Dynamics 365 & Manufacturing Strategies - PART 1 - General Concept

This article is about manufacturing strategies and their Dynamics 365 ERP applications. Knowledge transfer has been planned in 2 posts:

PART 1: Dynamics 365 & Manufacturing Strategies - PART 1 - General Concept

PART 2: Dynamics 365 & Manufacturing Strategies - PART 2 - Make-To-Stock (MTS)

Let's get started with PART 1

CONTENTS   Introduction Manufacturing strategies with APICS explanations

INTRODUCTION

Those series of articles aim to provide advanced knowledge of different manufacturing approaches. You will find:
 • Conceptual background of various manufacturing scenarios from the business point of view and expectations from ERP to support those scenarios.
 • How AX 365 for Operations supports various Manufacturing Strategies.

 

Let's take a look at APICS(American Production and Inventory Control Society) definitions to understand manufacturing strategies.

 

MANUFACTURING/SUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGIES

COMPARISON OF MANUFACTURING/SUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGY APPROACHES OF APICS AND MICROSOFT

APICS Approach says that there are four basic manufacturing strategies in terms of delivery lead time.

Dynamics AX Approaches with 2 dominant strategies. Make-to-stock (MTS) and make-to-order (MTO). MTO includes PTO, ATO, CTO and ETO, in other saying they are all varieties of make-to-order.

According to Oracle, pick-to-order is a type of assemble-to-order. On the other side, SAP uses Pick to Order strategy as a part of order fulfillment process as Supply Chain Strategy, not a manufacturing strategy.

 

All these strategies aim to minimize delivery lead time. To minimize lead time, all operations must be optimized. One of the best way of optimizing operations is lean manufacturing. You can support your MTO manufacturing with lean manufacturing strategy. It is a support execution strategy within overall MTO manufacturing strategies.

 

So table becomes as follows

What is lean manufacturing then?
Lean Manufacturing is a supporting execution philosophy within MTO Manufacturing strategy and endeavors to optimize MTO Supply Chain by "eliminating waste" in the entire value stream by using a set of tools and techniques (Microsoft).

Lean production is a concept that has evolved from JIT concepts over the years. The development of highly integrated production systems was rapidly evolving. MRP was recognized to be an effective engine to drive an integrated enterprise-wide information system that is today called ERP. Purchasing and logistics activities were similarly being integrated with fundamental internal materials management principles into an enterprise-wide approach, today called supply chain management.  Similarly, the fundamental concepts of JIT evolved to an enterprise-wide perspective called lean production. Lean production implies understanding and correctly implementing the major enterprise-wide changes required to truly eliminate or significantly reduce waste in the system. It is the system-wide philosophical approach used to integrate the system toward an ultimate goal of maximized customer service with minimal system waste. Lean production is a philosophy that relates to the way a manufacturing company organizes and operates its business. It includes both the approach to organizing the business and the practice of just-in-time production (JIT) (APICS).

Let's go through all manufacturing strategies in Dynamics 365 one by one.

Sit tight!

The rest of the article will be quite striking!

To be continued...

Dynamics 365 & Office Integration Series - PART 3 - Excel Integration

This article series is about integration practices between Dynamics 365 and office apps.  Integrations have been explained in 4 posts:

PART 1: Odata Queries Through Dynamics 365

PART 2: Connect to an OData feed through Get & Transform in Excel 2016

PART 3: Excel Integration

PART 4: Data Import/Export by Considering Your Business Purpose

Let's start PART 3

CONTENT Introduction Export to Excel Open In Excel Excel data connector add-in Data import/update Filtering Time tracking - Performance troubleshooting Off-line working Workbook designer Adding another table Automatic demo data generation Adding a formula column

INTRODUCTION

This article provides a comprehensive explanation for some of excel functions in Dynamics 365. All functions has been illustrated clearly.

You can also reach previous articles via following links.
Dynamics 365 & Office Integration Series - PART 1 - Odata Queries Through Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 & Office Integration Series - PART 2 - Connect to an OData feed through Get & Transform in Excel 2016

You can also find different approaches in following article regarding excel usage for data import/export.

Dynamics 365 Data Import/Export by Considering Your Business Purpose

EXPORT TO EXCEL

Also known as Static Export to excel. Just gets data out to excel - a quick mechanism to get data in grids on a form. This is the standard mechanism for triggering the export to Excel in Dynamics AX. It is listed in number of places. Such Open in Microsoft Office menu, right-click context menu.

You will see a dialog box as follows after you select one of "Export to excel/Export all rows/Export marked rows" options.

