IBM Sterling vs Dynamics 365 SCM

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Our analysts compared IBM Sterling vs Dynamics 365 SCM based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Supply Chain Management Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

IBM Sterling Software Tool

Product Basics

IBM Sterling is an open, integrated platform that leverages advanced technologies like AI and blockchain to connect with the supplier ecosystem. It provides real-time insights, end-to-end visibility and recommended measures to transform interruptions into customer engagement, profit and growth opportunities.

It offers support for supplier, inventory and order management. Users can build smarter business networks using business process improvement, supply chain visibility, supplier collaboration, manufacturing solutions, order fulfillment and retail solutions. It also supports B2B collaboration to fulfill ongoing business demands, minimize complexity and reduce costs.
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Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is a cloud-based software that streamlines and connects various aspects of your supply chain, from procurement and manufacturing to warehousing and distribution. Aimed at mid-sized to large businesses with complex or global operations, it boasts features like AI-powered demand forecasting, optimized inventory management, and real-time production visibility. Users praise its intuitive interface, seamless integration with other Microsoft products, and built-in analytics for data-driven decision-making. While pricing varies based on specific modules and deployment options, expect a subscription model with per-user or per-organization fees. Compared to similar systems, Dynamics 365 shines in its scalability and adaptability, but potential drawbacks include higher upfront costs and a steeper learning curve.

