[fusion_builder_container background_color=”” background_image=”” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ background_repeat=”no-repeat” background_position=”left top” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_webm=”” video_mp4=”” video_ogv=”” video_preview_image=”” overlay_color=”” video_mute=”yes” video_loop=”yes” fade=”no” border_size=”0px” border_color=”” border_style=”” padding_top=”20″ padding_bottom=”20″ padding_left=”” padding_right=”” hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” hide_on_mobile=”no” menu_anchor=”” class=”” id=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none” last=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all”][fusion_youtube id=”iiXEW2D-Qdk?list=PLOgOmXCGOFC7alBIaF0iKCp9l56d3-Kmb” width=”600″ height=”350″ autoplay=”no” api_params=”” class=”” /][fusion_separator style_type=”none” top_margin=”20px” bottom_margin=”” sep_color=”” border_size=”” icon=”” icon_circle=”” icon_circle_color=”” width=”” alignment=”center” class=”” id=”” /][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none” last=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” border_position=”all”][fusion_title size=”2″ content_align=”left” style_type=”single solid” sep_color=”” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” class=”” id=””]Quick Look – The New Dynamics AX |Release Sales Order Picking[/fusion_title][fusion_text]Hello, this is Mark Vent with another “Quick Look at The New Dynamics AX.” Today we’re going to focus on a window called the “Release Sales Order Picking.”
About Sikich
I work for a company called Sikich. Sikich is a professional services firm that specializes in technology, advisory and accounting. There are over 700 employees throughout the US, working from 11 regional offices. Sikich is known and recognized as being a top regional accounting firm, and a great place to work. Most importantly, for people who are looking at enterprise software, Sikich is in the top 1% of all technology solution providers in the world. Working with Microsoft Dynamics, we are gold certified, member of the president’s club and the inner circle.
Challenges with Sales Order Release Windows that Companies Face
So what are the challenges that we’re going to address with the release sales order picking window? Companies that have high sales order volumes and have to prioritize and understand what is going to happen when it comes to picking and shipping product against the sales orders, especially where there may be some availability concerns or problems, and there may be reservations for some orders. Whereas, others are not reserved and those have to be considered as part of that decision as well. And finally, where there are multiple competing priorities. Perhaps we have customers that are more important than others and therefore they need to have access to the product and have it shipped to them first. There may be priorities based upon date, and there could be many other things. We’ll talk about how the release sales order picking form helps to solve some of those problems.
We’ll cover the challenges in this order. First, we’ll talk about how to query for orders into this form, and to process them. We’ll show examples of how to sort and filter the lines that appear in the form to get the information that you need; and we’ll talk about the helpful hints that this form provides to the user so they can make the decisions as they’re going.
Sales Order Release Window Demo
Let’s jump into Dynamics AX from the new Dynamics AX home page. I’m going to click on my workspace for Sales Order Processing and Inquiry. To talk first about the process that many companies use to select and pick orders, let’s go to a specific sales order. It will process one order by itself, which is kind of common in many environments. I bring up my order, I review my line detail, I go to Pick and Pack, and I select “Generate Picking List” to pull up this kind of information here. Now I can make whatever changes I want to on the lines, to show what is actually going to ship, and what is not on this shipment, and then process it. That will generate my picking information to send to the warehouse for this order. That is fine if you’re processing sales orders in a very sequential, one at a time manner, and especially where you’re in kind of a Make to Order or Configure-to-Order environment, where the product is unique to the sales order.
For the sales line for companies that have a larger volume of sales orders to process, and competing priorities, I want to show you the release sales order picking form. I’m going to go to my favorites list here, and selected “Release Sales Order Picking,” which is found on the inventory menu. Now while this comes up, let me talk about what’s going to happen here. First of all I have the ability to create queries that bring only certain sales line data into my form. So you’ll notice here that I’m just reading this in kind of a wide-open fashion. To bring all the sales line detail in, for our demonstration purposes; but you could create multiple different types of queries. Maybe there’s a query for your high priority customers, maybe there’s a query for past due sales order lines etc. You can create those, and save them so they could be available here to recall and reuse again. I’m going to run this, like I said wide open, so I click on OK, and the system is going to query all my sales line detail, and present it to me here. Let me do a little bit of modification to the way this form is being displayed so we can talk about it.
