Inventory counts that look tidy on a screen are only useful if landed costs on bonded imports are handled correctly underneath.

Supply Chain is usually deployed alongside D365 Finance, since every movement of goods has a financial consequence. Together they cover procure-to-pay and order-to-cash end to end, replacing the spreadsheet-and-email coordination many mid-market distributors still rely on.

Procurement and vendor management

Purchase requisitions flow through approval hierarchies matched to your delegation of authority, with vendor onboarding, qualification and performance tracking. Three-way matching between purchase order, receipt and invoice prevents payment for goods never delivered. That sounds obvious and is still a common leakage point in businesses running manual processes.

Inventory, warehousing and landed cost

Inventory is configured for your physical structure: multiple sites, zones and bin locations, with barcode or RFID scanning for receipt, pick and putaway. For importers, landed cost functionality allocates customs duty, freight, insurance and clearing charges across received items so inventory is valued at true cost. Without this, gross margin by product is systematically wrong, and the error usually flatters heavy, low-value items and penalizes light, high-value ones.

Production planning

For manufacturers, Supply Chain covers bills of material, routes, work orders, capacity planning and shop floor execution, with actual material and labor costs captured against each production order. Master planning generates purchase and production suggestions from demand, which is where the platform starts driving decisions instead of only recording them.

A hypothetical example

Consider a Riyadh building materials importer that holds stock across several warehouses, with further containers awaiting customs clearance. Landed cost is estimated as a flat percentage, so heavy low-value items are under-costed and light high-value items over-costed. Supply Chain is implemented with landed cost allocated by weight and value. The aim is product-level margin analysis that reflects true cost.

Integration with planning and finance

Demand and supply data feed forecasting so that working capital plans reflect what operations intends to buy. Inventory valuation posts automatically to the ledger. That removes the month-end reconciliation between an operational stock report and the finance system, which takes up time in businesses running disconnected systems.

Warehouse execution and mobile operations

Advanced warehouse management adds directed putaway, wave picking and mobile execution. For a distributor with more than one warehouse, this is usually where the labor saving comes from. Configuration must follow how your team works: aisle and bin names that match the signage on the racks, and pick paths that follow the layout, not the item code order. This ties into process design, because warehouse software forced onto an illogical layout produces frustration, not efficiency.

Measuring performance after go-live

We agree in advance which measures will show the implementation worked: inventory accuracy, the share of purchase orders matched three ways without intervention, order fill rate from available stock, and receipt-to-putaway cycle time. Measuring them before and after turns an argument about whether the system works into a data-based answer the board can assess. It avoids relying on team impressions or the vendor's sales promises.