Manufacturing

Microsoft Dynamics for Manufacturing – differences between various Dynamics flavors

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image Houston Neal from Software Advice recently wrote a nice and a very detailed article on the Differences Between Microsoft Dynamics products. It’s an interesting article and gives a good overview of where different Microsoft Dynamics products stand, and overall I recommend you to read it, even though personally I don’t agree with everything in there.

I like good argument, but I don’t like disagreeing just for the sake of it, and this was one of those articles that I would prefer disagreeing in private. But Houston was so persistent in me expressing my opinion on his article here on my blog, that I just decided to speak up.

After all, everyone is entitled to my opinion 😉

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Parallel or serial?

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Long time no see, eh? I know I’ve promised to write about a lot of stuff here, and I see this queue of you hardly waiting to read my next topic on process manufacturing, but I am just far too lazy to think it out thoroughly. So, an easier one, but still about manufacturing.

I spent this week delivering two courses about manufacturing in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Usually, these trainings are gatherings of partners who discuss geeky stuff over coffee breaks. This time, it was kind of different – there were two people from the customer front, and it was really amazing to listen to customer perspective when learning about standard NAV.

One of the points raised today, in the midst of closing of Manufacturing II course, was about parallel routings. Do we do them, or do we not. A tough one, indeed.

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Output journal confusion

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A few days ago, I’ve got a question from a customer, about an alleged bug in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. According to online help, when you are posting output in manufacturing module, the last line of the type Output in the journal will actually adjust the inventory level. However, what is not explained is how the figure in this field is calculated, and why exactly that way.

When you decide to post an output of a production order, you specify the released production order for which you want to post the output, then call the function Explode Routing. After this function completes its chore, users unfamiliar with how manufacturing works can get quite confused, because two of the fields the procedure fills in contain unexpected values. These two fields are Output Quantity, and Scrap Quantity.

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Scrap doesn’t just happen

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In reality, if you need 1,000 of whatever product, the manufacturing process is rarely going to yield exactly 1,000 of it, even if you feed into the first operation the exact quantities of raw materials system calculated as gross requirements. The process may produce 980 or 1,020, but is hardly ever going to be exactly 1,000. If you didn’t take scrap into account, or you took incorrect scrap into account, your actual output from the process might be much more unpredictable, with huge variances. Variances are always a problem, only they don’t have to be that big a problem in all scenarios.

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Cut the (s)crap

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[I had to edit this post on April 01, 2008. And no, it’s not April Fool’s Prank] 

Have you ever wondered how manufacturing scrap works? Or what it really is? It’s an interesting topic, and yet a very confusing one. It has caused so many headaches to the project team I worked on recently, because nobody really understood it. So, what is manufacturing scrap?

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