The development of the Copilot Inventory Queries extension that I described in my previous blog posts has inspired me to apply the same concept of using Copilot (or actually Azure OpenAI) to enhance the other extensions that we use. This blog post is an example of an application that hopefully can inspire others to apply AI to their Business Central extensions. In this case we have an extension called Planning Parameter Worksheet that allows Business Central users to set up rules and have the system suggest the planning parameters to use for each Item or Stockkeeping Unit. This is a...
As we all know, Microsoft is adding Copilot features to everything these days. Every new version of Business Central has more Copilot than the last version and soon there is not a single place in the application that does not have a Copilot feature. This is great and most people are excited about it. The Copilot features and the underlying AI capabilities are what get people talking when we present Business Central to customers. Most of what I work with are manufacturing companies and almost all of them have their own AI initiatives, sometimes those are just around being creative...
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 was released last week. I have installed it and poked around in the new functionality a bit and there are some awesome improvements and new features. 🙂 Through this blog post I share some of my thoughts on some of the new functionality. The look and feel when first launching the windows client is more or less the same as with version 2016, and I was happy that it could co-exists with all my older installations of NAV (always interesting when installing a new version). Below are some of the new functionality that I have looked...
Production orders in Dynamics NAV allows you to consume both less and more than what’s defined on the components and to output both less and more than what’s defined on the operations in the routing. There is no check when you post, which is nice (sometime I which it was like that on sales and purchase orders as well, but that’s a topic for another post). But when you post more than you wanted you need to be able to reverse it. Luckily reversing production output and consumption is easy if you know how to do it (if the production...
This blog post is to describe how fields can be added to the Item Tracking Lines in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Adding additional fields to this page is a common requirement; it could for example be to add a vendor lot number, some quality measurements, a manufacturing date or any other type of property that should be stored against an inventory lot or serial number. When you first look at it seems like a simple modification but it is actually a bit (or a lot) more involved than just adding the field to the table and the page. The Item Tracking...
If you have a relative large number of items to plan it could take a while to run the MRP calculations in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an hour to do a full calculation is not uncommon, especially if you have been using the system for a while. In order to not have the MRP calculations to interrupt with the daily operations (such as posting orders) you typically want the calculations to take place during the night. This is a very common requirement and in fact a lot of people I talk to are surprised that this is not something Dynamics NAV...
This blog post describes how you activate the ‘Directed Put-away and Pick’ functionality (also known as WMS or advanced warehousing) for an existing location in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. It could for example be that you have been using Dynamics NAV for a couple of years and your business has grown or changed and you want to start using the WMS functionality for an existing location (or at least check the functionality out in a test environment). Below is the process to do this, step by step. The screenshots are done by converting the ‘BLUE’ location in a Cronus company (the...
Just like with processing of shipments, there are four ways to process receipts of inventory in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Choosing the most suitable method is important in order to get the software to support the business as efficient as possible. Below is a description of each of the four methods together with some of the pros and cons. If you have read the previous blog post describing processing of shipments then you will notice that there are lots of similarities between the options on the receiving and shipping side, in fact a lot of the functionality just ‘mirrors’ each other. On the...
I have previously described how production orders are posting into the general ledger which I have received a lot of positive feedback on. This time I will described how assembly orders are posting into the general ledger in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (which is a lot simpler). The assembly orders in Microsoft Dynamics NAV was introduced in the 2013 version and they are a great compliment to the production orders, you can read one of my previous blog posts about assembly vs. production orders to get a feeling about what to use when. The only thing on assembly orders that creates entries...
One of the nicer things about the assembly functionality in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is the option to assemble to order. What this means is that you can stock the components and not assemble them until it is time to ship the order (very useful if you sell kits of products for example). In this blog post I will describe how this works together with the inventory picks and movements. This is in my mind a setup that works well and supports scenarios where the personnel that are picking the products also assembling/bundling them at the same time. I have previously...