Now let’s go through this column by column to make sure we understand what the data is telling us here. In column number one, we see “customer classification group,” this is defined at the customer level, and it’s a great way to prioritize customers. Like perhaps we prioritize our retail customers before the wholesale, as you want to make sure that we’re shipping product that has the highest margin first, perhaps; or there could be many other reasons why you’d want to create different customer classification groups, and those are used in this release sales order picking form to sort and filter the data that appears.
Next we see the ship date, which is just telling us the ship date coming from the sales line on the order. We see the sales order number, and you’ll notice that by default, when the line details first pulled into this form, it is sorted by sales order customer account item number. We see the quantity on the line and the remainder that is due on that line; so if there have been partial shipments this, number here would be less than the quantity on the line. There is a field here called “possible delivery percentage;” we’ll come back and talk to that. In it, there’s a field called ‘activate now,’ which is where we indicate what we want to select from this forum, which line details were going to select and process, and the quantity that will be selected. ‘Those lines require a location’, means that there is not enough inventory to satisfy all orders for this item. In this case, with item l 0 0 0 1, which is on a sales order 697, and there’s not enough inventory to satisfy all the orders for that item, so we will have to allocate or reserve the lines that we want to process. There are also some informational columns here, ‘production order exists’ and ‘transferred exists’ tell us whether there are some orders outstanding that could be used to satisfy or to fulfill. And finally, a column called ‘all orders can be delivered’, if there’s enough inventory to satisfy all current sales order lines for l 0001, then that will be checked to indicate that I can ship away. I don’t have to pause, I don’t have to worry about allocations, I can just go for it because there’s enough inventory to do it.
So let’s try some different sorts here. Perhaps most intuitively, companies would sort first by ship date, would want to satisfy those orders that are our oldest first. They can also sort by and filter by customer classification group. For the purpose of our demo, I’m going to filter by item number and just ask it to show me the ‘sort A to Z’ on that, so I can illustrate some of the other fields here. Once we sort this, we can see that item 1000 comes to the top of our list, and you see the possible delivery percentage, which is a very interesting number. This does not mean that I can deliver this one sales order line at 100 percent; what it means is that I can deliver this sales order at 100 percent. So you’ll notice that line number two on my list here shows that my possible delivery percentage is 50 percent, even though I have plenty of item 1000 on hand. That means that there’s another line on that sales order which I cannot ship right now, I do not have the inventory to ship it. Likewise, the third line down says 33 percent for possible delivery percentage. Again that’s telling me that there are three lines in this order, and only this one line is capable of being delivered complete at this time. Notice that the table at the bottom refreshes, depending upon which line I’m focused on. Up above, to give me quick summary information about the products I’m looking at, it’ll tell me what is on hand and what has been physically reserved. So I have 1410 on hand, 30 of those are already reserved on other orders, so I have 1380 available to ship, and that would explain why it says over here in the check box, I can deliver all orders for the site.
Now that I have reviewed the columns in this form, and I’m comfortable with what they need, the next step for the users used is to go ahead and activate. So I could now begin to activate line number one, by saying I’m going to ship that one. Perhaps I would skip line number two and go to line number three, and let’s go ahead and activate the one that’s due on that line number four. In this form I’m going to go ahead and ship the two that are due on that. I could now do a different kind of filter or sort.
Let’s go back and do a customer classification sort, and let’s say I want to see only customers that are the highest priority, which is my classification. Apply that, and then that’s going to re-arrange the sales lines that came into my form from the query that I ran, and allow me to do some different things. Now I could see whether there’s enough on hand to satisfy this one. It looks to me like I have five on order, on this sales line there are 11 in inventory but eight of those have already been reserved, so I only have three available. I could go ahead and indicate that I’m going to ship those three on that line.
There’s a lot of other information on this form, and some fun things you can do in terms of the way you’re activating lines. This allows me to activate those that I can ship or deliver, those that I do have already reserved, physical inventory, and things like that. In this case what I want to do when I’m done is click on ‘Release for Picking.’ This will take all the lines that I’ve indicated, where there is an ‘activate now’ quantity and we’ll send those to be picked to the warehouse.
Summary
The release sales order picking form is a really nice tool for companies that have a high volume of sales orders to process, or have the need to prioritize certain customers over others, or to carefully allocate and reserve their inventory to those sales orders that need it.
If you have any other questions about this presentation, or about Sikich, feel free to contact me at the email below. Have a great day![/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
