Conrad Volkmann

It must be possible to find available inventory based on a combination of engineering attributes, ideally with the possibility to specify a range of values as well.

So far, you can use the properties to search for all items that exist, but not with focus on availability.

This may be something to be solved with the inventory availability service or with co-pilot capabilities.

This is mission critical for customers in manufacturing, especially in complex engineering, electrical engineering, and obviously in the Food and beverage industry (Assumption: allergens and other critical attributes are engineering attributes).

In many cases, the traceability to a vendor related material is not done with Batch or serial references, but basically by using other Vendor references for traceability:

• Purchase order number
• Delivery note number (Receipt ID in Dynamics)
• Shipment ID
• Invoice number
• Vendor package ID / Handling unit ID / Container- ID
• Obviously, an important reference to track is the delivery date.

If no batch or serial number is defined or tracked, those references are the preferred references to track back to the Vendor traceability. The Vendor might also provide additional tracking references in an ASN or in an As-build-BOM Report that are NOT used as inventory dimensions in Dynamics, but should be registered in the Tracking solution.

It should be possible to:

• Export of additional purchase references to the traceability solution
• View and analyze traceability based on those document / reference types
• Import additional references to the traceability model that are NOT registered in Dynamics directly.

When raw materials are stored in silos, often a new batch is filled into a silo without the silo completely empty. For traceability, this results in a mix of batches (what may be one solution to solve the scenario: create a new merged batch.

The other solution would be to allow to create tracking references on consumption for more than one Batch at a time.

This also applies to scenarios where a production line may be provisioned with material from multiple batches at the same time.

In a way, this could be solved with a concept of "staged batches" on a specific location, that create more than one traceability reference on consumption.

For various planning processes it is needed, that for a specific coverage dimension, it is possible to define a priotized list of allowed values.

Example: Inventory Status:

Assume you have Inventory Statuses for product quality:

Q3 - Highest quality

Q2 - Medium quality

Q1 - Low quality

BL - In review

RJ - Rejected - to be returned.

Depending on the customer Requirement, it should be possible to fullfill a customer demand for Q2 with quality Q2 or Q3 (In that sequence).

A customer demand for Q1 should be fulfilled with Q1 - Q2 - or Q3 (In that sequence)

So it should be possible for every dimension value used in an issue transaction what receipt or inventory transactions are allowed to be pegged and in what sequence that pegging should happen (similar to the plan groups, but specific to a dimension).

This should also work for product dimensions, warehouse and eventually Owner or Batch-Number.

When a product is substituted, it must be possible to mark the substituted material as Use-Up, meaning that the old material inventory is consumed FIRST from inventory before the new material or material variant is consumed.

When using plan groups in formulas, it is possible to define the sequence of consumption, however in this case, the old material that is no longer supposed to be purchased or produced must be on priority 1 to be consumed first from inventory - but it is not supposed to be purchased.

One way to solve this would be to consider the lifecycle state for procurement or production. Another way would be to introduce more sophisticated replacement rules.

If the solution is based on planning groups, it would be great to see that concept also enabled in Discrete BOM's.