Wednesday 26 March 2008

Dynamics 2009 First Impressions

I have managed to get hold of a TAP2 and TAP3 version of this software and wanted to give my first impressions of some of the new features.

Likes:

The Version control built into Ax

The workflow wizards in almost all modules

The Expense module (finally)


Dislikes:

The Site addition is not really well thought through as it adds another inventory dimension and the companies mostly needing this are heavy inventdim users so this will have a big performance impact on all inventory reporting


The new apparent sub menu in the display window

The new colours in the TAP3 version seem a bit well I hope they are not the final ones



More to come

Take Care
Sven

Sunday 16 March 2008

Performance and InventDim

I find that the impact of the datastructure choosen to implement Inventdimensions is too heavy performance wise and I would really like to see MS - Ax Team in the future revise this structure.

In the product developped before called XAL the inventory dimension fields were present in the tables concerned that is we had the Warehouse as a field on the equivalent to the SalesLine, CustInvoiceTrans, InventTrans etc etc.

Finally this approach allowed for really huge datastructures with simple index based group by type queries and simple index constructs. Compared to the forced joins we have in our current inventsum sphagetti code especially with the huge number of inventdim records when using Batch or Serial numbers.

What would I like to see :

1. Delete Inventdim as a table (whew what a performance boon that would be)

2. Create an Array field like the finance dimensions Called InventSKU with three fields Config, Size and Colour

3. Create an Array field InventStorage with three fields Warehouse, Location, Pallet
( add a fourth one called Site for version 5 compatibility )

4. Create an Array field InventCondition with three fields Batch, SerialNumber, and Condition

I only introduced one new field in the above as compared to V5 and two new fields V3 and V4 (V5 Adds one)

5. Add the above array fields to all tables containing inventdimID, I realise that this means 2 times the fields for the transfer table and will cause a lot of code changes :-)


However the performance improvement in large scale installations !!!!


Also the ease of adding new Inventory dimensions !!!!


The simplification of inventsum logic !!!!



Take Care
Sven