There are two interesting functionalities in R3 that have flown in under the radar because they are officially part of Retail and the Call Center functionality. This certainly should not stop us from using them for manufacturing companies. Let’s first check the license configuration.
The two features discussed in this paper do not have their own license key, they are part of the “feature set”, so make sure the Retail – Full feature set is checked. The rest of retail features, including the call center, can be switched off without losing Order events and Order holds.
In an ERP system, few transactions are as scrutinized as sales orders, which makes the requirement of a sales order change history rather unsurprising. Throughout the past years we heard this requirement regularly and we could only answer “use database logging”. But we all know that the access to the data in database logging is not exactly user friendly. More importantly, we were always cautious to show much enthusiasm for database logging, mindful of the serious warnings we received from our developers that the server “could be brought to its knees” if we use database logging too abundantly.
Now our R3 release brought a beautiful new feature that allows a set up of sales order logging parameters per user.
This certainly sounds like a winner by reading the description alone. Is it indeed a winner? We think yes.
Sales and Marketing/setup/Order events/Order event set up
This interesting screen allows the familiar feature “Table/Group/All” with regards to the user. Is the event parameter set up for one user, for a user group or for all users? Once we know WHO should be tracking order events, we have a most sophisticated set of checkboxes to our disposal that we can check for order event tracking.
Below we see the closed fast tabs.
NOTE: Start and end dates don’t hurt, yet I don’t see anybody ever putting an end date on tracking sales order events.
Sales order, sales line, Returns and Sales quotation checkboxes speak for themselves.
Rather intriguing are the boxes for Direct Delivery and Automatic Notification:
Direct Delivery
Automatic notification and cancellation
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn497861.aspx
For manufacturing companies, this seems irrelevant functionality to me.
INQUIRY OF THE ORDER EVENTS
One can click the icon ‘order events’ in the action bar of an individual sales order but there is also a general inquiry in Sales and Marketing/Inquiry/Order status/Order eventsOnce on a sales order, clicking the “Sales inquiry” gives access to a special summary screen that allows the user to see the details of a sales order.
This functionality is in addition to credit hold functionality. This functionality has nothing to do with credit hold.
There was always a requirement for a different type of hold then the credit hold. Especially in the Make-to-Order and certainly in the Engineer-to-Order business, the sales order hold is very common. With this functionality we can put a sales order on hold for any reason and we do it manually. In MTO, the most common hold may be “engineering hold”.
It is interesting to note that the use of sales configurators is supposed to avoid these “engineering holds”.
Often a sales order is on hold right at the start while more information is being gathered from the customer and discussed. In ETO environments, a long back and forth can go on between the company and its customer. During this time that sales order should be on hold.
Sales and Marketing/Common/order holds
As opposed to the Order events, the Order holds have a menu choice in Sales and Marketing/Common.
A list of features:
Remarkable is that one can associate a hold code with a certain role, which ties into security.
After having voiced our general enthusiasm for this new feature, are there some criticisms? Yes there are.
The functionalities of “Order Events” and “Order holds” seem pretty solid and work “as designed”. They are very useful functionalities for MTO/ETO manufacturing companies, although we are missing a production order hold. This is even more urgent given the fact that “Cases” cannot be used for Production orders, so we are facing a guaranteed customization in that area.
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