Hi everybody,
I'm lookin for a new process for our manufacturing and hope that someone got some input for this need.
We are using AX 2012 R3 and are using the system in a standardized way. Demand forecast, becomes planned orders which we produce and put in the warehouse. Sales orders are manually created and items are delivered out from the warehouse.
During the years we have ended up with quite many different item numbers for basically the same thing. Many of the items have a similar BOM but some component are different and we get a new item number. We are of course spending a lot of time on maintaining the items but today the number of products isn't really a big problem. Our concerns comes up when we think about the future.
Our prediction is that the number of variants will increase. The customers will demand more models to choose from but also more specialized products. We are already now getting question from customers if we could print customer unique labels to put on the products, use different boxes etc.
So far, all specific customer needs have resulted in new item numbers with a slightly different BOM compared to the standard item. This way will not work to secure the future
Today we are creating all sales orders in AX where we enter item numbers. One idea we have is that perhaps the order entry will not happen in AX in the future. Perhaps we will setup some kind of "product selection tool" outside of AX where we combine different components into a "product". This is kind of a configurator but completely outside of AX. The order of from the "Product selection tool" is then imported into AX by a customized integration.
Now to the question:
Let's say we have the possibility to create a sales order with our BOM containing the components to use for our product.
Is there a way to transfer these sales order components into a production order ? Or produce something based on a number of sales order lines instead of a BOM?
I hope I was able to explain what we are aiming for.
If someone got experience in this area or could point me towards the right direction, please reply.