Topic: ‘Production’

Product Attributes are a nice addition to AX for the 2012 release.  They give you a good way to further describe a product and its characteristics through user defined fields that would previously have required modification.  The drawback is that seeing and using these attributes throughout the application seems rather limited.

 Product attributes are basically user defined additional information fields for a product.  They are created and assigned to a category, and then a product is associated with the category.  Therefore, all the product attributes that are assigned to that category are assigned to the product and a value can be entered for each. 

Note: Product attributes can only be added to the Category Hierarchy that is assigned to the Category Hierarchy Type “Procurement Category Hierarchy”. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are like me, setting up Postings is a bit of a mystery. It’s a fact that AX does not validate that the accounts specified in the posting profiles are correct. It just needs an account to which it can post transactions. What do we care?
I can tell you that the Finance team will care a lot!
You will definitely need their help in specifying the correct accounts for posting, but before you ask them to confirm the account numbers, you need to know the type of account required for each of the postings. Read the rest of this entry »

Available to promise is a great concept that Dynamics AX 2009 has implemented as an option for delivery date control. Meaning, if you were to use it, you can give your customers a future date on when their Sales orders will be delivered. So, how does it work? 

Keep reading to find out more!

  Read the rest of this entry »

Scheduling in Dynamics AX 2012 has been both greatly enhanced and simplified at the same time.  If you have had trouble in the past with assigning and scheduling the resources and/or materials required, the changes provided in manufacturing and scheduling in AX 2012 will bring you a sigh of relief from scheduling production orders, to configuring products, to scheduling resources for a project.  Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s blog post will touch on the many different tasks the Shop Floor Control (SFC) Module can help you accomplish. Daily tasks such as employee attendance and absence, job execution, reporting good production quantity and scrap, and scheduling employees according to working times are just a few examples that become extremely manageable with the shop floor control module. The Shop floor control module is integrated with the HR module so a few settings must be setup in HR before the shop floor module can be used effectively. Continue reading to see how to perform a few common daily activities in SFC.

  Read the rest of this entry »

The Production II training is finally available on Partnersource/Customersource (login required).  It is a deeper dive and builds on some of the concepts from Production I.  Included are subcontracting, advance scheduling, production and the GL, and inventory dimensions.

Here is a little publicized fact concerning the resetting of the status of a Production Order in AX2009…..

The Production Order is released, and started as planned….but then, Production Control decide that the decision to “Start” production, was the wrong decision, so they must reset the Production Order. This is done by clicking the “Update” button and selecting “Reset Status”.

Click the “Update” button

From the options, select “Reset Status”

When the reset form is displayed, AX suggests the desired status to reset back to…..there is no indication that you have a choice, and if you accept the default, AX implies that you have to reset status, one step at a time.

This is not the case!

By clicking in the “Desired Status” field, a drop down icon becomes visible……

Simply select the desired status from the list and click”OK”.

The Production Order will be reset back to the selected status.

Microsoft last week released Lean Manufacturing for Microsoft Dynamics AX2009, which in Microsoft’s words will enable organizations to embark on the “Lean Journey”.

Partnersource: Lean Manufacturing for Microsoft Dynamics AX

Customersource: Lean Manufacturing for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009

Stephen Wilson of eBECS has also created the Lean Centre of Excellence website.
There you will find a series of short videos, free to watch, that will give you a feel for what Lean means.
http://www.leancentreofexcellence.com

They are delivered by Andrew Rumney, who is the Solutions Director for eBECS Ltd, and the original architect of the Lean Manufacturing module for AX2009.

Although Microsoft have released Lean Manufacturing for AX2009, it does come complete with some known issues – 51 in total, that may impact on a prospective implementation, depending on the solution chosen.  We should all familiarize ourselves with the issues document, which is available for download.
https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/deployment/resources/productreleases/ax2009leanmanufacturing.htm

The Lean Module provides easy-to-use graphical tools such as Kanban Stop/Go and Electronic Heijunka Board(below):

I had an interesting issue from a client recently.  They were importing Bill of Material data into AX and validating the data.  When they went to mass calculate all the Bills of Material however, they ran into an issue that none that had active Item dimensions worked.  What we discovered is that the item dimension combination need to be setup for the mass calculation to work for Bills of Material.  This can be accomplished via a set of code as follows:

The following are some brief / informational points related to a month-end inventory close:

• Adjustments required to inventory and the general ledger can occur without completing a month-end inventory close.  An inventory recalculation can be run to make adjustments.  This process however does not settle the inventory transactions.
• Inventory close does settle issues to items, bill of materials and service item types.
• Inventory dimensions can control the settlement process within a specific dimension, i.e. an item issued in an inventory dimension cannot be settled against another inventory dimension.  To control within a specific dimension, the financial inventory parameter must be selected on the dimension.  This control does apply to the Marking functionality.
• Following inventory close, transactions can no longer be posted to the closed periods.  If required, the close would have to be cancelled, transactions posted, and the period closed again.  Any adjustments made, following the close, would also require cancellation.
• Manual adjustments can be made to transactions with a receipt status of “purchased” or to on hand quantities.  Both adjustments allow for the cost of a transaction to be adjusted based on the purchase price or to the value of the current on hand quantity.  A recalculation is required for the adjustment(s) to affect an inventory value.
• Manual adjustments to on hand inventory should be done immediately following an inventory close.
• Review steps in preparing for a month-end close:
• Run the Open quantity report to view a list of inventory transactions that will remain open after the close.  Use this report to clean up transactions which should have been posted or cancelled.
• Run the Check cost prices report to view the differences between the item’s cost price and the receipt price.  Adjustments should be made where required, prior to the close.  Note when running this report a maximum deviation percentage can be set to determine the differences to review.  This report can be re-run, following adjustments, until all required changes have been recorded.
• When satisfied with adjustments, run the Close procedure to complete the month-end inventory close.