Dynamics 365 SCM: Do not reserve in Inbound

Dynamics 365 SCM: Do not reserve in Inbound

You are going to have this error in Dynamics 365 Warehouse management, guaranteed. The error manifests itself at the production order picking or at sales order picking: the picking location is empty. Depending on the Location directive failures setup under the Warehouse management parameters this is going to either create a broken warehouse work or throw an error, but the outcome will be bad in any case. This issue can occur when materials or merchandise have arrived but have not yet been put away in their expected location. They are not on the shelves but still somewhere in a staging area, possibly waiting for sorting or expecting a quality control. If your location directives are correct, you may need to adjust your inventory status settings to prevent this issue from happening.

The below recipe was invented either by Carsten or Thomas, maybe Nicolas, all kudos to them, I have just picked up the torch, refined the recipe and shared it with my colleagues and customers at 2 other implementation projects.

In a nutshell, create a new Inventory status called INBOUND and assign it to every purchase order. Make sure every sales or transfer order becomes the regular inventory status AVAILABLE. When a production order covers the demand, it will inherit the “Available” status and pass it to the BOM lines. Only “Available” raw materials will be reserved, not “Inbound”. If you attempt to release the production order, it will fail, because the reservation will misfire (but only if you install my fix Production order should not get Released on material shortage). This is a desired behaviour, because the materials have not been inspected or deconsolidated yet. The “Inbound” inventory status remains transparent to master planning and won’t be replenished unless the quality inspection fails and the goods become BLOCKED.

To implement this scenario, you’ll need to adjust some very specific parameters throughout the system. Below are the notes to myself:

In Warehouse management > Setup > Inventory > Inventory statuses, add a new inventory status called “Inbound“. Do not mark it as inventory blocking; it only needs to differ from the “Available“.
In Warehouse management > Setup > Warehouse > Warehouses, do not set the default inventory status ID at your advanced warehouse, as it will overrule other settings.
In Warehouse management parameters, set the default inventory status ID to “Available” and mark Use default status for sales orders and transfer orders to force most material demand to look for Available items only.
Ensure that every purchase order line becomes a different status by assigning the default inventory status ID “Inbound” to every supplier, new or existing (Accounts payable > Vendors > All vendors).
Turn OFF the Reserve ordered items inventory parameter in Inventory management > Setup > Inventory and warehouse management parameters. To be honest, I have not seen any customer yet who benefited from the reservations in purchase orders not yet received, it just messes things up. If you do let the system reserve in open purchase orders, it is going to reserve the Inbound status, which is clearly not our intent, and the picking location will be empty again.
Now it becomes tricky. If you use master planning, do not firm planned orders in the Standard or– God forbid – Extended Update marking mode. This marking will again be later converted into a fixed reservation of the materials / merchandise in the Inbound status. Instead, carefully set the default Update marking mode in Master planning > Setup > Master planning parameters. In a retail/distribution scenario, choose “None”. In a MTO (manufacture-to-order) or a ETO (engineer-to-order) scenario, choose Single level standard. The latter is quite a new addition to Dynamics 365 SCM: D365 New Feature – Make to order supply automation – Logan Consulting. This will establish a link between the Sales order and the production order, but not their lines or lower-level production orders to purchase orders. If there is a strong need for a chain of assembly / sub-assembly’s production orders, you may still use the Pegged supply BOM line type. This will make the upstream production order a derived requirement and it will establish a firm marking between the top-level and bottom-level production orders.
Configure a recurring batch job in Warehouse management > Periodic tasks > Change inventory status to quickly update the status of “Inbound” items to “Available” once they are put away in their regular storage locations. Find a good set of criteria to capture all regular locations for storage and picking:

By following these steps, you can avoid the empty picking location error and ensure that your inventory status settings are correctly configured.

Warehouse management blog series

Production order should not get Released on material shortage

Update 27.08.2024: The below issue has ultimately been solved by Microsoft in Update 38, see What’s new or changed in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 10.0.38 (February 2024) – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn. The feature “Prevent production orders to be released when full material is not available” is described as follows: “Fixes an issue where the production control parameter Requirement for material reservation is set to Require full reservation. Previously, when a production order was released while this option was selected, its status was always changed from Scheduled to Released, even if all material couldn’t be fully reserved. When this feature is enabled, when a production order is released with this option selected, the production order will only change status once all material is fully available for reservation.”

There is an evergreen issue in Dynamics 365 material reservation for production: despite the policy “Require full reservation“, the production order is released even if there is a shortage of materials:

The issue is very well known, I have been combating it since 2018. It has been reported to Microsoft on numerous occasions by my colleagues around the world: Production order should not get status Released if raw material release to warehouse fails.

The consequences are dire. A released order’s jobs will appear on the Shop floor control terminal and animate the worker to start the order. In the course of the assembly the worker is going to be forced to interrupt his/her work and fetch the parts from the warehouse. Later, at the report as finished / material backflushing stage at the Production floor terminal, it is going to prevent the online material consumption if the backflushing principle is set to Finish.

