Asset Management in #MSDyn365

For many companies, integrating their machines, vehicles, and other assets into their ERP has long been a pipe dream. A great ISV product by Dynaway answered this call for many Dynamics companies over the years. In late 2018, Microsoft purchased Dynaway’s Enterprise Asset Management solution and got to work making this a standard module. This blog will be a brief introduction into the capabilities of this module.

First, let’s take a look at where this fits in with existing modules and functionality. Dynamics already had a Fixed asset module with deals with acquiring, capitalizing, and depreciating your assets. Asset management focuses on managing, maintaining, and fixing those assets.

Asset management integrates with Dynamics, much like any other module. There are items, purchase orders, scheduling capabilities requiring calendars, and much more. Assets represent physical assets your company own, such as, machines, equipment, and vehicles. They are created and setup in Functional locations that represent physical spaces, like a warehouse. Functional locations can have sublocations.

Asset types are setup to categorize different functional types of Assets, as well as manage tasks and create rules for asset maintenance. For example, all your drilling machines may need an Asset type with the same Maintenance tasks, Counters, Asset attributes, Condition assessment templates, and Asset models. Whereas, your forklifts would have different parameters for when and how it needs to be serviced and could belong to a different Asset type.

Work orders are used to perform predictive maintenance, reactive maintenance, and inspections. Work order define the job or activity that needs to occur and one work order can be used for multiple assets. In addition, work orders can spawn requirements and link to purchase orders for spare parts, or just to create the service Purchase order for a technician to perform maintenance on one of your assets.

To create work orders, a Maintenance schedule is used. This is a similar concept to a production schedule derived from manually created production orders and Master planning generated production orders.

Maintenance schedules consist of work that can come from 1 of 3 Maintenance processes. Maintenance requests are used for corrective maintenance. This is something that would be used when there is an unexpected breakdown or failure of a machine, for example. A manager or planner would review that request, and if accepted, assign the work order to a technician.

Maintenance plans are used for preventive maintenance. These are triggered by time or counter based intervals. A common scenario for this would be assets like a truck engine that need to be serviced every 50,000 miles, or a machine press that needs to be serviced after 200 hours or run time. Also for preventive or reactive maintenance is Maintenance rounds. These are used when you need to carry out a similar task at regular intervals. For example, safety inspection jobs that need to be carried out on several machines within the same intervals.

There are lots of other things that we can go into on work orders, but the last thing I want to talk about in this intro is the mobile workspace. This is pretty slick already. The below graphic highlights the activities and information that can be access through this mobile interface:

I have downloaded the D365 app to my phone so I could use this workspace hooked up to my company’s internal D365 sandbox and it works great. It’s very simple and intuitive, allows the use of linking attachments of pictures right to work orders, make comments that are immediately visible in D365, view statuses of work and its maintenance checklists, and more.

At first, I was fairly intimidated by learning another module in D365, but I was pleasantly surprised how a lot of the little things clicked into place as far as understanding the business processes and its relation to physically managing your assets. I think a lot of companies will be interested in leveraging this toolset and expanding their digital transformations in Dynamics, especially as additions like integrations with D365 HoloLens Guides (Requires use of Dual Write and MRGuidesFeature flighted feature) and the future with connected IoT.