Project Manufacturing in Dynamics AX 2009 (and 2012)

As a manufacturing consultant for Engineer-to-Order companies, I've heard the following requirement often:

How can I see my production order postings (progress of actual time and actual material) in a Project?

This is a basic requirement  that any company that builds equipment would face. Theoretically  this requirement should be addressed with the "consumed" posting type in the project module, where each production order posting creates an immediate Project journal of the same type. This does indeed work.

In my Project costing screen I see exactly how much material and labor cost I have incurred on my production orders that are linked to the project. I can see it by category. Not bad.

Unfortunately, the functionality had three show-stopping limitations from the beginning, so none of our customers could use it.  In  Dynamics AX 2012 nothing has changed in this area.

1.Master Planning cannot be used; Project production orders have to be created manually. Few companies could  get over this hurdle. Big equipment BOM's can generate hundreds of production orders.

2.There cannot be a cost sheet, so no overhead can be defined. Nobody could get over that hurdle

3. The items in question cannot be on standard cost .This one was an issue in only one case. The customer  in -question built larger quantities of a product , sometimes "to inventory", sometimes in a project, so the item was on standard cost but  was sometimes built with "project production orders". 

We have addressed the issues in different ways in the last 7 years, but recently we created what I think is the most elegant solution by modifying the standard code just a little bit.

For issue number 3, it was fairly straightforward to remove the limitation of standard cost in the code. (The standard cost is not in any way used in the transactions, the limitation seemed to be there for formal reasons, which we can agree with).

For issue number 2, we built a new posting mechanism that transfers the production order overhead costs to a Project Expense journal when the production order route card or job card journal is posted. (through SFC or not)

For issue number 1, we are going to allow the user to firm "to a project" and enter a project number for  planned production orders. More news on that later.