Releasing Sales Orders for Picking in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations
Posted on: February 2, 2018 | By: Jarrod Kraemer | Microsoft Dynamics AX/365
Authored by: Rosey McAdams
Effectively and efficiently picking and shipping sales orders to customers is one of the most important processes to master for manufacturing and distribution companies. Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations can help your business automate this process to your specifications utilizing some very cool Advanced WMS functionalities.
While many of us are familiar with automatic reservations in Dynamics once inventory is reserved to a sales order it often is followed up with a very manual process to create a picking list and release it to the warehouse. While manual processing is always an option the Automatic Release to Warehouse functionality can completely eliminate the step of having a user review sales orders to release them to a warehouse, and this can be done based on specific criteria unique to your business processes.
To utilize the Automatic Release to Warehouse capability, navigate to Warehouse Management > Periodic > Automatic Release of Sales Orders
From this form we can start to choose our criteria for automatic release, which is where the real power of this process lies.
Expand the Records to include tab and press the Filter button, here you can set your criteria on a number of sales order fields that will determine which sales order you would like to release to the warehouse during this process.
Below you can see an example of what your release criteria may be, I have only selected a few fields to base my automatic release off of, but you can base if off of any Sales order, Order line, or Customer field that you can think of and would want to control your release to warehouse by clicking on Add.
The first four criteria shown above cannot be changed, and this is the basis for what orders will be considered. My next three criteria are telling me that I only want to release orders with a Ship Date of 2/1/2018, orders that are delivered by truck, and have a customer classification group that indicate this is the highest priority. Once I have finished running this process I can move on to running another auto release for lower priority orders.
Finally, before running the job make sure your Parameters for running the job are as you like – do you want the quantity to release to be the entire quantity or reserved quantity only, do you want to allow release of orders that have already been partially released, and do you want to keep reservations on release failures?
In addition to these parameters there is also one more piece of setup that can contribute to how orders get automatically released, it is the Fulfillment Rate setup on the Accounts Receivable Parameters > Warehouse Management
The fulfillment rate controls what percent of the inventory needs to be available to release the order to the warehouse – in my setup I am saying that my fulfillment rate is 100%, meaning I do not do partial releases to my warehouse.
Once you have your automatic release job ready to go you can click OK to run the job (you may also run it in batch if you have a high volume of orders every time it is run).
After the process completes you will receive a message on the results of running the job, the message will tell you which waves were created and which orders could not be released due to fulfillment rate restrictions as pictured below.
Hope this post helps to get you started on automating your sales order picking and shipping release process! For additional information please feel free to reach out to us at info@loganconsulting.com or (312) 345-8817.
All the best!
Logan Consulting
www.loganconsulting.com