Today’s organizations have seen tremendous value in using mixed reality, as it rapidly changes how employees learn, work, and understand the world around them. With the unique value of mixed reality solutions, such as Microsoft HoloLens 2, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, organizations can drive workforce transformation with on-the-job guidance, hands-on training, and collaboration that is seamless, intuitive, and embedded into everyday workflows.

Intel technicians using HoloLens 2, Dynamics 365 Guides, and Remote Assist to resolve complex issues

Today, we’ll look at how Intel manufacturing facilities are using mixed reality solutions such as HoloLens 2, Dynamics 365 Guides, and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist globally. In some of the world’s most advanced manufacturing facilities, technicians are responsible for building, maintaining, and troubleshooting some of the most complex manufacturing products made by humans. Working at some of the smallest known geometries, every piece of maintenance must be performed precisely by continuously improving processes to ensure the production of smarter, faster, and more energy-efficient computer chips. With six wafer fabrication sites and four assembly test manufacturing locations worldwide, Intel must maintain a global, virtual network.

In Intel’s Israel manufacturing facility, HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Guides have become integral to its manufacturing processes, playing a key role in the following scenarios:

• Maintenance and repair tasks: Intel employees “learn by doing” with step-by-step instructions for conducting inspections and audits, deploying new equipment, fixing machine breaks, addressing issues faster, and increasing efficiency. Additionally, Dynamics 365 Guides allows Intel to proactively manage their assets to avoid costly downtime due to unpredicted failure. This includes conducting preventative maintenance, defining new intelligent workflows, and thoroughly completing maintenance tasks using checklists in Dynamics 365 Guides.
• Troubleshooting: Dynamics 365 Guides brings critical information into view to help Intel technicians troubleshoot, audit, or support difficult and delicate procedures, improving first-time fix rate for urgent repairs with guidance.
• Remote communication: Dynamics 365 Remote Assist seamlessly connects Intel experts and technicians through the calling feature to collaborate and solve problems without disrupting the flow of work. Dynamics 365 Remote Assist has also helped maintain the new normal to everyday routinewith advanced collaboration features, Intel has made it easy for their expert engineers to work from home to perform remote inspections that share video, screenshots, and annotations across devices. By avoiding unnecessary travel, Intel has helped increase safety and wellbeing during COVID-19 on a global scale.

• Preparing interactive training materials: Intel employees can train from home, at their desk, or on the shop floor. Dynamics 365 Guides enables authors to build digital, interactive trainings that can be viewed from anywhere and easily scale any updates to keep up with real-time changes. These trainings can be produced by anyone on a PC or HoloLens device with simple 2D and 3D creation in the real-world environment.
• Facility tour: With the power of HoloLens 2, employees can provide hands-free, digital facility tours to virtually show the inner workings of Intel’s cutting-edge facilities.

We are thrilled to see what the future holds and how mixed reality will continue to innovate manufacturing processes at Intel. To learn more, watch the video below to discover how Intel Israel is using Dynamics 365 Guides, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and HoloLens 2 today.

Get started with Dynamics 365 Guides

• Ready to empower your frontline employees? Read more about Dynamics 365 Guides capabilities and get your questions answered using our Dynamics 365 Guides documentation.
• Take the next step by trying a 30-day free trial of Dynamics 365 Guides.
• See how mixed reality solutions on HoloLens 2 can help your business be more productive.
• Find information on Dynamics 365 partners for manufacturing.

The post Exploring the Intel manufacturing environment through mixed reality appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The concept of the global control tower first appeared on the radar of supply chain leaders around 15 years ago. As more and more companies pursued end-to-end visibility for increasingly globalized supply chains, the idea quickly gained momentum. IndustryWeek noted global control towers as one of the hottest supply chain buzzwords of 2008.¹ Still, for an idea that has been buzzing for over a decade, many companies have been challenged to move from concept to reality.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping companies overcome these challenges by equipping them with the tools necessary to create digital supply chains that are highly collaborative, coordinated, agile, and demand-driven. With these new supply chain solutions in place, businesses can achieve real-time, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, breathing new life into concepts like supply chain control towers in the process.

Supply chain control towers

It has quickly become essential for businesses to invest in technology that can help them sense and predict supply chain constraints and disruptions and spikes and troughs in demand. From using advanced forecasting techniques to real-time collaboration between trading partners and commercial teams, business processes are increasingly geared to generate and proactively shape customer demand. Companies must also integrate the agility to continuously optimize supply and production plans in real-time, as forecast and predictions shift into actual customer order receipts. Supply chains control towers help in these efforts by building both agility and resiliency into the supply chain by delivering end-to-end operational visibility, all the way from planning to delivery and back.

