Countries around the world are increasingly adopting sweeping measures to stem the spread of the new coronavirus, including shutting down airports, imposing travel restrictions (including public transport) and completely sealing their borders. This global health crisis raises an important question: How can we assure continued business when working from home?
In the nutrition supply chain (which is Adifo’s core industry), it is especially important that we are able to support home office operations, as our customers are producing an essential product. Food and animal feed operation simply cannot suffer any interruptions.
So how does the corona crisis impact our customers? Obviously, people physically working at a plant have to be on site. Furthermore, inbound and outbound transport workers have to operate per usual. But all other employees of feed and food producing companies (such as: back office administration, sales, transport planning, finance, procurement staff members,…) are all currently working from home offices.
The power of the cloud
And that’s where the power of cloud technology really shines. Applications like Microsoft Office365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Power-BI Reporting and other mobile applications, can help us manage our day-to-day operations easily and efficiently, from within the comfort of our own home.
During this global health crisis, it is especially important to utilize your ERP, so that operations are not being interrupted.
So what are some of the common challenges we are currently facing?
- Sales orders in case of exceeded credit limit: How do you release held orders and how do you update production planning?
- For medicated feed: If you need a new prescription, the sales order needs to stay blocked until that prescription is available. Furthermore, you need to be able to invoice the veterinary charges from your home office.
- How do you manage raw material positions from home? And how do you match these to rapidly changing market prices?
- How do you manage the need to utilize another production facility (i.e. due to transport limitations)?
Weekly updates
For the duration of the corona crisis, we will do a weekly update (either a VLOG or a BLOG) about how to handle your business processes remotely from your home office or mobile device. We will publish useful ideas and concepts, showcasing exactly how MILAS (our ERP based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations) can assist you during these trying times, once again proving that Microsoft, together with MILAS, can add value to your business processes.