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

In this blueprint we will walk through an example that shows how to set up your costing controls within Dynamics AX.

Here are all of the topics that are included in this blueprint:

1. Setting up Costing Versions
2. Manually Assigning a Product Cost
3. Creating Calculation Groups
4. Using Costing Versions to perform a Mass Cost Calculation
5. Performing a Basic Cost Rollup
6. Creating Cost Groups

There is a lot more that you can do within the Costing configuration of Dynamics AX that we did not cover in this brief introduction.

Try it out and I’m sure that you will quickly surpass what we did here.

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If you want to personalize your products a little, or if you are more of a configure to order operation where every product that you ship out the door is tailored to your customers specifications and needs then you will probably want to take advantage of the Product Configurator that is built into Dynamics AX.  This feature allows you to create a product with a number of different attributes, and rules that will allow Dynamics AX to build a custom BOM every time the product is ordered, and also tell you if the product is even possible to make.

The topics that are described within this series are:

1. Creating a Constraint Based Product Master
2. Creating a Product Configuration Model
3. Adding Configuration Attributes
4. Grouping Related Attributes
5. Adding Conditional Display Options
6. Adding Constraints to your Configuration Model
7. Configuring BOMS Based On Attributes
8. Using Table Based Attribute Values (Book Only)
9. Using Attributes as Variables (Book Only)