruptions. Organizations will strive toward balancing cost and investments in creating a resilient supply chain and visibility. With investments in key areas such as resource planning, we'll enable businesses to optimize their usage of available material and capacity to avoid stockout situations and keep the business flow.
World-class service health and execution. Customer adoption and satisfaction, and good references, are critical to our success. Our customers should be able to adopt and integrate new business models with ease. New manufacturing execution scenarios allow integration between Supply Chain Management, common manufacturing execution solutions, and shop floor automation systems. We'll continue our investments toward better discoverability, improved trial experiences, improved net satisfaction scores, and other fundamental efforts.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 2021 release wave 2
Tip
Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.
* Overview guide available in English version only.
Investment areas
Inventory and logistics
This release adds the following inventory and logistics capabilities to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management:
- Global Inventory Accounting Add-in: Lets you perform inventory account using multiple costing ledgers so you can comply with multiple accounting standards and internal management accounting at the same time. This is especially useful for international organizations.
- Soft reservation for the Inventory Visibility Add-in: Enables external systems to query Supply Chain Management for the inventory position of requested items. The system returns an accurate count of available inventory and temporarily reserves the requested item.
- Rebate management module enhancements: The new rebate workbench helps streamline rebate processing. The module now integrates with the existing deduction workbench to let you process rebates as customer deductions.
- Landed cost module enhancements: Provides warehouse managers with more control over putaway work for goods-in-transit orders. Improves the Landed cost module’s ability to track the arrival dates of imported goods.
- Post on-hand adjustments using configurable reason codes: Warehouse and retail store workers doing on-hand inventory adjustments can select the reason for each adjustment while they work. The system can then automatically post each adjustment to the appropriate offset account based on the stated reason.
- Pricing service: Enables you to define prices and discounts using flexible price attributes. The service provides an omnichannel pricing engine that can find the product’s right price based on the applicable price, discounts, promotions, trade agreement, and more.
- Warehouse Management mobile app enhancements: User-customizable step-by-step instructions and localized prompts for workers.
- GS1 standard barcodes: The system can now scan GS1 standard barcodes for facilitated warehouse processing.
Distributed hybrid topology
The distributed hybrid topology extends the supply chain management enterprise cloud hub, with one or more vertical scale units in the cloud or on the edge.
Scale units run business processes in vertical domains near or where the work occurs to increase resilience and provide higher reliability, extra performance, and maximum uptime.
Scale units can run either in the cloud (in an Azure data center closer to where the work occurs) or on edge hardware running physically on site. Each scale unit runs one or more workloads, each of which provides support for a set of vertical functionalities (such as warehousing or manufacturing).
Distributed hybrid topologies for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management have been available since late 2020, and we have continuously expanded and improved its capabilities with each release since then. For the 2021 release wave 2, we're introducing these enhancements to the topology platform and the out-of-the-box workloads for vertical functionality:
- Enhancements for the cloud scale unit platform.
- Capabilities enabling edge scale units, which allow you to run workloads on-premises in your local facility while being connected or temporarily disconnected from the cloud hub.
- Enhancements for topology deployment and lifecycle management capabilities.
- Incremental enhancements for the out-of-the-box vertical workload functionality in warehouse and manufacturing execution.
Manufacturing
This release adds the following capabilities for manufacturers:
- Supply Chain Management can be integrated with common manufacturing execution systems. The solution provides a simple and efficient no-code onboarding process, which reduces overall implementation and operating costs. It helps manufacturers to establish end-to-end visibility and control the production floor.
- The production floor execution interface now enables workers to register batch and serial numbers for raw materials and adjust the amount of material consumed. This ensures material traceability, provides accurate and up-to-date inventory levels, and increases the efficiency of shop-floor workers.
- Workers can now use the Warehouse Management mobile app running against a scale unit to register quantities, batch numbers, and serial numbers of consumed raw materials. This ensures material traceability, accurate inventory records, and shop-floor efficiency, while also enabling manufacturers to take advantage of the increased resiliency and performance offered by a distributed hybrid topology.
Planning
This release adds Planning Optimization support for production scheduling that respects finite resource capacity. Manufacturers can now:
- Use finite scheduling to detect potential future delays caused by limited resource capacity. This helps manufacturers to automatically update their material requirements accordingly and notify impacted customers.
- Allocate resources based on capabilities during scheduling. Instead of assigning specific resources or resource groups to a route operation, the required capabilities can be defined on the route operation. With this setup, scheduling will match the required capabilities with capabilities of available resources to determine the resource assignment for a given production job.
- Support process manufacturing scenarios while taking advantage of Planning Optimization. For process manufacturers, the system now supports batch orders, co-products, by-products, and items with limited shelf life.
Product information management
Turning on features by default helps customers stay current with the latest product information management capabilities of Supply Chain Management.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Supply Chain Management
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Supply Chain Management. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Supply Chain Management. |
| User community | Engage with Supply Chain Management experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Supply Chain Management. |