Sharing of Customers and Vendors in AX 2012 (Update)

Posted on: March 16, 2016 | By: Jarrod Kraemer | Microsoft Dynamics AX/365

Authored by: Dave Occhionero

About a year and a half ago I had written a blog post regarding the sharing of Customers and Vendors in AX.  At the time of the post there was very little information posted in the AX Community that discussed the pros and cons of whether or not you should share your Customer or Vendor base.  When the client I was partnering with first received R3, we had looked at using the new Master Data Management features that were available, but decided against using those features.  It was during the requirement gathering and process design stage of our project when we decided to share both Customers and Vendors.  We went Live in January of 2015, and wanted to provide the community with an update on what we have noticed in the past year regarding our shared customer and vendor decision. 

In my previous post I included the following link that Microsoft sent us to verify the list of tables we needed to share to successfully share customers and vendors.  This location is still valid, and we would recommend anyone looking to share customers and vendors to use these instructions and table collections:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj556270.aspx

Since our decision to share customers and vendors I am happy to share that our decision was the right one.  By sharing this data we have been able to:

1.      Maintain clean and consistent data records for a particular customer or vendor

2.      Streamline customer and vendor management

3.      Centralize payments out of one company for one vendor number

4.      Keep organized and accurate collections for large accounts

5.      360 degree reporting on a customer/vendor in all legal entities

6.      Easily integrate customer and vendor data when converting legacy data or performing an acquisition

As you can see we have gained efficiency with our system design.  We no longer have 1 vendor containing 4 different numbers in 4 different Legal Entities in our ERP system.  Everything is going designed as planned.  The only issues we have notice are small in scale but worth mentioning.

1.      When a Customer or Vendor has transactions in multiple legal entities, users have to log into each entity to see the transaction.  There is no transaction lookup regardless of Legal Entity built into standard AX.

2.      We did run into issues with linking a vendor payment in one legal entities to vendor transactions in multiple legal entities.  It was difficult to pull the legal entity of the transaction line using standard AX.  We had to develop reports to pull this information from AX.

Again, these were a couple of small issues that we ran into, and by no means were these show stoppers.

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



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