Pros
  • Intuitive interface
  • Seamless integration
  • Robust analytics
  • Scalability and adaptability
  • Global reach
Cons
  • Higher upfront costs
  • Steeper learning curve
  • Potential customization needs
  • Dependency on Microsoft ecosystem
  • Complex setup and configuration
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$80 Monthly
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$180/User, Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
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Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
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24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Evolve Business Processes: Maintain business continuity, reduce operational silos, respond to market disruptions and mitigate risks with intelligent workflows. Improve interactions between people, data and processes through its experts and reduce inventory costs with process improvements. 
  • Improve Visibility: Supply chain stakeholders can access data related to inventory, order processes, delivery and potential disruptions. Improves customer service, assists with regulatory directives and mitigates interruptions affecting supplier inventory levels and product delivery with advanced insights. 
  • Supplier Collaboration: Streamline collaboration to drive efficiencies, increase supplier satisfaction, resolve disruptions for procure-to-pay transactions and order-to-cash with supplier collaboration solutions and global business networks. Quickly respond to supplier issues with embedded AI capabilities like cycle time prediction, anomaly detection and next-best-action recommendations. 
  • Deliver Customer Promises: Track orders from inception to delivery, manage data and processes and gain visibility into all orders throughout channels. Offers various solutions that include order management, order fulfillment, inventory management and digital store operations. 
  • Enhance Manufacturing Management: Innovate supply chain management by transforming outdated processes, uncovering hidden insights and delivering superior customer experience with automation, IoT, AI and blockchain. It helps avoid disruptions, improve visibility, respond quickly and streamline planning and optimization. 
  • Retail Technology Services: Evolve the shopping experience with advanced retail solutions for fulfilling digital demands. Revitalize customer engagement by delivering omnichannel marketing messages and offers tailored to the customer base. Minimize disruptions to the supply chain through various retail technology solutions. 
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  • Optimize Cost Management: Collect cost data to gain real-time reports and actionable insights to improve visibility and accessibility across inventories. Improves management decisions by setting up reasonable prices. Detect trends and improve KPIs such as day sales of inventory or inventory turns. 
  • Flexible Warehouse Management: Automate operations like workforce planning, inventory flow and material handling using integrated warehouse management. Improve productivity and track performance using flexible dashboards via mobile apps. Maintain operations throughout the day and peak processing times to ensure business continuity. 
  • Strengthen Procurement: Leverage sourcing solutions and procurement using embedded tools for real-time vendor collaboration, spend analysis and supplier performance management. Provide actionable insights to maximize purchase effectiveness. Execute trade agreements via a centralized repository with information related to vendor contracts, communication and transactions. 
  • Reduce Costly Downtime: Eliminate costly errors and increase workforce efficiency using mixed reality and predictive analytics. Leverage enhanced resource scheduling using IoT and keep the lines running 24/7. 
  • Improve Demand Forecasting: Minimize inventory by leveraging machine learning to produce accurate insights. Collaborate planning process with supply chain, sales and marketing data, enhancing demand forecasting to make smarter business decisions. 
  • Optimize Planning Capability: Improve inventory volumes by ensuring the right resources are in place at the right time. Optimize intelligent planning to exceed customer demands and expectations. Reduce downtime by allocating work centers, workers, machines and plants to maximize efficiency. 
  • Enhance Product Information: Create product definitions, attributes, identifiers and documentation to improve time-to-market. Standardize, define and control the release of products in compliance with legal requirements. Consolidate product information in a centralized repository to avoid confusion. 
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  • Business Network: Offers cloud-based and security-rich connectivity with suppliers, partners and customers. Ensure timely order deliveries with real-time intelligence and recommendations through AI capabilities. Provides multi-party visibility of digital events throughout the supply chain via blockchain, empowering transparency and trust. 
  • Food Trust: Connects participants through an immutable, permissioned and shared record of processing details, food provenance, transaction data and more through its collaborative network. Trace the location and status of food products, including essential details like multi-ingredient and farm-store view. 
  • Visibility Insights: Optimize performance by correlating data from disparate and siloed systems, creating digital playbooks and capturing organizational knowledge. Accelerate time to value, get intelligent insights, manage inventory and mitigate disruptions to meet demand through the inventory control tower. Supply chain intelligence services help boost data integration by developing purpose-built control towers using a control tower solution blueprint. 
  • TradeLens Platform: Gain access to a supply chain and logistics network with over half of the global container shipping volume data coverage through an interconnected supply chain partners system. Every shipment party can access their information and all transactions’ audit trails using its permission matrix. Offers services and apps developed by TradeLens and third parties to accelerate innovation and value creation. 
  • Trust Your Supplier: Identify, onboard and manage qualified suppliers through a blockchain-based solution. It helps expedite supplier onboarding, lower procurement operating costs, reduce compliance risk, speed new supplier assessments, access verified data and streamline insight sharing. 
  • Business Transaction Intelligence: Provides insights into B2B transaction lifecycles. Offers multi-part shared transaction visibility and empowers users with real-time visibility and self-service. Prevents potential risks by giving discrepancy alerts on B2B transaction anomalies. 
  • Transaction Manager: Automates manual B2B transactions and helps save money and time by cutting costs, reducing errors and elevating user satisfaction with customers, non-EDI suppliers and other trading partners. Gain unified visibility throughout supply chain partner transactions and onboard non-technical trading partners. 
  • Document Conversion Services: Converts manual transactions and non-structured documents like email, pdf and fax into EDI or other structured formats. Provides various features, including advanced OCR to read images, customized exception handling, multiple language support and ICR technology to recognize handwriting. 
  • Order Management: Ensures omnichannel order fulfillment by combining inventory and delivery visibility, multichannel order aggregation and service availability in a single platform. It helps customize monitoring and alerts, take immediate actions on capacity, deliver order promises with intelligent fulfillment and use reverse logistics to track inventory. 
  • Fulfillment Optimizer with Watson: Enhance existing order management systems and minimize cost-to-serve with cognitive analytics engine. Retailers can utilize store capacity, balance protecting margins and meet delivery expectations, increasing profits. 
  • Inventory Visibility: Explore product highlights and find use-case specific solutions. Users can personalize dashboards, balance inventory across channels, track inventory velocity, enable drop shipping, leverage autoscaling, get real-time views with the Cassandra database, Akamai gateways and more. 
  • Store Engagement: Gain inventory, customer and order data view through an intuitive user-interface, accessible from mobile devices and sales counters. Provides cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, enables flexible fulfillment options, helps standardize processes for task and inventory management and manages returns throughout channels using purpose-built tools. 
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  • Dashboards: Create easy-to-use dashboards to manage product information and images. Access complete product information from a centralized dashboard. 
  • Configuration Models: Configure customer requirements and product attributes by creating scalable models using embedded constraints. Automatically generates a list of product requirements and routes needed for delivery and production process. 
  • Asset Maintenance: Increase machine life by creating an asset maintenance routine. Access telemetry data to identify repairs for machines and make plans for replacement. 
  • Supply Chain Management: Manage stock using insights driven by AI. Optimize inbound and outbound delivery to drive greater efficiency. Ensure accurate order picking and packing. 
  • Customer Returns: Track each returned product and address issues. Vital insights from AI can minimize future returns. 
  • Transportation Management: Manage inbound and outbound transportation to comply with deadlines. Deliver and pickup via the company’s fleet or use an external logistics provider for transportation purposes. Determine rates for transportation activities and make adjustments accordingly. 
  • Workforce Management: Simplify employees’ daily performance by using a mobile app tailored to their needs. Align real-time tasks and drive collaboration among employees across different business units. 
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Product Ranking

