Receipt status arrived: The forgotten jewel

There are two ways to learn how Dynamics AX is working. Users can do courses, read manuals, self-training, “try and fail”, blogs etc. Professionals can also read code. Each time Microsoft is releasing a new version I try to read the code for better understanding new features and possibilities.

I then often find traces of functionality that exists, but that Microsoft never took the “last mile” and created the front-end functionality. This code is often made by the best developers in the industry. And it is open and free to use for partners and customers.

One of these hidden jewels are the status arrived.

To explain what this is, we need to understand how the real physical logistics flow is translated and viewed in Dynamics AX.

Dynamics AX tries to mirror this processes with transactions, and reflect each status as both transactions and as inventory statuses. Take a look at the following Dynamics AX On-hand screen.

What I suggest, is that they should start using the Arrived status more. Because it can give some very important information. When an order processor (like Susan) take a look at the current on-hand, because she have a customer on the phone, she can see that the items has arrived, and it is probably just a few hours before the items are available in stock, and ready to be picked.

It also tells the warehouse manager how much goods has arrived to the warehouse, and how he should prioritize his workforce to do quality control and put-away.

It answers one of the most basic logistics questions: Has the items arrived yet?

You may now ask the question: Why have we not heard about this, and why isn’t we using this more?

There is a catch. In order to use the Arrived status, you need to use pallets, and pallet transports. Microsoft is describing the process in this blog. But it is actually quite few that uses pallets in their warehouses. Most SMB companies have warehouses, but just places the goods in cartons into the warehouse.

In the following section I would like to tell you how to go around this, so that you actually can use the arrived status without using pallets. It is just a small modification needed, and it will make sure that the “forgotten jewel” again can shine.

We do this, by making some small changes to how the arrival journal is working. When the user adds a record in the arrival journal we want the inventory transactions to reflect this.

This will be reflected in the on-hand screen as been before.

Here is how I made this possible.

Warning ! The following section is for developers only J, and are created for Dynamics AX 2012 R2.

1.First I need a function for summing up arrived transactions.

2.Create some static methods that controls the arrived status based on WMSJournalTrans.

3.Create event handlers on insert, update and delete methods on the table WMSJournalTrans.

4.A small correction to std. AX is also needed, so that arrived transactions can be seen from the arrival overview.

This concludes the adjustment to make status arrived work for companies that don’t do pallets.

Take care, and happy daxing.