Resiliency in this context is about driving business continuity. This can take the form of digitizing production in factories, automating operations on the shop floor, and providing unparallel transparency, in real-time, to leadership. By utilizing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights^preview to create a digital representation of the physical supply chain, whether called a control tower, digital twin, or supply chain nerve center, businesses can reach new levels of agility and gain the ability to sense and proactively mitigate disruptions before they occur. And to respond faster when the inevitable happens, such as an unpredictable or unforeseen event.

McKinsey & Company estimates that a $10 billion business with a high-performing supply chain can reduce cost by as much as $50 million annually through digital initiatives such as supply chain nerve centers.² This is because control towers enable supply chain organizations to blur the lines between planning and execution, allowing businesses to uncover and exploit improvement opportunities faster than ever before.

Building blocks

Visibility

Starting with the end in mind, regardless of the mixture of people, processes, data, organization, and technology used to erect a control tower, it must deliver end-to-end visibility across all supply chain nodes to be successful. This visibility should penetrate beyond tier 1 and tier 2 partners.

Agility

While visibility is the starting point, visibility by itself is not sufficient. Supply chain solutions must also deliver improvements to agility so companies can more effectively respond to changing customer demands. In practice, this means going beyond the ability to immediately grasp what is happening (system-wide visibility) and on to making predictions of what is likely to happen next. This way, business leaders can adapt and overcome challenges as they are identified in real-time.

Unified data

The value that a construct such as a supply chain control tower can deliver is proportional to the organizations’ ability to unify data from disparate sources. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, legacy business applications, supplier systems of records, siloed hard drives, PLCs, and even IoT data streams all must be incorporated and unified.

Automation

Businesses also need supply chain solutions that incorporate rules-based orchestration to model and automate responses to fulfillment constraints. By leveraging automation in this manner, organizations can proactively address issues with actionable, data-driven insights, allowing them to adapt faster to disruptions and constraints.

Vision

At Microsoft, we see supply chain control towers as a shared service process that can be brought together from a mix of supply chain solutions. For example, a control tower can be assembled using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights^preview together with Microsoft Power Platform, and our rapidly growing ecosystem of digital supply chain applications.

A supply chain control tower enabled by Dynamics 365 in this fashion positions organizations to respond faster and more intelligently to disruptions and opportunities. With seamless integration to many market-leading API-enabled applications using our configurable pre-built partner connectors, businesses can convert the action signals from what-if analysis into directives sent to the applications that guide day-to-day operational execution.

Organizational benefits

When organizations use Dynamics 365 to create a supply chain control tower, they can realize the benefits of a single platform. One version of truth brings together internal and external stakeholders to visualize constraints and disruptions at any point in the value stream. Then, affected agents and authorities can work together to analyze the upstream or downstream impacts, collaborate in near real-time to formulate and enact optimal responsesall from one location and one pane of glass.

In this way, a supply chain control tower created with Dynamics 365 enables organizations to adapt quickly to demand shifts by deliberately blurring the lines between planning and execution and effectively creating a continuous digital feedback loop across entities and distinct business processes.

Let’s now look at how a customer, Breville Group, is creating a resilient supply chain of the future with Dynamics 365.

Looking forward

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides manufacturers, distributors, and retailers with the real-time visibility and intelligence they need to move from reactive to proactive. It unifies data and uses predictive insightsacross order fulfillment, planning, procurement, production, inventory, warehousing, and transportationto maximize operational efficiency, product quality, and profitability. And, with innovative technologies, such as AI and machine learning integrated into the solution, it helps organizations accelerate performance even further.

Learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights ^preview enable companies to strengthen and expand the Four Pillars of the Digital Supply Chain. To learn more, check out our recent webinar Create Agile and Digital Supply Chains with Dynamics 365, and join a panel of Microsoft Experts in the live Ask the Expert session scheduled for December 7, 2021, at 10AM Pacific Time.

1- IndustryWeek, A Guide to the Hottest Supply Chain Buzzwords of 2008, January 2008

2- McKinsey & Company, Building a digital bridge across the supply chain with nerve centers, January 2021

The post Enhance visibility with Dynamics 365 digital supply chain solutions appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.