In Dynamics Ax two inventory dimensions which in most other cases are more or less similair stand out a bit or rather stick out like a sore thumb.
One is the warehouse, it has attached to it a lot of functionality, such as quarantine handling or the Warehouse management functionality plus some other basic hookups such as the ability to define a default warehouse by item on Sales / Item / Purchase levels.
However because the warehouse is often confused between a logical warehouse and a physical warehouse and in implementations one often makes use of one or the other and has to stick them both into one field it sometimes becomes difficult to visualise and control ones stock.
What would be nice is to have a sort of sub warehouse level which could be configured everywhere as well as the warehouse, the sub warehouse could be the logical warehouse and should be uniquely linked to its parent which should map to the physical warehouse.
What I am speaking of is sort of like the physical stock locations used in the warehouse module except they should be independent of the locations. The sub warehouse should be availeable all the places where today only the warehouse is present, that is in BOMS in the Quarantine flow, in the SO PO etc etc etc. This allows it to be used as a logical warehouse so that one can have non QC stock and it can still be in the physical warehouse in physical Location but have a statust that disallows it's use.
The reason for adding the sub warehouse or logical warehouse everywhere is to allow the users / dealers to configure legal flows.
One could debate whether it should act as a flag that is we need a new transaction type to control the transfer of it from one status to another (one sub warehouse to another) that does not generate a new inventory transaction or whether a transfer should be required. In an ideal world both should be possible as many businesses would prefer the ability to just change the flage where as audited companies such as medecinal / pharamaceutical companies will want a full track and accounting for any changes made.
I have made such changes but only partially, I have also seen many half botched attempts at making such changes, and I would love to see something like this added as a part of the standard package to allow the product to contain such functionality out of the box.
It would support most industries and allow a much more logical configuration of the system, where the warehouse is really a warehouse and not some beast with many names as is often the case on implementations today.
/Sven
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2 comments:
Hello again,
One zany implementation which will remain nameless had us defining Warehouses, with Locations as the sub-warehouse zones.
Got better when we created the Out-of-order General warehouse with Locations per physical warehouse :)
Obviously we solved the WMS aspect by shunting on a (real) WMS application.
Not that WMS in AX sucks that badly,for a midsize ERP its pretty good, shame on MS for not expanding it's features. It seeme to have stood still on V4, more's the pity.
Cheers
It stands still in Ax because of the collaboration with an external company on WMS, and because it does not have a proponent in the dev team.
By the By adding a status dimension takes about 1 hour of dev work and unless you are in a high (really high) transaction environment poses little risk. Will publish a little howto on it when I have time.
/Sven
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