Topic: ‘Production’

What would you use one for?
Well; Microsoft Dynamics AX2012 has a really cool feature which represents a Heijunka Planning Board, except that in AX2012 it’s called the Kanban Schedule Board.
Lean Schedule Groups are designed to allow you to see products or groups of products easily recognizable by colour, in the Kanban Schedule Board. So for folks who can recognize colours easily, it’s an added bonus. Read the rest of this entry »

Available to promise a great tool to use in Dynamics AX 2009 for getting more accurate order dates to your customers. There are quite a few simple setups involved on an item in its default order settings that can affect ATP. I’ll go through them in this post and explain what days use working days and which use calendar days.

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So, there I was setting up my Sales Event Kanban in a training environment, enjoying life and learning something new! Everything was going swimmingly well until I decided to go check the results of my set up in the Kanban Scheduling Board, or for the real Lean aficionados – the Heijunka Board (Why did Microsoft change the name?).
No sign of my Kanban – oops! Then I noticed that I did not see the correct period, silly me! So I clicked on the advance arrow, and it moved forward by one day; not what I expected! Ok, let’s look at changing the period settings, because I don’t’ want to move from January 2011, to January 2012, one click at a time do I? How do you change the period? Read the rest of this entry »

Why would you want to schedule a Kanban? Surely this is not Lean?
Maybe not strictly Lean, but there are circumstances where you may want to compromise. For example, a product that is not frequently used, or does not fit well with a fixed Kanban Rule, or may be based on a Customers’ forecast.
Scheduled Kanbans can also be used in these manufacturing scenarios :
• Level Loading a work cell with scheduled demand on top of the fixed quantity Kanban jobs.
• Creating Kanbans based on a minimum stock quantity and minimum/maximum allocation keys to model seasonal demand that changes over time.
• Modeling build to order scenarios in batch sizes higher than the average sales or picking line, grouping demand into small batches.
• Modeling a mixed manufacturing environment(Trad & Lean ) where it makes sense to use a consistent way of reporting on the production floor using the Kanban reporting transactions. Read the rest of this entry »

Scheduling tools are critical for manufacturing and engineering environments.  It provides the ability to minimize production time and costs by identifying resources available and utilizing them in the most efficient manner possible.

The definition of scheduling is ‘To plan or appoint for a certain time or date’.  To take it one step further, production scheduling is ‘The management and allocation of resources, events and processes to create goods and services’. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Lean actually incorporates the best manufacturing processes from the USA, Germany and Japan…it’s not just a Japanese initiative.
It’s main purpose is to eliminate all the non value added(waste) activities from a process
There are 5 main Lean Principles Read the rest of this entry »

When creating calendars to use in Dynamics AX, most users don’t want to spend a lot of time manipulating working days on each calendar especially when dealing with holidays and planned shut downs that affect the entire operation.

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Non-conformances in AX 2012 are used to report anything that may be an issue with a product.  But that also comes with the stipulation that any non-conformance that is created, must have a product associated with it as well as a quantity of that product specified.  When creating a non-conformance, the required information is a type, an item number, and a problem type.  Also, if the type is customer or vendor, those accounts must be specified as well. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you out there who know and “love” Microsoft’s’ Product Builder (PB), there’s now a new alternative.
It does basically the same thing as PB, but it’s got a new name and a new look. Surprise! Surprise!
Yay! Here comes Product Configurator (PC), just when you thought that some things never change!
Just like PB, Microsoft says that you do not need developer skills to build a Configurator Model, but BEWARE! Read the rest of this entry »

In early stages of most implementations, companies tend to try to keep things simple. With all that needs to be done in a new system implementation, sometimes the more complex subject matter gets pushed to “phase 2” or users are left to handle data and difficult situations some other way. Use of Coverage Groups in Master Planning is a good example of this.

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