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Chemical Industry — Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration
Improving Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration with Microsoft Solutions
Managing an Increasingly Complex Network
As competition intensifies in the global market, chemical companies look to
their increasingly complex supply chains as a key lever for raising customer
service levels and lowering operating costs. The most successful chemical
companies are those capable of meeting their business goals while managing industry challenges such as volatility in energy and raw material costs,
continued pricing pressure, and the complex regulatory environment.
To overcome these prevailing challenges, chemical executives must closely
monitor the performance of their supply chains to ensure alignment between their supply chain goals and business strategy. Experienced managers know that the tradeoff between cost and customer service depends on
the characteristics and the strategy of the business. Specialty chemical supply chain managers may focus more on reducing inventory and improving
customer service; managers of basic chemical supply chains may focus on
reducing overall operating costs.
Introducing Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration
Key information technology (IT) capabilities for the Supply Chain Visibility
and Collaboration solutions include:
A business process platform for automating and integrating business process workflows
RFID for real-time event management as well as for the integration of
devices and processes
Performance management and business intelligence to build operational
dashboards and analytics environment
Unified communications to bring your people together across the globe to
help them make better decisions faster
Microsoft partners provide both implementation and deep functional expertise for visibility and collaboration solutions in areas such as demand management, inventory optimization, service level management, and procurement.
Empowering Your People
To improve the supply chain, chemical
companies must consider both functional and cross-functional excellence. Functional excellence relates to continuous
improvement in areas such as production and logistics; cross-functional excellence relates to linking performance
management with supply and demand
planning across the value chain. The success of these efforts depends on people
having greater visibility of data, the ability to collaborate, and the ability to access their business processes.
With Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration solutions from Microsoft and its partners, chemical companies can integrate
functional workflows into end-to-end
process workflows. Microsoft also provides
real-time visibility of key performance indicators as well as deep data analysis to
support better decision making.
People drive supply chain improvements. Microsoft is committed to helping chemical companies maximize the
return on their supply chain investments
by giving their people role-based insight
into their business. Microsoft capabilities
help your people formulate decisions
based on your business process priorities and results are driven by the performance of the supply chain. Chemical
companies can achieve supply chain
efficiency by increasing the quality of
interactions between people, their business processes, and their data.
Today’s chemical companies are increasingly dependent on the performance
of their supply chain to drive top-line and bottom-line improvements.
Microsoft visibility and collaboration solutions enable real-time monitoring
and adjustments to stay ahead of the competition.
Supply Chain solutions from Microsoft
and our partners help your people effectively balance service levels and costs by
connecting them to the critical facets of
the supply chain in an easy-to-use and
familiar environment.
Benefits of Microsoft Supply Chain Solutions
With Supply Chain solutions from Microsoft and its partners, your people can:
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Improve supply chain visibility.
Achieve efficient supply chain collaboration.
Improve operational efficiency and customer service.
Reduce inventory.
Improve agility and competitiveness.
Ensure alignment of business strategy and supply chain strategy.
Gain actionable insight and real-time collaboration and communication
for making better decisions faster.
Key Technologies for Microsoft Sales Solutions
Microsoft Office delivers the most complete solution for managing information and simplifying teamwork. This complete suite of productivity and
database software can help you save time, stay organized, and create dynamic business documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases.
Office Business Applications are an emerging breed of applications that leverages the power of the Office Business Platform, that is, the clients, servers,
services, and tools that constitute the Microsoft Office system. Office Business
Applications help simplify interaction with line-of-business systems by fitting
within the informal processes that information workers actually follow.
Windows Mobile® phones, software, and services deliver a flexible, businesscentric solution for mobile messaging and collaboration. Workers on the go
get fast, efficient access to work e-mail, phone messages, tasks, calendars, and
instant messaging on phones from the world’s top device manufacturers.
Microsoft® BizTalk® Server allows organizations to more easily connect
disparate systems. With more than 25 multi-platform adapters and a robust
messaging infrastructure, BizTalk Server offers connectivity between core
systems both inside and outside your organization. In addition to integration functionality, BizTalk also provides strong durable messaging, a rules
engine, EDI connectivity, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), RFID capabilities, and IBM Host/Mainframe connectivity.
Microsoft SQL Server® data management software brings data together
from virtually any source within an organization and enables online analytical processing (OLAP) so that decision makers can centrally define and manage organizational business logic. It also supports simple ad hoc analysis and
sophisticated predictive analytics in familiar, easy-to-use tools. These tools
can be used to publish highly formatted and interactive reports that make
data easily accessible to a large number of people.
Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server facilitates collaboration, provides content management features, implements business processes, and supplies access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes.
SharePoint sites can quickly be created to support specific content publishing,
content management, records management, or business intelligence needs.
Microsoft Dynamics® CRM has transformed the way many companies secure and retain their most valuable asset: loyal, satisfied customers. From
global enterprise to small business, companies are quick to capitalize on
the familiar and flexible functionality offered by the only CRM solution that
works inside Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client.
Microsoft Office Communications Server helps bridge the gap between telephony and computing to deliver real-time messaging, voice, and conferencing to the desktop. Features include enterprise instant messaging, enhanced
presence, peer-to-peer voice and video, file transfer, multiparty Web conferencing, application sharing, software-powered VoIP, and call management.
www.microsoft.com/chemicals
About the Microsoft Worldwide Chemical Group
Together with our partners, Microsoft delivers chemical industry solutions that work the way people and organizations work. Our software amplifies the talent
and activities of everyone in the organization. Through a broad range of solutions, both managed and online, your company can reduce communications costs,
uncover untapped inefficiencies, and make better decisions through relevant, actionable business intelligence.
For more information, contact a member of the Chemical Industry Team at [email protected]. Or visit our Web site at www.microsoft.com/chemicals. For a complete directory of Microsoft partners worldwide that offer solutions for Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration, please visit www.microsoft.com/chemicals/partners.
© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This datasheet is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, BizTalk, Microsoft
Dynamics, Outlook, SharePoint, SQL Server, and Windows Mobile are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.
Part Number 098-115061