Challenges Companies Face Related to Sales Order Entry
What are some of the challenges we see companies facing related to sales order entry? The number one is inventory availability, being able to see that, and being able to get answers quickly during the ordering process. Another is the different methods that are used, is it “Available to Promise,” is it “Capable to Promise,” are there other methods that could be used to give the user a good answer quickly? And finally, although there are some pure Make to Stock and Make to Order environments out there, we find that many companies are Mixed-Mode or they have some combination of Make to Stock and Configure-to-Order etc. So I’d like to show you the flexibility of the new Dynamics AX as it relates to sales order entry, and how it meets these challenges. We’re going to talk about visibility, will talk about availability methods, and then we’ll show the flexibility of choosing which is appropriate during sales order entry.
New Dynamics AX Sales Order Entry Demo
Let’s jump into the New Dynamics AX from my AX home screen. I’m going to click on my sales order processing, an inquiry tile here, to take me to the workspace. This allows me to see through the tiles on the left, and lists in the middle summary information about sales owners.
Let’s create a new sales order quickly. For our demonstration I’m going to pick a customer that I’m comfortable with and we’ll get quickly to the line detail information. I’m going to enter an item number that I know is by default is set up as a Make to Stock type item, and that is defined at the item level. I can next go to my detail underneath that line and look at availability. This is set to use the “Available to Promise” (ATP). Now that I’ve entered this line detail I can go directly to my Product and Supply menu and select ATP information. That will give me a quick summary of what is available from inventory. I can see, by the dates on the left, that I have 400 available plus, or I could see graphically to the right how that might vary from period to period.
Let’s add another line, and I’m going to enter an item that I know is not in inventory. It’s a Made-to-Order style of product, and I’m going to have to do some inquiry in the system to see when that could be available. If I scroll down slightly, you’ll see that the delivery date control for this item is Capable to Promise, meaning that it’s not inventory, but how long would it take us to get it if we were to release an order? I’m going to hit “Simulate Delivery Dates” on this and let the system respond to me with a summary of availability. I can see now that this could be produced and available by Wednesday, the 22nd. I can now use that to update my Confirm Ship Date for my question, “Ship date?” for that line.
Let me show you another option for ordering that could be really helpful for companies that have a combination of items that are Make to Stock and items that are Made to Order. If I click on the “Add Lines” option here, it will show me the products that are in inventory and what quantity is available right now. So I could potentially say I want two of those, and I want one of those; and I’m going to scroll down here a little bit and see that there are some other products available in the D-series. I want those and one of these. When I’m done, I click the “Create” button at the bottom, and it will add all of those lines to the sales order I’m entering, with the quantities that I have.
Summary
In summary, we’ve shown great visibility into the sales order entry process for products where we can actually view the available inventory quickly and easily. We’ve shown that I have the ability to define different methods for seeing what’s available from inventory, although those default for the item. I can also change those at the line level, if I’d like to alter it for this specific sales order. And we’ve shown flexibility, the ability to have different methods for checking inventory depending upon the type of product that’s being ordered.
Thank you for watching, if you have any questions about Sikich or about this presentation, feel free to email me at the email address below. Thank you!
