Supply Chain - Manufacturing & Distribution

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Microsoft Business Network Process Templates

Anyone who has ever used a word processor or a spreadsheet application is familiar with templates. Products like Microsoft Office include templates for resumes, newsletters, expense reports, budgets, and many other documents.

Microsoft Business Network features a new type of template—a process template—designed to streamline specific activities you do with your customers and suppliers.

Process templates expand on the traditional template concept by addressing a complete, end-to-end set of business activities. A process template includes various individual document templates and defines how those documents interrelate. In fact, process templates can enforce that certain steps of a business process occur in the proper sequence as defined by the publisher of the template.

Industry Specific

To better fit how your business works with your trading partners, process templates can be configured directly by you or with the help of a Microsoft Certified Partner. Once configured and deployed, the process templates become active representations of the business processes you share with your partners.

Over time, more and more process templates will be created by Microsoft and our partners to address the wide-ranging needs of businesses as they work with their trading partners. In the first release of the Microsoft Business Network, you will find the following supply chain-oriented process templates included.

Orders-to-Cash

Perhaps the most common business process involves orders being placed between businesses and eventually money changing hands for those goods or services.

The orders-to-cash process template in Microsoft Business Network includes the following key activities: price list, order, acknowledgment, shipping notification, and invoice. By implementing this process template, you and your customers can reduce the time and effort involved in order processing, while increasing accuracy and visibility.

Supplier Visibility

For businesses that have long-running orders with key suppliers, especially in outsourced manufacturing scenarios, visibility into the status of orders is critical. The supplier visibility process template provides milestone-based reporting forms that can be easily exchanged between companies for monitoring supplier performance and keeping overall production schedules on track.

Built to Last

The process templates inside Microsoft Business Network are built on XML and Web services, taking advantage of Microsoft .NET technologies. By using these process templates to streamline the way you work with your trading partners, your business is ready to capitalize on the future of business-to-business commerce.

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