The only thing worse that having a “Discussion” with Human Resources is to miss a “Discussion”, and have another “Discussion” created to discuss your poor time planning. To solve this, you may want to think about creating sending out meeting reminders when Discussions are created, which is just the click on the button within Dynamics AX.
Even if the discussion isn’t pleasant, then at least the creation of one isn’t. Read More
If you are putting your products into boxes before you ship them out, or if you are worried about the cube space that the order lines will take up when being shipped then you might want to get Dynamics AX to calculate them on the fly as you enter in the order lines. The package calculation allows you to define how many items of a product goes into a standard package, and then it will tell you how many of those packages will be used on the order. For example, if you can fit 4 items in a box and the customer orders 6 then it will tell you that you need 2 boxes.
Now you can optimize you packing regardless of the product. Read More
Sales Orders seem to have a life of their own. They are created and every time you look at them, it’s as if someone has been tinkering and changing it. If you want to be able to take a closer look at your orders and see who is making changes to them, and what they have been up to then you may want to enable a feature within Dynamics AX called Order Events which will track whenever anyone updates the Sales Order, or even creates follow on transactions associated with the order.
Watching your orders will be like having hundreds of Tamagotchis to watch and nurture. Read More
As you are typing in orders, rather than guessing how much money you are making on the lines, wouldn’t it be better to see the margin right on the order line. Luckily there is a setting within Dynamics AX that does exactly that. All you need to do is turn it on.
Now you don’t have to go to your manager’s office every time you try to sell a product.
Discussions are a polite term for being called into a meeting with HR, but the creation of them does not have to be a painful affair – at least for the HR department. There is a mass creation feature that allows you to create a block of discussion appointments for a group of employees that makes this process a breeze.
Being called into the Principal’s Office has never been so automated.
Workflows are great, but there are a lot of times that you want to run one version of the workflow in this situation, and another version of the workflow in a different situation. You could take the Sauron approach and create one workflow to rule them all, and embed in conditional tree at the beginning of the workflow that routes you to the right decision tree, or you can just create multiple workflows, and then use the Activation option to tell Dynamics AX when to use the variations of your workflows.
Now you can create an army of workflows that are all unique.
The Export To Excel function within Dynamics AX is a powerful tool, because it gives you a live link back to the database, allows you to add additional fields, and also allows you to refresh the data. But for some people that is just too much power. For those users you can easily turn the Export To Excel from a power tool to a simple screen scrape utility just with a flick of a option flag.
I would never suggest that you do this as an April Fools prank…
The Data Import Export Framework module is not just for getting data in and out of Dynamics AX through import and export files, it also has a nifty feature that allows you to copy data within your companies, so if you are configuring a new legal entity for testing or production purposes, and want to populate it with information from another existing company, you can replicate the data in a matter of minutes.
It’s like having your own personal Sketch-A-Graph, but not as much fun…
The roles within Dynamics AX are pre-configured to restrict users from accessing areas that they usually don’t need to use, but you don’t have to stop there. You can tweak the security even more by restricting access to the field level data that shows up on the forms through the security role maintenance feature, allowing you to give people read only access, or not even show the field in the case of sensitive information. As an added benefit, if you restrict access this way, then the users will not be able to access the data through the reports, or through the Excel add-in.
If your users are already paranoid that they don’t see all of the data, then redacting access this way may push them over the edge. Read More
Although Excel is a great way to import base data into Dynamics AX, sometime you need to bring in the big guns and that’s where the Data Import Export Framework applies. This is a new module that makes importing data into Dynamics AX so much simpler, especially when importing complex data types that include multiple dependent tables. All you need to do is check the data that you want to import and the D.I.E.F. will do the rest for you.
On a side note, “dief” in Dutch actually means “thief”. Is this a coincidence, or is it a reminder that the D.I.E.F. stealing data seem so simple? Read More
Dynamics AX Tip Of The Day 