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

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:

• Configuring a Value Stream
• Configuring a Production Group
• Creating a Production Flow Model
• Creating a Work Cell
• Creating a Production Flow
• Creating a Production Flow Activity
• Activating Your Process Flow Version
• Creating a Kanban Manufacturing Rule
• Assigning Tasks to Work Cells Through the Kanban Scheduling Board
• Reporting Jobs through the Kanban Board for Process Jobs

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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This week I was challenged to find a way for one of our customers to view how many customers they have by zip code, and compare it to the population within the area so that they can determine if they should accept new customer requests. Their customers are actually sales people, and they did not want to have more than one customer per 10000 people within the local zip code or surrounding area.

In this worked example I will show how I used the new suite of Power BI tools (Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View & Power Map) to allow them to analyze this information in a simple, and also very cool way. Read More

At this point in my GuygAX project (a.k.a. implementing Dungeons & Dragons within ERP), I have been configuring all of my merchants and customers. Doing this by hand would take forever, so I decided to use the Excel Add-In make the loading of the records a little easier.

This process is not quite as simple as loading a table, because all of the contact information is initially stored within the Global Address book, and the tables that you update are slightly different depending on if you are creating an organization, or a person, but once we got the hang of it, importing became a breeze.

In this walkthrough I will show how to use the Excel Add-In for Dynamics AX to create a template that you can use to easily import customer and vendor records. Read More

Setting up a new company within Dynamics AX is not hard, but it is time consuming because you have to configure a lot to base tables and codes such as payment terms, freight methods etc. that are not shared between the companies. Something that would make the process easier would be a mass load of data from a template.

In this worked example we will show how you can do just that with the Dynamics Excel Add-In, by using it to query the tables in one company and then update the data in another without even breaking a sweat. Read More

At this point in my GuygAX project (a.k.a. implementing Dungeons & Dragons within ERP), I am working on loading all of the reference products and services into my system so that I can start stocking my shelves and selling services to my NPC’s. This is no small feat, since the initial load has more than 2000 different items. Rather than load all of the data by hand, I decided to use the Excel Add-In and create a import template for loading all of the products and services.

Since there are multiple tables that need to be loaded with this example, it is a little more work to create the initial template, bus once it is up and built, it is a great time saver when loading in base and incremental data.

In this walkthrough I will show how to use the Excel Add-In for Dynamics AX to create and use an Excel Product Import Template Read More

As part of my GuygAX project, I found that a lot of data within the HR module was missing, because it Dynamics AX is not has not been published with the localization details for the realms of Faerûn. One case in point is that there are over 99 different languages within Faerûn that I needed to load into the HR module. Although loading the data by hand is possible, I wanted to find a better way to get the information loaded.

In this walkthrough I will show how I used the Excel Add-In for Dynamics AX to make the process a matter of cutting and pasting. Read More

Dynamics AX has an add-on for Microsoft Excel that allows you to retrieve data from Dynamics AX, and also publish changes back to the database in a controlled way. You can use this to give users a simpler way to manipulate the information in the database. As an example, you can use this to create a better way to update demand forecasts, since the default maintenance forms within Dynamics AX.

In this walkthrough we will show how you can:

• Build your initial forecast model
• Link to your forecast within Excel
• Create total matrix fields
• Create period total matrix fields
• Create summary forecast dashboards in PowerView Read More