In addition to your desktop, you can save your files to OneDrive for Business or SharePoint for now. Other options like Drop Box will be available in the future.

Exported data will be shown as follows. This provides a quick mechanism to get data in grids on a form. This is the standard mechanism for triggering the export to Excel in Dynamics AX using the open in Microsoft Office menu on the form.

OPEN IN EXCEL

Instead of static data, the idea is opening an excel in a dynamic dataset. In this case, you will be able to refresh and publish the data. 

Open in Excel button option can be reached via "Open in Microsoft Office Menu" button.

Open in Excel options can be

• Automatically generated for an entity that shares the same root datasource as the current form.

• Automatically added for a template that shares the same root datasource as the current form.

• Programmatically added for an  Entity or Template using the Excel Export API

Excel Data Connector Add-in

The Excel Data Connector app interacts with Excel workbooks and OData services that are created for publicly exposed data entities.

This app is built using the new apps for Office framework, and it provides a JavaScript-based Web API for apps to communicate with Office applications.  And the biggest advantage to this new framework is that the apps can run inside of Excel on-premise for Windows in addition to Excel Online and Office 365 as well as Excel on the iPad.  And other Excel apps will be supported in the future.  So this app leverages OData feeds based on underlying data entities and allows inserting, updating, and deleting data so users have the ability to publish data back to AX.

Data Import/Update

You can add a new line or change the information and publish it by using task pane buttons. Let's do that in fleet customers form.

Insert the line.

Publish the document.

Customer information directly goes to customer form as you see below.

Filtering

In addition to regular excel filtering, you will be able to filter your data by using task pane filter portion - excel add-in filter. The difference between regular filter and excel add-in filter is the excel add-in filters at the Odata service level and pulls back list of data.

Click on the Filter icon on task pane.

Enter your filtering criteria and click on done.

Time Tracking - Performance Troubleshooting

By clicking on the message center icon, you can see the exact publish time of records.

In message center you can see the timing of all of those operations occurring throughout the system. This may help you to detect delays and take necessary actions.

Off-line Working

In case of device connection or going offline, original data information is kept in data_cache sheet. This allows users to make changes and save the workbook. You can go offline and do whatever you want, come back and open up the workbook again. Your changes will still be there so that you can publish them at a later time. In previous versions of new Dynamics AX those changings were kept in memory but with Dynamics 365, now changings are kept in the workbook. Thus, Dynamics 365 became more convenient for mobile devices in case of connection lost.

Workbook Designer

You can use the Workbook Designer page to design an editable custom export workbook that contains an entity and a set of fields. To open the Workbook Designer page, click Common > Common > Office Integration > Excel workbook designer.

It is a nice way to scroll through and look at different entities in the system and get workbooks that are able to be used in excel. 

It also has a nice future in term of "view related form". If you are looking at these entities and you see an entity you interested in. Then you pull data out to excel. You can use `view related form`s button to see the form that is related to entity.

Use the common search and open excel workbook designer by typing "workbook" or navigate to Common > Common > Office integration > Excel workbook designer.

On the left hand side, you can see available entities and related fields. 

Use filter bar to select an entity. Here, we will select FleetCustomers.

Send all fields to "selected fields" portion.

Now it is time to create workbook by clicking on "Create workbook" button

Download the created workbook.

Click on design icon on task pane.

Design button will take you to design experience.

Click on the edit icon in design experience.

You can remove the filed that you are not interested in.

Click on update button after you finish field removing.

System will show you the last appearance of the form.

Adding another table

You can also add a new table by adding a new sheet.

Click on Add table icon.

Select the table that you want to add.

Type the table name. Excel can easily find it. (There might be a filter future in one of next versions)

Let's select vendors.

Click on NEXT button.

Select the fields that you want to add (CTRL + A combination works here) and hit the add button.

System will ask you to refresh the table like it does in 2012 excel add-in version.

Close the design experience by clicking on DONE.

Refresh the form.

An informative warning pops up and says that current data in the workbook will be overwritten. 

You can see the vendors as below.

When you change the fields you will see that task pane shows different filter options correspondingly with each data type.

Automatic demo data generation

Following demonstration requires to create demo data. You can create demo data as follows.

Fleet management > Setup > Fleet setup

Adding a formula column

Back to the topic, If you want to add a formula column, open design experience by clicking on design.

Click on the edit icon to edit datasource.

Select formula icon to add a field to be used for formula.

Change the label of the field. For our example, change it to Monthly Rent .

Monthly rent formula should be = 20 business days x daily rent.

Click Done and refresh the form.