Problem description

Our company has been using the Asset management module in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations since 2020. We recently upgraded to version 10.0.41 and we were quite disappointed to realize that we are no longer able to modify asset IDs directly. In previous versions of D365, we were able to edit asset IDs and we built our asset hierarchy and maintenance procedures around that assumption.

According to the following webpage, the issue is not a bug but rather a feature that was designed to work in a specific way. https://fix.lcs.dynamics.com/Issue/Details?bugId=973471

Modifying asset IDs is required under the following circumstances:

1. When moving an asset in our hierarchy. In general, the first part of the asset ID represents where it is located in the hierarchy. For example, consider the two following assets: FM-D-24 is a parent asset that represents snowcat 24 and FM-D-24-TR is a child asset of FM-D-24 that represents a winch installed on snowcat 24. Lets say that we install the winch on snowcat FM-D-34, the we would need to move the asset rename FM-D-24-TR to FM-D-34-TR.
2. When replacing an old asset by a new one. To do that, we used to rename the old asset and create a new asset whose ID corresponds to te ID of the original asset. For example, we recently replaced asset LM-DUN-MOT-RDI. We would have renamed that asset to LM-DUN-MOT-RDI-OLD and created a new asset called LM-DUN-MOT-RDI.

Consequences

This change is causing important issues for our company. 

1. Maintenance supervisors and planners are no longer able to see the maintenance history of a given asset hierarchy. In the previous example, when snowcat FM-D-34 is repaired, we would search for all maintenance jobs that are related to that snowcat FM-D-34 (including child assets). To do that, we would search for maintenance jobs that are associated to asset ID that "begins with" FM-D-34. This is a small example with only two levels, but we have examples with up to 5 levels in the hierarchy and searching using the parent asset would not be an option.
2. Managers often need to build reports to estimate ressources used for a given asset hierarchy (costs, parts and items). These analyses are performed using a similar approach.

Idea description

A potential solution to this problem would be to create a button that enables to rename Asset IDs. For functional locations, there is a “Rename” button that enables to edit functional locations IDs.