#19

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

#188

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

IBM Sterling
Dynamics 365 SCM
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Inventory Management Logistics And Transportation Mobile Capabilites Procurement And Supplier Management Purchase Order Management Supply Chain Analytics Supply Chain Planning Warehouse Labor Management Warehouse Management 98 84 81 93 98 96 82 86 80 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 47 reviews
Good User Sentiment 340 reviews
84%
of users recommend this product

IBM Sterling has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 47 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

78%
of users recommend this product

Dynamics 365 SCM has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 78% when considering 340 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.1 (38)
3.7 (98)
5.0 (1)
n/a
4.6 (5)
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4.5 (2)
4.3 (113)
4.0 (1)
3.7 (129)

Awards

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SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Dynamics 365 SCM and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Mobile Capabilites.

Mobile Capabilites Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Integration: It supports integration with multiple external systems, as noted by 88% of reviewers who mention integration.
Customization: It offers highly customizable tools and features, as observed by 50% of the users who refer to reports.
Ease of Use: It offers a flexible platform that is easy to use, manage and modify, as noted by all the reviewers specifying ease of use.
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Intuitive Interface: Familiar layout and drag-and-drop functionality make it easy to learn and navigate.
Seamless Integration: Connects seamlessly with other Microsoft products and external systems, providing a holistic view of your supply chain.
Actionable Insights: Real-time data and AI-powered analytics enable data-driven decision-making for improved efficiency and agility.
Scalable and Adaptable: Grows with your business needs and adapts to industry-specific requirements.
Automated Workflows: Automates routine tasks and processes, freeing up time for strategic initiatives.
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Learning Curve: It is complicated to understand and involves a steep learning curve, as stated by 57% of the users who report learning curve.
Interface: Over 50% of reviewers that mentioned the interface stated that the interface is not user-friendly and intuitive.
Resource-Intensive: It consumes a large amount of system resources, as observed by all reviewers referring to system resource utilization.
Implementation: Around 67% of the users who specified implementation report that the deployment and implementation process is cumbersome.
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Higher Upfront Costs: Subscription fees and potential implementation costs can be significant, especially for larger businesses.
Steeper Learning Curve: The comprehensive features require dedicated training and ongoing support for optimal utilization.
Potential Customization Needs: Adapting to specific industry requirements or workflows may involve additional development.
Dependency on Microsoft Ecosystem: Integration with other Microsoft products is seamless, but switching to non-Microsoft solutions might be challenging.
Complex Setup and Configuration: Initial setup and configuration can be intricate, requiring IT expertise or consultant assistance.
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IBM Sterling is a flexible and easy-to-use supply chain suite that helps its customers build dynamic and smarter business networks. It has a highly customizable platform and supports comprehensive integration capabilities with various external systems. Many reviewers have noted that it does not have an intuitive user interface, and the implementation process can be cumbersome. It involves a steep learning curve, and users find it complicated to understand. It also consumes a large amount of system resources, making it slow sometimes.

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User reviews of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management paint a nuanced picture. Many praise its intuitive interface, seamless integration with other Microsoft products, and real-time data-driven insights, citing improved efficiency and informed decision-making. Its scalability and adaptability are also lauded, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes and across diverse industries. However, some criticisms revolve around its higher upfront costs compared to competitors, particularly for larger implementations. The steeper learning curve and potential customization needs can also be daunting for smaller teams. Users mention dependence on the Microsoft ecosystem as both a boon and a potential hindrance, as switching to non-Microsoft solutions might be challenging. Compared to similar products, Dynamics 365 shines in its user-friendliness and integration capabilities within the Microsoft suite. Its AI-powered analytics and robust features for specific areas like manufacturing and warehouse management are also differentiating factors. However, competitors often offer more flexible pricing models and potentially easier customization options. Ultimately, the choice between Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and alternative solutions depends on individual needs and priorities. For businesses prioritizing user-friendliness, Microsoft integration, and robust functionalities, Dynamics 365 might be the perfect fit. But for those seeking flexible pricing and easier customization, exploring other options might be prudent.

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