I had no clue how good my laptop was. Seriously. Today it kicked ass of an 8-processor server.
Tomorrow we have a go-live of a Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment, with manufacturing customized to support configure-to-order functionality. Refreshing manufacturing orders now calculates dynamic BOMs and routings, and it takes time.
The biggest jeopardies often lurk where we least expect them. When implementing an ERP system such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, what should be one of our best allies, turns out to be our mortal enemy. It has a simple name: The Standard. Standard processes, standard functionality, standard documents, standard system. All these gizmos can turn into gremlins in a blink of an unattentive eye.
Standards are tricky. If during due dilligence, or diagnostic or analysis phase, we hear the prospect or customer utter the word “standard”, what do we instinctively do? Well, in a standard system, it’s pretty obvious what the standard is, and when the customer says that they “just have standard processes” it means that these processes are just covered with such a standard system, right? So we instinctively tend to skip the more detailed analysis of these, because after all, they are standard.
No, it is not a new piece of software; although I admit that to anyone not knowing exactly what it is it might just seem so. Microsoft WinDays is the largest and most important business and technology conference in Croatia (and the region), traditionally organized in Opatija in the last week of April. This year it is taking place from April 22 to 25, with a pre-conference day on April 21. Last year it gathered over 1,900 attendees from Croatia and neighboring countries, and this year it is expected to even surpass this number. During the conference the attendees will have an opportunity to visit 160+ presentations covering 28 different topics, 9 pre-conference seminars, plus enjoy themselves and mingle about the evening parties, or simply enjoy the mild weather, sea and fresh air.
They say the only constant is change. I’d say that the only other constant is error. We humans tend to err. Give a repeatable task to a human, and they’ll mess it up every once in a while. Some call it the human factor.
One of the many repeatable tasks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is setting up items. If you remember my rant about mandatory fields, and how I said they were baaad, there might be an even more baaad kind of fields: the default value fields. Because the system simply inserts a value into these fields without asking for your say, and if anything is easy, it’s only so easy to overlook these. Yep, you have a chance to voice your oppinion on these, but having got to hurry for a cup of coffe with Mary from accounting, admit it, you’re gonna leave that default FIFO costing method for an item every once in a while, even though it should really have been Average. Then you’ll start posting. Then your phone rings and starts screaming at you about a moron who screwed up items again.
I’ve stumbled recently upon a support request, where a partner asked if there was a possibility to register purchases of services in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. When it comes to selling services, such as consulting, or repairs, NAV is your true friend, because you can use Resources to register sales against them. However, purchase documents don’t offer a possibility of purchasing resources, so you are left to some workarounds.
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.
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.
[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?
Due to fluctuations in market prices, purchase cost of goods may vary from one purchase to another. Also, you rarely just purchase goods and immediately sell them in the same quantity. What you usually do is that you purchase the goods, then let them sit in the inventory for a while, then you may sell five different purchases all at once, or you may sell goods from one purchase to five different customers.
All of these situations have different effects on your inventory value, because something else must be taken into account: cost flow. Regardless of the inventory valuation method you chose, whenever you take an item from the inventory, how do you know its cost? Without knowing its cost, you can’t know the cost of goods sold, so you better know your cost. Don’t tell me you stick the purchase price to each item, so that you can know exactly how much it cost whenever you are about to sell it, because accountants won’t subscribe to the idea.
When you buy a sheep, how much is it worth to you, what is its value? For starters, its value is at least what you paid for it, but that’s not quite it. Say you paid a hundred dollars for it. If you want to sell it now, how do you determine your selling price? A hundred-twenty? A hundred-fifty? Obviously, you need to increase the price by some percentage over whatever you paid initially, but regardless of what you increase your price, if you don’t know your true costs, you might be at loss.