Manufacturing leaders today are under constant pressure: volatile demand, fragile supply networks, inventory risk, and zero tolerance for missed customer commitments. Plants must protect margins and maintain uptime while responding to disruption with incomplete or delayed information.
To lead in this environment, manufacturers need decision-making that surfaces risk earlier, absorb supply shocks faster, and replans quickly, so production stays aligned to demand and customer commitments.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is your agentic enterprise resource planning (ERP) foundation
Dynamics 365 gives manufacturers a connected foundation where signals from demand, supply, capacity, and cost can drive action. As part of the Microsoft platform, it brings together data, analytics, automation, and collaboration across the business.
Imagine a manufacturing stack where every part of the business is connected, where data isn’t fragmented across systems but unified into a shared understanding of operations, and where insights don’t sit in dashboards but show up in context, in the flow of work. Where your teams can build AI agents and adapt processes in real time rather than reengineering them months later. Where every person operates with the full context of the business, demand, supply, capacity, and commitments, every decision drives aligned action across the company. This is what it means to close the gap between knowing and doing.
At Hannover Messe 2026, Microsoft is showcasing how agentic ERP with Copilot, agents and Dynamics 365 supports these operational decisions amid constant change, helping manufacturers replan faster, make better production tradeoffs, and meet or exceed customer service SLAs.
From sensing demand shifts to mitigating supplier delays, production constraints, and equipment downtime, these signals must translate into real-time fulfillment and order promise decisions. Agentic ERP can connect planning, sourcing, production, fulfillment and service commerce to execute these decisions across the manufacturing value chain.
Agentic demand planning can sense shifts earlier
Demand planning can help you forecast demand, applying a structured phase in/phase out with external signals to account for market dynamics. Copilot accelerates this data analysis, scenario modeling, and incorporates market intelligence. For structured planning, Demand Planning in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides an agentic collaborative demand planning solution, powered by best-in-class forecasting algorithms and models, an immersive user experience with AI, intelligent segmentation and signal analysis, and analytics.
“Now, we can see the item-level details and the solution populates Dynamics 365 with that information for master planning. That’s a big step forward because now we essentially have a planned budget and we can easily produce the next production cycle’s budget without manually exporting the data.”
Patrick Keller, Head of ERP, Poloplast | Read more about how Poloplast modernizes manufacturing and streamlines forecasting and planning with Dynamics 365
Agent evaluates supplier disruption impact enabling operational resilience
A delayed component or supplier exception is not a paperwork problem. It is a production and operational risk. Today, Microsoft announced the Procurement Agent in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is available in public preview. The Procurement Agent helps teams respond faster to supply disruption by decoding supplier communications and identifying which production orders, inventory positions, and customer commitments are at risk, while keeping humans in control. Beyond triaging supplier communications, the Procurement Agent performs impact analysis so teams can assess downstream effects and act before a supplier issue turns into an on time, in full (OTIF) failure.
“Across the team, Dynamics 365 will save us a total of 20 hours weekly. The big benefit in time savings is that the agent has read the email, found the order, found the lines affected, decoded what the vendor is trying to say, and recommended actions.”
Sean Barrett, Inventory and Analytics Manager, Farmlands Cooperative | Read more about Farmlands Cooperative: Sowing the seeds of innovation with autonomous agents in Dynamics 365
Agent mitigates production constraints
For the shop floor, Copilot, connected to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management via Dynamics 365 MCP Server (Model Context Protocol), can provide AI-generated insights to schedules, inventory, and orders. Copilot can also surface quality-related alerts and can suggest targeted inspections to prevent recurring recalibration issues enabling supervisors to proactively mitigate resource constraints and shortages before they impact production schedules, triggering downstream inventory repositioning and order promise adjustments across fulfillment and customer commitments.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides near real-time visibility to the production floor; with agentic experiences, supervisors can spend less time gathering data and more time on proactive exception management. This translates to higher Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), fewer unplanned stops, and better on-time delivery to customers.
Agent protects production uptime
Equipment uptime and asset health are critical inputs to manufacturing performance. Unplanned downtime, delayed service, or poorly coordinated technician schedules can quickly cascade into constrained capacity and missed production targets. The Scheduling Operations Agent in Dynamics 365 Field Service can help maintain equipment availability for constrained production schedules by dynamically coordinating technician assignments based on geography, skills, certification requirements, capacity, travel time, and SLA commitments.
Today, Microsoft announced Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot is available in public preview within Dynamics 365 Field Service. With Microsoft 365 Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service, manufacturers can use Researcher to quickly view operational information across work orders, asset and service history, and parts availability. Researcher surfaces relevant context from Field Service data and Microsoft 365 signals to help teams understand situations as they arise.
