It is pretty constant for the Microsoft team to deliver two major waves of updates to D365 in Q2 and Q4. Since the time has come for the wave 1 2021 update, we are going to delve into features that were planned to be released through the April-September period and how your team can leverage ones to enhance your supply chain, improving visibility, resiliency, and efficiency.
As usual, there are 5 categories of features we are going to move through:
- Asset Management – aims to better perform maintenance on assets owned by customers;
- Inventory and Logistics – aims to improve efficiency in their supply chain;
- Manufacturing – aims to enhance manufacturing processes to avoid any interruptions;
- Planning – aims to introduce MRP II in the Planning Optimization Add-in;
- Product Information Management – aims to bring incremental improvements on product master data, product variants, and engineering.
In this particular article, we are going to move through Asset Management and Inventory and Logistics update items, following with Manufacturing, Planning, and Product Information Management in the future pieces.
Asset Management
Work Orders Grouping
The feature allows teams to group work order lines under a single work order when the system is configured to generate work orders automatically based on a maintenance plan. Automatically generated work orders used to contain only one line, but now you are able to group.
Bill Customers for Maintenance Work
The one allows you to improve the process of creating, billing, and processing maintenance work done on assets that belong to your customers. You will be able to connect customers to their assets; view customers’ assets when creating a work order; create a parent project for each customer; record items, fees & expenses for the work order.
Maintenance Planning
It aims to help teams by making it impossible to plan maintenance standing on accumulator asset counter values, which is extremely relevant for processes with fluctuating output. For example, you could set a condition where once an emergency water pump has reached 1k hours after the previous maintenance it will ring a bell and generate a planned maintenance record.
Inventory and Logistics
Global Inventory Accounting
International organizations obviously have international operations and in most cases prefer inventory to be accounted by standard cost as part of their accounting configuration. Nevertheless, oftentimes it is pretty tense due to different local regulations, tax requirements and etc.
But, the feature superchargers users to define as many costing ledgers as they need, for each legal entity, enabling them to comply with all accounting rules and internal accounting management.
SPS – Small Parcel Shipping
SPS will allow organizations to integrate with shipping carriers through a dedicated rate engine, send details about packages/containers, and get the information related to that package, like tracking number, rate, and label information.
MHAX Integration Framework
MHAX framework, which stands for material handling equipment for automated warehouse processes, enhances enterprises with an ability to automate their warehouse by integrating with D365 to process work generated in Warehouse Module. Users will be able to configure outbound subscriptions on events (completion, cancelation, etc.), tracking them through a web service.
Landed Cost
The landed cost extends visibility over the supply chain while maximizing item profitability. It gives the power to determine shipments of inbound orders and trace each segment of goods in transit through their path. Such clarity helps to predict arrivals and better plan warehouse operations improving efficiency and item profitability.
Parallel Wave Allocation
The solution gives an ability to improve outbound order processing efficiency through batch parallel processing and wave allocation, which is working by running allocateWave method. It works per item and per dimension above the location, meaning, if an item is set using the color dimension, then variables for green, yellow, and brown will be processed at the same time, in parallel.
Warehouse Management App
The mobile application enhances organizations` overall warehouse operations through improved efficiency, ergonomics, and support for B-grade accessibility standards. The solution has got a brand new design for a flawless user experience, providing a better look-and-feel part to help workers complete the job more accurately.
Inventory and Logistics Saved Views
Simply provides a collection of saved views for inventory and logistics. These include the most commonly used fields to speed up teams by removing unnecessary steps like creating fields themselves.
Warehouse management: work creation scheduling
Simply helps to optimize warehouse order wave processing throughput by replacing Create work wave method with Schedule work method.
Warehouse Execution: Cloud Scale Units
The feature enhances organizations to operate critical manufacturing processes by placing scale units at each warehouse to remain operational during connection issues, maintenance outages, and other disruptive events. In the end, it improves the resilience rate by minimizing mission-critical disruptions.
Financial Dimensions: inventory standard cost revaluation
The solution improves the cost revaluation process by letting you choose the way for the system to assign financial dimensions to inventory standard cost revaluation vouchers.
Packing Dimension
With packing dimension, teams will be able to configure one or several types of dimensions (weight, width, depth, and height) for each product setting the process where these physical measurements values apply. Storage, packing, and nested packing dimensions will be supported.
Enterprise-scale inventory performance enhancement
System performance has been improved with the ability to archive old inventory transactions. Without the one, the table would grow and eventually consume too much storage space, drastically slowing queries against the table.
Rebate Management Module
The module aims to drastically cut the complexity and administrative burden related to rebates and dedication programs. It helps teams to omit manual calculations while retaining flexible and efficient processes to focus on maximizing the prons out of these programs.
Sales Return Order Line Registration
The solution lets organizations decide what should happen when a sales return order line cannot be split due to decimal precision on sales or the catch-weight unit of measure.
Sales Order Confirmation: Single-Click Option
The feature streamlines the sales ordering process by letting teams confirm orders with a single click. It adds a new menu button that allows you to create a sales order directly, omitting steps where you need to head to the sales order confirmation posting page.
Vendor Information: Bank Details Accuracy Improved
The solution lets vendors & suppliers submit their bank information, updating their records, through a vendor collaboration interface. Each submission flows through the approval stage and is going to be submitted once your team approves. Improved accuracy as well as decreased internal maintenance.
Incremental Enhancements For Warehouse Execution: Scale Units
With workloads running on scale units, organizations are able to proceed with mission-critical operations avoiding disruptions to better satisfy their growing requirements. For example, workers can make inventory adjustments and influence counting processing through the warehouse inventory adjustment journals.
Inventory Visibility Add-in
The solution allows teams to manage global, on-hand inventory with minimal required configuration with an ability to easily extend real-time inventory visibility through related apps. It is basically an independent, scalable microservice that empowers manufacturers and retailers to administrate and manage inventory updates at scale with real-time visibly across all inventory channels.