Apparently, the BOM line and the warehouse work generation are not in the same transaction scope as the overall production order release. Indeed, the ProdWHSRelease call is performed outside of the ttsbegin/ttscommit pair in ProdUpdRelease

Since Microsoft refuses to fix this problem, let me publish a programmatic solution. We put the ProdWHSRelease call into the endUpdateProduction() method if the order requires full reservation. Then we prevent the execution of ProdWHSRelease for the second time by temporarily changing one parameter and then reverting it back:

DontReleaseOnMaterialShortage.axpp

				
					                ttscommit;
                this.printout();
            }
        }
        catch (Exception::Deadlock)
        {
            retry;
        }
...
        prodTable.reread();
        if (ProdParametersDim::find(prodTable.InventDimId).ProductionLineRelease == WHSProductionLineRelease::OnProdOrderRelease)
        {
            ProdWHSRelease::newFromProdParmRelease(prodParmRelease).whsReleaseSingleOrder(prodTable);
        }

Production and Manufacturing blog series

Subcontracting with Warehouse management – Part 2

Following up the 1st part of this blog series, let’s elaborate on the standard model of subcontracting promoted by Microsoft
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/supply-chain/production-control/manage-subcontract-work-production

Option 2: Subcontracting via Production order

The semi-finished product (here: M0070) has a BOM of its own. It includes all materials but also a service item (M0070_SC) for the value added by the subcontractor.

The service item drives the purchasing process with the subcontractor, is carries the purchase price of the service. We open a purchase order for a service, and provide components to the subcontractor which are either sent to the supplier from the main warehouse or procured directly to the supplier’s site. On the PO delivery note posting, the semi-finished product is received as an output of a sub-production order, it is then brought (“put away”) to the main warehouse, where it is picked for the master production order as a regular component.

The product structure transforms to a 2-level BOM:

Note that this time the service and the free issue material items belong to the same operation 5 which resides on an own route.

The standard process includes the following steps:

The main order and the subcontracting order are either converted (firmed) from planned production orders, or the main order for D0003 is entered manually, then the estimation spawns the sub-production order automatically due to the type Vendor of the M0070 BOM line. The MRP explosion shows the following picture:
With the firming/estimation of the sub-production order a purchase order for the service item M0070_SC is automatically generated by the system
The purchase order is confirmed by the procurement department.
The sub-production order is started from the screen Production / Subcontracted work. No materials or time may be consumed before this point.
The transfer order for the free issue materials is released to the warehouse (it may be the same person who created and started the production order).
The warehouse workers execute the picking work, confirm the TO shipment.
The transfer order is getting shipped and received.

After a while the semi-finished product arrives at our doorstep. It is time to ‘receive’ the service. In standard Dynamics 365, this is not performed at a mobile scanner. Instead, a delivery note is posted against the purchase order. Thanks to the configuration described in first blog, this leads to an automatic consumption of the BOM and the route of the sub-production order. The system automatically:

– consumes both the materials delivered for free (M0071) and the service item M0070_SC itself,

– reports the route good quantity = purchase order quantity my means of a Route card journal, the same journal…

– …derives and posts a Report as finished journal which writes the semi-finished product in the stock ledger.

Normally, the last step – posting a RaF journal – is going to fail, because the license plate (SSCC pallet ID) is missing. To circumvent this, the special output location of the resource RECV-SUB can be given a “non-LP-controlled” location profile and assigned a “No putaway” work policy. This technique is described in detail in another blog of mine.

As a result, the received quantity of M0070 appears at the location 51/RECV-SUB with no license plate known and no production put-away work generated. A ‘fake’ put-away work may be triggered by the user with a special Movement by template menu item on the mobile device. The ‘from’ location in this menu item is pre-selected to RECV-SUB via the Default data setting of the menu item:

This menu item should be given a specific Directive code; a set of Location directives of the Inventory movement kind would react to this directive code and simulate the ‘put’ logic of a purchase order. The license plate number is scanned by the user during the movement. As a result of this movement, the pallet will land where it was supposed to be if we received the M0070 item from a purchase order (Option 1).

Now, the problem is that the step “Post purchase order delivery note” is not automated. Somebody needs to recognize the subcontracted PO as such, put aside the mobile device, open the rich Dynamics 365 interface and capture the quantity. In essence, this is an annoying deviation from the standard PO receipt process, a source of human error.

The suggested disruptive solution is a…

Warehouse-enabled service item

Astonishingly, it works: a service may be received on a license plate (pallet) in D365.

The stocked service item (Item model group -> Stocked product = Yes) should be given a WHS-enabled Storage dimension group with Use warehouse management process = Yes. Such an item participates in the master planning as long as it is assigned a Vendor-type BOM line, it does not have any on-hand stock at any given point in time, but it does record inventory transactions with all 5 mandatory WHS dimensions: Site, Warehouse, Location, Inventory status, License plate.

