Manufacturers running Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management almost always also run a dedicated Manufacturing Execution System (MES) on the shop floor. Production order updates, inventory movements, quality tests, and traceability data flow between them continuously. The integration has to be low-latency (shop floor runs on seconds, not hours), high-throughput (hundreds of events per minute at peak), and reliable (lost messages mean lost traceability).
Three integration patterns come up in evaluations. Two have documented failure modes.
The options that don't fit manufacturing
Nightly batch jobs via Data Management Framework. Designed for bulk data movement, not real-time signaling. Production orders complete hours before D365 knows about it. Real-time inventory view is always lagging. Traceability data arrives after the batches have shipped.
Custom OData polling with a loop that queries MES every few seconds. Introduces polling overhead for no latency benefit, and MES systems aren't typically designed to handle heavy poll loads. Also creates a custom code dependency that needs maintenance.
