Tuesday 5 December 2006

Product and other hierarchies

One of the things that most customers wish for when confronted with the reality of the datamodel in Dynamics Ax is some means of attaching meaningfull default values at various levels of a hierarchy to which they attach information.

An example could be the wish to dictate that a certain field f'ex the item group is set to a certain value for all items that belong to the category Oranges, as well as being sold in Belgium.

It is not easy to do in the standard Ax structures, what would be nice is a standard hierarchy builder type of feature as that found in f'ex the Demand planner add on where you are able to conceive your own hierarchy on top of any existing field in the system and for Ax basically to recognize the relationship so that reporting and other features could be built using this variable hierarchy.

Thereafter the next step would be to give the hierarchies an active role in the product, that is to allow the definition of certain fields to be tied to a hierarchy structure.

F'ex to say that the item group is deduced from somewhere in a given hierarchy meaning we can setup a default group at high level and then down the branches define exceptions, allowing the user to work top down and do less work and the system to work bottom up in order to use the first value found.

If we applied this principle to the groups used in the pricing matrix then we could really make some neat price matrices with pricing, discounts, etc at all sorts of levels.

What do you think ?

/Sven

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