Provide the service item with the same unit, unit conversion factors, Unit sequence group, Reservation hierarchy as the subcontracted product it represents (here: M0070). Do not try to set the external supplier ID to the item number of M0070: the user would need to scan the real item ID (M0070_SC) at the baydoor.
Set the Output location of the subcontractor resource SUB_US-104 to the regular, LP-controlled location RECV. Here is what is going to happen on a timeline:

In practice, the consumption of M0070_SC in the below example will happen at the location 005 (the default WH production input location):
51/RECV +10 ea M0070_SC
51/005 -10 ea M0070_SC
This works even without the negative stock option set, because there is no such a thing as a service stock level: it is neither maintained nor controlled by the system. The location stock imbalance is not a problem for the inventory settlement and closing, because the location dimension is never a ‘financial’ one: the overall stock level at the warehouse level is zero, the (+) and (-) transactions will be settled and will mutually annihilate.

Subsequently, at the start of the sub-production order to the warehouse the system is going to say “The total quantity for production BOM XXXXXX could not be fulfilled. No work was created for wave USMF-YYYYYYYYY. See the work creation history log for details.”, because the item M0070_SC cannot be really picked, and this warning message can be safely ignored.

The scenario then continues as follows:

The service from the purchase order is “received”, the license plate number is scanned or generated. Interestingly, the system does not build any put-away work for the item, probably because a service item cannot be reserved in any location.
The delivery note (en-us: packing slip) posting should better be automated. In standard D365, this doesn’t work, because the batch mode posting requires a unique delivery note number. With a little customization this obstacle may be overcome by feeding the system with a fake delivery note number “DUMMY”. With the posting running in the batch mode and automatically updating every 2 minutes any purchase order with some quantity in the status Registered, this step may be fully automated:
In standard D365 FO, the automatic posting of the picking list journal is going to fail because of the missing location (the Location dimension in the BOM of any WHS-enabled item is always empty, because it awaits a production order release to reserve at the location level according to the location directives, but a service cannot be reserved by definition), and the automatic posting of the Report as finished journals is going to ask for a license plate ID due to the LP-controlled location RECV. 2 little customizations outlined in the next chapter help: the service Licence plate ID propagates the production order and generates the RaF put-away work.
The RaF put away location directives should be configured in exactly the same manner as the purchase order put-away locations. They can react to the M0070 item number or sense any other attribute of the sub-production order, such as a specific pool or a presence of a Vendor operation on the joined production route.The put-away work should be processed at the mobile device. A Print work line may be added to the Work template to print or re-print the pallet label which now has the proper Item ID: M0070 instead of the M0070_SC (beware that the Zebra ZPL printing language cannot carve a substring out of the printing stream or perform any other string manipulations).
The semi-finished product is now placed in the main warehouse and the main production order may be reserved and released to the warehouse. A picking work for the subcontracted SFG is created.
The picking work is performed at the mobile scanner:
The main production order may be stated and the materials may be consumed with a Picking list in any eligible way.

ProdBOM table customization

The above scenario needs a little extension of the ProdBOM table:
– the location of the service may not remain empty. The method setInventDimId() has been extended to populate any WHS-enables service BOM line with the Default production input location of the warehouse. The location does not need to match the inbound location for the reasons described above.

– the license plate number of the service received with the purchase order should propagate the marked subcontracted production order. The method postVendorProdRoute() has been extended to write the service LP number right into the production order inventory dimensions. Obviously, this allows for the receipt of 1 pallet at a time, and updates the production order with the most recent license plate.

This does not contradict the current system logic though, as partial receipts can anyways only be enabled by an undocumented feature ProdJournalPostVendorProdBOMInOrderFeature:
“This feature enables partial receipt of subcontracted items. Before, when reporting a partial quantity on a purchase order for a sub contracted service item, the full quantity was updated on the related picking list journal on the production order. Now, the correct partial received quantity is updated. This feature also fixes an issue with an incorrect updated scrap quantity when using BOM lines of type Vendor.“

The source code can be downloaded here: ProdBOMLine_SubcontractingLicensePlate.axpp
Feel free to use, but I do not give any guarantees 😉

Conclusion, pros and contras

2 options have been presented:

Subcontracting via Purchase order

+ A lightweight implementation can be easily adopted by the logistics department.
+ It does not require any customizations.
– The raw material transfer to the subcontractor may be scheduled too late if we maintain the subcontracting lead time at the route operation level.
– The cost price of the semi-finished product only includes the cost of the subcontracting service, but not the materials. The standard price model will always show deviations.
– The free issue raw materials are only consumed at the next operation. On long-running orders this distorts the WIP value.

Subcontracting via Production order

– The solution contains too many moving parts: the sub-production order must be in the Started status, all raw material levels at the external warehouse must be exact.
– The segregation of duties between the procurement, logistics, warehouse and production departments is broken.
– Such a ‘deviant’ process is not easily adopted by the warehouse people: they must know when to use the normal purchase put-away menu items and when to leverage the production put-away menu.
– Comfortable work is not possible without the above production BOM and purchase delivery note auto-posting customizations
+ The cost price of the semi-finished product is correct at all times.

Choose for yourself, but the CFO may let you reconsider 😉

There is a video recording in German explaining fine aspects of the 2 scenarios.