Kevin Fons Sr Application Consultant

We need the ability to add attachments or record links to Lot Numbers and serial numbers or to their information cards. When items are purchased or manufactured and documents like quality certifications are required it would be beneficial if there were quick access to these documents to be able to view and print by lot or serial number. They could be attached to the information cards. It would be ideal if there was a way to access all these documents in a tree/trace structure and then print the documents as needed. For example a sales order item you would need to see the production order the lot was produced from and then the related lots from the components used on the production order and then be able to print them to include with the shipment for certification purposes. We are currently working on an extension for this but it is quite a bit of programming since there is very little functionality available to do this.

Currently you can leave the expiration on a item that expires blank and it will calculate the expiration as Today + expiration calculation from the item. The other option is to enter the actual expiration date. We have several customers where the vendor only provides a manufacture date and a shelf life. We would like a third expiration calculation where you could enter a manufacture date and the expiration would calculate as manufacture date + expiration calculation from the item. We have done this modification in on-premise fro several customers and are working on it for a couple in BC SaaS now.

Many of our customers require a separate Remitt To address to send checks an/or bills to. We have done modification to add this to the company information page and then print on Sales Invoices and even purchase orders. It would be very useful to have this option as a stock feature.

A common modification we do for customers it to back-flush "standard" labor at output vs when the order is finished. By doing this the capacity entries are created as production is done and there is not a variance until the order is finished like you have in stock BC. This tends to make accounting happier. This is done in companies where they do not report actual labor and just flush labor at the routing standard. At the first output, the setup capacity is posted and long with a calculated run based on the routing time and qty output. Subsequent outputs only posts additional run time. There is also an option to "explode the routing" and post the standard labor to the prior operations where the company does not output for each operation but only the final operation is output.

Need the ability to add links or attachments to the lot and serial information card pages. When items are received quality certificates may be included and these ideally could be scanned and linked to the lot or serial numbers received. They would then be available later related to production and sales order requirements to send to customers related to quality requirements. This is very common for many customers who require quality certifications.

SKU’s currently are only one way “Transfer-From”. Many companies have Offsite Overflow warehouses used for bulk storage that does not fit in the main location. The companies manually transfer inventory to and from these locations and planning does not view the inventory as available and typically suggests messages to order more (the is not nettable / non-nettable functionality in BC). If a “Transfer-To” location was added to a SKU, it would allow planning to suggest transfer orders from the Offsite warehouse to the main warehouse when inventory was available Offsite. This would be beneficial as offsite inventory would be used before recommending new message to order more inventory. Transfer messages would show in planning until the demand was greater than the total inventory of the main and offsite locations combined, then new purchases would be recommended. Here is an example: The company receive a full truckload of product to the main location. There is only room for 10 of the 40 pallets on the truck so the other 30 pallets are transferred to the offsite warehouse manually. Sales orders come in and ship from the main warehouse and deplete the 10 pallets of material until at some point additional stock is needed in the main warehouse. Current functionality would not see the inventory in the offsite warehouse and messages would generate in planning to order more inventory. The buyer needs to be aware there is inventory offsite and to delete the messages in planning and create transfer orders. IF there was a “Transfer-to” setup on the SKU for the item, instead of creating purchase messages, the planning would create transfer orders for the material as needed from the offsite warehouse to the main warehouse until the demand was greater than the total inventory in the main and offsite warehouse.

Have an option to setup a location as nettable to another location. For example an Offsite bulk warehouse could be set as nettable to the main location. Then when planning is run or availability viewed the total inventory between the 2 locations would be used. This could prevent excess purchase or production messages form being created. This could be done at the location and / or SKU level (I have another idea for a SKU Transfer-to location similar to this idea in the purchasing section)

There is code in the planning function that if there are any item ledger entries against a production order, planning will treat the order as planning flexibility none. The result of this is that if the demand date is before the supply date (dales order pulled in or prod order moved out) planning will ignore the released order and suggest a new order resulting in an over-supply. For example I have a production order for 1000 pieces due June 1 related to a sales demand for 1 piece due June 1 and I consume some of the raw material. If for some reason, the sales order is moved to May 31st, planing will now ignore the production order and suggest a new order for the sales order demand (if the multiple is 1000 it would be for the multiple). It will never suggest a change or cancel to the original order since it views it as planning flexibility = None. Many companies have thousands of planning messages and to not even present and exception message that there is a supply / demand imbalance is very dangerous and several of our customers have ended up with thousands of dollars in mistakenly ordered components.

Please add the Calendar Rounding Precision to the Work center card page and the Machine Center card page, customers use this to limit the number of decimals. It would be good if all available table fields would be on the page so the users could display what they use or need vs having to add via an extension.

An often missed "feature" by most customers (from the NAV 2018 help files) - If the lot accumulation period is less than the dampener period, then the dampener period is dynamically set to equal the lot accumulation period. This is not mentioned in the Microsoft Docs site for he planning functionality at the end of this document... This is troublesome for pretty much all our customers as they do not expect or want an interaction between the dampener and the accumulation period. If they set the dampener period to 1W (1 week), they really expect that if a purchase order or production order are coming in early inside the 1 week dampener (prior to the demand) they do not want a planning message. It is pretty common to have 1D to 1W accumulation periods but have dampeners set to 1W or more (have seen up to 4W). Please remove the interaction between the dampener and the accumulation period and respect the dampener regardless of what the accumulation period is set to. Definition or the dampener from docs.microsot.com - note no mention of the accumulation period: This field is used to avoid minor rescheduling of existing supply out in time. Changes from the supply date until one dampener period from the supply date will not generate any action messages. The dampener period specifies a period of time during which you do not want the planning system to propose to reschedule existing supply orders forward. This limits the number of insignificant rescheduling of existing supply to a later date if the rescheduled date is within the dampener period. As a result, a positive delta between the suggested new supply date and the original supply date will always be larger than the dampener period.