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?

  • Reading time:5 mins read

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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Discreet and process manufacturing difference

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When implementing NAV in manufacturing companies, I’ve sometimes heard complaints that the type of manufacturing supported in NAV doesn’t fit the customer needs.

And sometimes that’s completely true. NAV supports discreet manufacturing, and it handles it pretty well. But the things do get bumpy when you venture into process manufacturing world.

Sometimes customers or even consultants don’t really understand why this happens. It’s simple: there is a big difference between process and discreet manufacturing, and to successfully implement NAV in these two fundamentally different environments you need to understand and appreciate these differences.

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Mystery laptop

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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.

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Architectures: Good, Bad and Ugly

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Four months ago I attended a conference, where I had a chance to listen to Miha Kralj, an architect at Microsoft, talk about architectures. It was one of the best presentations I ever attended, and ever since I had this topic in queue, but never really had chance to write about it. Most of the stuff he talked about reminded me of some bad experiences about architectures on projects I’ve worked on. Most of stuff here is also not my original contribution to the universal pool of knowledge, and I reuse it with the permission of the author, so Miha, thanks! What I did, however, is that I applied general principles to specific Microsoft Dynamics NAV situations.

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Not-so-elementary costing: The Change

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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.

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Output journal confusion

  • Reading time:6 mins read

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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Scrap the crap

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Scrap happens. So does sh*t. In my last blog post about scrap I gave a crappy explanation of how forward calculation of fixed scrap works. So instead of disgracing myself by leaving the incorrect explanation there, I’ve just corrected it, and posted this lame excuse here. Anyone who is interested in how it really works, please accept my sincere apology for not testing my hypothesis thoroughly before posting it here. I’ve now tested it thoroughly, corrected it accordingly, and there you go.

Today is April the 1st. The April Fool’s Day. I hoped to be posting a prank here today, but it seems I’ve posted a prank few days ago. Sorry.

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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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