Hi dax’ers,
We have ax 2012 implemented however we use a separate sales order system. We would like to begin to integrate these over time, and eventually move everything into AX.
For now, when we know a sales order is coming in, we’d like to somehow generate the demand or a planned order of some kind that will be for that quantity and item. We already use master planning with coverage groups to maintain safety stock, so we would want a means of differentiating planned orders if we go that route.
Any suggestions? Advice?
Thanks,
~S
It kind of depends why the separate sales order system is being used. I presume there was a plan in place for the demand generation reflection originally to keep the legacy system? Ideally you want them as sales orders, but a half-way house could be to enter them as forecast lines - if you configure the master plan to consume the forecast it could then work. However how are you downdating finished stock without a sales order, and there could be other implications with historical forecasts. I would also guess your action messages are currently quite messy. What are the timescales for the moving to AX?
Without giving away trade secrets, it is a very complex custom sales system that accurately determines our final sales price. What we have in place now is manual entry of production orders for inventory that is close or below our minimum safetey stock quantity and have been able to signal these with priority over other production orders that are just to fill our stock levels.
I am looking to automate this process, either through an AIF service exposing Master Planning tables or perhaps even the current production table we use currently in the manual process.
We have successfully been using AX since January however are beginning to feel the growing pains of some of our more manual integrations.
~S
Why not push from the sales entry system to create a sales order in AX, you can then plan from it and pick and ship it.
We are implementing AX in phases and for now our AR and Sales are outside of ERP. We have accomplished this by placing production orders for make items, and requisitions for purchase items so that our buyers can decide whether it is more affordable to purchase or produce a given item.
I would love to get Sales into AX as soon as possible…
I am not talking about a full “trade secrets” integration, just push the net demand. If not and you are manually creating production orders why not manually create sales orders and then generate planning to create the production orders?
Can you explain the net demand option in more depth? I like the sound of that a lot!
Under our current setup, creating production orders is rather low impact as it is being done manually by production staff all day long. It would become cumbersome in my opinion to maintain sales orders in two separate systems concurrently…especially if the customer accounts are not yet apart of AX either (AR is in an upcoming phase).
I do understand your meaning though with the sales demand, because that is the beauty of the MRP module. … we might as well call it the Master Coverage module at this point in time…our goal is to eventually have everything tightly integrated to take use of this powerful feature as well as forecasting, however we just aren’t there yet.
I obviosuly do not know the details of your sales order system, but at the end of it you have a requirement of a quantity of item x. You could enter this as a single sales order, I would not be a great fan of this as it is double entry, but if you could create this in AX automatically it woudl be a different matter. Alternatively you can manually key the requirement into a forecast, or have it populate a forecast plan through integration, then run planning (assuming you forecast) and it will suggest a planned production order.
Can you give me the path to where a forecast exists for a given released product? Or is this another type of planned order under MRP but instead of our MasterPlan it would be a ForecastPlan etc.? We do not have forecasting setup currently as we were waiting for sales to be integrated.
I am very comfortable with AIF and the creation of new services to expose documents, and opening a webservice to the forecasting method sounds very intriguing!
This would be one step closer to a sales integration for us.
Thanks as always for your expertise in this area.
There are obviously a few settings required for the forecast to be configured, but from the released product you go to teh plan tab and the demand forecast. You need a model and this gets tied to the master plan. There is also a forecast plan and a forecast schedule. You also need to have a reduction principle. Anyway you have a starting point, and this is shown in the inventory forecast (sum of supply and demand).