“The field technicians understand that AI can be a benefit for them. It’s really about trying to improve their overall experience as well as the customer’s”
Matthew Hashenberger, Head of Service Excellence, Siemens Smart Infrastructure (U.S.) | Learn how Siemens elevates field service operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Agentic warehouse management can fulfill demand faster
As finished goods hit the warehouse, intelligent inventory on-hand balancing in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management warehouse management updates slotting to align demand with pick zones. When inbound put-away happens, workers are directed to the best locations based on the intelligent inventory balancing, keeping the warehouse organized dynamically. On the outbound side, optimized pick routes shorten travel distance. The combined outcome is higher throughput with the same labor—faster fulfillment, lower picking cost.
With Dynamics 365, we trust the system. It’s easy to retrieve information and know it’s correct; people can just drive the forklift over. All the considerations we have for our picking, packing, and customer details, the system is doing it for us.
Niclas Strand, Warehouse Manager, KåKå, Orkla Food | Read more about why Orkla Food Ingredients’ Dynamics 365 transformation is a sweet upgrade
Agentic B2B Commerce aligns customer orders to production reality
As manufacturers and industrial distributors modernize how they sell, serve, and scale, digital ordering is becoming a core capability of the ERP rather than a standalone channel. Dynamics 365 Commerce enables manufacturers to support complex buying and selling models including business-to-business (B2B), business-to-business-to-business (B2B2B), and multioutlet ordering across direct customers, distributors, and dealer networks.
Agentic B2B commerce can help automate routine ordering, replenishment, and quote-to-order processes while remaining tightly connected to pricing, inventory, warehousing, and production planning. This can allow manufacturers and distributors to accelerate order cycles, strengthen partner collaboration, and scale indirect growth with accuracy and control.
Partner agents to empower manufacturers and solve unmet needs
Frontier Manufacturing Firms can extend ERP embedded‑operational decisioning using Copilot and agents built with the Dynamics 365 ERP MCP Server. Microsoft’s partners are building agents to solve high friction manufacturing workflows, including engineering change impact analysis, product recalls, and configure-price‑quote‑ processes, enabling manufacturers to execute operational decisions across sourcing, production, and fulfillment within the systems they use to run their business.
“With the Experlogix CPQ MCP Server and Dynamics 365 ERP manufacturers can turn Copilot into a revenue agent that understands complex configurations, validates engineering rules and constraints, and generates accurate quotes instantly. This accelerates sales cycles, with many customers reducing time to quote by well over 90%.”
Louis-Philippe Perras, CTO, Experlogix
“Cegeka’s Quality Impact Recall Agent turns disruptive recall events into a controlled, orchestrated process for manufacturers reliant on end-to-end traceability. Running inside Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, companies handling batch- or serial-controlled products can identify affected materials across plants and distribution channels in minutes, trigger automated communication flows, and accelerate quality-investigation cycles. This approach supports manufacturers in maintaining continuity, reducing risk, and protecting both customers and brand reputation.”
Stijn Geeroms, VP Business Solutions, Cegeka
“The most expensive moment in manufacturing isn’t when something breaks. It’s when an engineering change gets approved without anyone understanding the impact. Manufacturers don’t need another disconnected AI tool to fix that. They need intelligence embedded where they already work. That’s why we built the Staedean ECM+ Impact Agent natively on Copilot inside Dynamics 365 – your rules, your data, your answer – without asking teams to leave the system they run their business in.”
Michiel Toppers, Chief Product Officer, Staedean
These agents extend ERP-embedded decision execution into engineering, quality, and configure-to-order workflows that directly impact production scheduling and customer commitments.
Become a Frontier Manufacturing Firm
The manufacturers that lead this next era will be the ones who can respond to demand shifts, supplier delays, and equipment constraints by coordinating planning, production, fulfillment, and customer commitments across the value chain in real time.
Microsoft is committed to helping manufacturers make that transition, combining a connected Dynamics 365 foundation with Copilot and agents embedded in everyday workflows plus a partner ecosystem that brings manufacturing expertise to the front line. Join us and become Frontier.
Join us in person at Hannover Messe 2026:
- Return on Intelligence: The Next Frontier of Manufacturing, Dev Cupp, Yitshak Kesselman, Monday, April 20, 2026, 2:00 – 2:30, Hall 25, Center Stage
- From Insight to Action: The Rise of Agentic Supply Chains in Manufacturing, Sam Schotte, Monday, April 20, 2026, 3:30 – 3:50, Hall 17, Stand G06
Register to watch a series of executive conversations recorded at Hannover Messe 2026: Executive Insights: Unlock the Future of Industrial Intelligence
