Your Partner for Microsoft AX
jsmyth
An experienced software implementation consultant with a background in manufacturing and supply chain management to blue chip organisations such as Debenhams, Jaeger and Austin Reed.
Homepage: http://www.ardentsolutions.co.uk
Posts by jsmyth
Brilliance by Design
Jan 18th
A belated Happy New Year to all readers of the Ardent Solutions Blog, it’s astonishing that we are already into the third working week of the New Year, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun.
During the Christmas Break I exchanged laptop for paintbrush and dutifully got on with the jobs assigned to me by the lady of the house. Overindulging in a little too much festive food and wine, I was grateful returning to work on the 4th of January ready for anything the New Year had in stall for me.
The first job of the New Year involved reconfiguring a customer’s System, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, to support up to 6 decimal places for purchase prices and standard stock costs. On face value this sounded like a fairly simple task. Once I had delved a little deeper the change also needed applying to the costing version, stock transaction file, GRN file, ledger journals and so on. The list of database tables affected by this change grew and in an ordinary ERP system this change might have taken hours or possibly even days. But Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 isn’t an ordinary system, quite the contrary. It is an extraordinary system! Common fields that are referenced on many tables (such as the purchase price) are assigned an Extended Data Type. Think of an Extended Data Type as a template, which can be applied to many different objects, or in this case fields. The benefit this brings is efficiency when making changes of this nature. The change is made once against the Extended Data Type and the new format is inherited by any tables referencing it. To put this rather bluntly, a job which might have taken hours in other systems was achieved in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 in less than 2 minutes. This efficient design is reflected throughout the system. Considerable planning definitely went into the architecture of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. As the title of the blog suggests “Brilliance by design” is in the DNA of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009.
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The cost of quality in manufacturing
Nov 29th
The cost of quality, or perhaps costs associated with poor quality, is a common discussion point within many UK board rooms today. With unrivalled manufacturing growth in the Far East, mass produced items do not always represent the best quality but do very often tempt customers with very low prices. How can we compete in the UK? One approach is to offer a higher quality product, that is more durable, reliable and with a potentially longer service life.
The management of quality within production environments is not easy, all too often regarded as a cost to the business, rather than a potential saving when the cost of product failure and returns is taken into consideration. The experience at Ardent Solutions when implementing business systems into organisations is that quality systems typically grow out of necessity, perhaps driven by a specific historic failure in the process. All too often this can result in quality systems that are isolated from core business systems, introducing duplication of effort maintaining data, and a lack of visibility to the business as a whole.
Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 features a quality module, embedded into core business processes of the system. Rule driven quality associations automatically create relationships between specific system transactions. Throughout a complete supply chain, the quality module within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 has the ability to automatically create quality orders, holding specific transactions and requiring specific quality operations to be completed. Consider a supplier that consistently delivers sub standard materials that sometimes inadvertently get released into production. This can be controlled at the point of receipt, automatically quarantining the raw materials until the quality process has been carried out. Consider a specific operation on your shop floor that has the potential to introduce reliability issues to the finished product. Again, this can be controlled within Microsoft Dynamics AX2009, automatically generating quality orders for specific production operations or processes. Where quality orders identify a problem, this can be documented as a non conformance with corrective actions to address the quality issue. All of these transactions can then be reported upon, providing the information to continually engineer higher quality into your products. The question isn’t how much quality costs but how much quality improvements can increase profitability. This functionality is available as standard within Microsoft Dynamics AX2009.
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Dynamics AX Role Centres in a challenging business environment
Aug 27th
The economic news is encouraging. Earlier today the Office for National Statistics revised its original growth estimates upward from 1.1% to 1.2% for the second quarter of 2010 as confidence returns to many sectors, particularly manufacturing and construction.
As the recovery gathers pace now isn’t the time to take our collective eyes off the road, companies must remain focused on our corporate objectives and business growth goals. Leveraging visibility of key performance metrics or indicators (KPI’s) has until now been the preserve of specialist, bespoke and rather expensive business dashboard applications. Microsoft Dynamics AX and the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem are changing that with Microsoft Dynamics AX role centres.
As a key component of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, the role based home page is the landing page for users of the system, both internally with the rich client and externally using the Enterprise Portal web browser solution. What makes the role based home page particularly interesting is its ability to clearly and efficiently display current operational performance, correlating this alongside the original business KPI’s. This can be displayed graphically in the format of histograms and pie charts or numerically with the ability to drill down into the detail within.
A number of other tools within the role based home page look to increase personal productivity and a pro-active approach to tasks through the use of Cue’s, workflow business alerts.
