The Service Management area within Dynamics AX allows you to track all of your service order contracts and service orders for your customers, will track all of your time and expenses against the service orders, and will also pass along any chargeable items to the receivables department for automatic invoicing to the customer.

Service Management has additional functions as well that allow you to track the items that are being serviced, define the tasks that are allowed to be performed against a service order, and also track the symptoms, diagnosis, and resolution to service order issues, making it a great tracking and analysis tool.

In this walkthrough we will show how you can create service agreements and orders, and then how you can use the additional tracking features within Service Management to get a tighter handle on your service orders.

Configuring Vendor Ratings and Scorecards in Dynamics AX

By Author, Canine & Equine Choreographer, Citizen AI Data Scientist, and Dynamics 365 Global Black Belt at Microsoft

August 14, 2013

Dynamics AX

3 Comments

Dynamics AX allows you to configure your own Vendor Evaluation Criteria and then track the vendor performance against any or all of the criteria that you have defined. When you combine this with the Power BI tools, you get a great way to rate vendors, and also a nice way to present Vendor Scorecards.

In this worked example we will show how to configure the Vendor Evaluations, and also how to create a simple Vendor Scorecard without breaking a sweat. Read More

Configuring Lean Manufacturing in Dynamics AX 2012

By Author, Canine & Equine Choreographer, Citizen AI Data Scientist, and Dynamics 365 Global Black Belt at Microsoft

August 11, 2013

Dynamics AX

3 Comments

The Lean Manufacturing capabilities are new with Dynamics AX 2012, and they give you a different way of managing your manufacturing processes as compared to the traditional discrete manufacturing models of BOM’s and Routes. Don’t be scared away though by its new terminology and constructs that it uses to model the manufacturing processes. It shares a number of the processes that the traditional manufacturing models use, and is pretty easy to configure if you know the right steps.

Also, you don’t have to be a pure “Lean” organization to use the Lean manufacturing processes that are built into Dynamics AX. You can pick and choose what you use, and even create hybrid manufacturing models that blend both the traditional and lean processes.

In this worked example I will show you how you can create a simple set of Lean Manufacturing processes and see them in in action.

The topics that are described within this series are:

In this worked example we worked through the setup of a set of simple production and transfer Kanbans. The interesting thing about these processes, is that you don’t necessarily need to be a Lean Manufacturer in order to take advantage of these capabilities. For piece work, then this process works really well, and also the transfer Kanbans can easily be used by traditional manufacturers to replenish floor stocking areas.

Once you have worked through these examples, you may want to branch out and try other areas of the Lean Manufacturing that we didn’t address in this presentation. Features that you may want to try include:

Having multiple activities in a Process Flow that are chained together.
Using the bar code scanning to further automate the job reporting process
Using the planning and scheduling in conjunction with the Lean Manufacturing to create the purchase forecasts etc.

This is a really useful feature within Dynamics AX. Just because you have always used BOM’s and Routes does not mean that you can’t dabble in Process Flows and Activities. Give it a try and I’m sure you will like what you find out.

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