web
You’re offline. This is a read only version of the page.
close
Skip to main content

Announcements

No record found.

News and Announcements icon
Community site session details

Community site session details

Session Id :
Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, ...
Unanswered

Changing lifecycle state for obsolete products in a large company for the very first time.

(4) ShareShare
ReportReport
Posted on by 12

 I am new to using Dynamics 365, and having on the job training. I have run into an issue. The company I am working for has very large operations. We have 41930 rows of released products, and 94699 released product variants.

The problem is that from these products and the variants, not all are actual products that the company is manufacturing. They have bought various spare parts, machines, and other items that get used in the manufacturing process either directly or indirectly.

So while we do have 25 years worth of company history and from my estimation, at least 30,000 are actual products (it may sound a lot, but the operations is such that they make a variant of a product and release it as a new product). The company adopted D365 in 2020, but the database is still very large.

I am trying to use the UAT testing system to figure out how to phase out and make products obsolete, but I keep running into roadblock. I am using product information management to do this task. I want to review and mark products obsolete, it is a large exercise, but the obsolescence simulation always gives me an error.

changing-lifecycle-state-for-obsolete-products-in-a-large-v0-8yugauoklszf1.webp
changing-lifecycle-state-for-obsolete-products-in-a-large-v0-mtkxm63olszf1.webp
Categories:
I have the same question (0)
  • Sohaib Cheema Profile Picture
    49,677 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Hi,
    What defines one of your products as not being used anymore.
    Are you going to look at transactions history of the products (to find out if a products has not been used for long?) Or do you have a list of products already that your company is no longer using?
  • ND-07110812-0 Profile Picture
    12 on at
    @Sohaib Cheema We are trying to look at the sales of the products and see which one has not sold in the past 2 years.
  • André Arnaud de Calavon Profile Picture
    303,667 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Hi,
     
    This error is too generic to learn the root cause. If you go to the batch job history, can you then find more detailed logs?
    Note that making the products obsolete will not allow you to delete the items as there are dependencies from a lot of tables.
     
    For shrinking the database size, there are multiple action possible. One of them is enabling Cleanup routines.
     
  • ND-07110812-0 Profile Picture
    12 on at
    @André Arnaud de Calavon as you correctly pointed out, the goal of the exercise is not to delete the products as there are many dependencies in the transactions history. We are trying to implement future planning and forecasting for production, but the issue is that there are currently no product lifecycle states that exist. So there are many that have not had any movement since 2023 and before. Making those obsolete removes them from planning and also helps product campaigns by focusing on what is more relevant. We want to be doing this on a periodic basis as well, however it has been proving difficult to start. 
     
    In Batch job history, the error logs "update has been cancel, batch task failed, end of task log" so not very helpful information to help diagnose what is going on. I did not cancel the job, and no one has access to my terminal either, so this failure is something that baffles me. 
  • Sohaib Cheema Profile Picture
    49,677 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
     
    You can look at the inventory transaction to find the History of any item transactions, to find out how frequently or recently it was used.
     
     
    One thing is for sure, if there would any transactions (even 1 transaction) the system would allow you to delete such an item..
    However you can stop items from being sold using sell end date on the item master (under Sales tab)
     
     

Under review

Thank you for your reply! To ensure a great experience for everyone, your content is awaiting approval by our Community Managers. Please check back later.

Helpful resources

Quick Links

Introducing the 2026 Season 1 community Super Users

Congratulations to our 2026 Super Stars!

Congratulations to our 2025 Community Spotlights

Thanks to all of our 2025 Community Spotlight stars!

Leaderboard > Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, AX, GP, SL

#1
Giorgio Bonacorsi Profile Picture

Giorgio Bonacorsi 613

#2
André Arnaud de Calavon Profile Picture

André Arnaud de Cal... 455 Super User 2026 Season 1

#3
Syed Haris Shah Profile Picture

Syed Haris Shah 292 Super User 2026 Season 1

Last 30 days Overall leaderboard

Product updates

Dynamics 365 release plans