Dynamics AX 2012 WMS: Micro improvements #1

Today I wanted to start a series of blog posts to show some of the smaller improvements related to warehouse management in AX 2012. Dynamics AX 2012 does have some major improvement, but sometimes it good to know that smaller changes also manages to get into new releases.

In this posting I want to look a bit deeper into a form that used to manually pick items without using picking routes.

In Dynamics AX 2009 the picking form looked like this :

Here the user could mark the lines(Inventory Transactions) that was wanted to be picked, and then override the dimensions. In AX 2012 this form has changed.

Pay specially attention to the field at the top. Here Microsoft has added a field to scan inventory dimensions. Like location, serial, batch and kanbans.

I think it works best for tracking dimensions like pallet, serial and batch numbers, and will move the inventory transactions to the lower part of the screen, and also change the issue status on the inventory transaction to “Picked”.

BUT! There are a few things you need to know. There are a set of checks in the code, so it will only work in those cases where the dimensions is NOT specified on the original transaction. So in my case here, if I SCAN the location “PICK” that is a valid location on the warehouse 11, the result will be the following, where the system picks all lines against location PICK.

For my technical readers, here is where is happends:

The source code for this check is available in the class InventTransWMS_Pick.createFromHandlingUnit().

Also pay attention to the following code:

Here the validation that the “source” dimension needs to be “BLANK” for it to work.

In earlier Damgaard days, one of the creators of AXAPTA had a nice slogan : “Copy with pride”. Since ALL Microsoft code are available when we make improvements, we should get good ideas from one part of the application and use it other places. We as implementers of Dynamics AX 2012 now have the option to improve this feature by adding support for more intelligent scanning, by incorporate support for EAN128 in the scanning field(s). Then multiple dimensions like PalletID(SSCC), Batch, serial etc could be fetched out of the scan, since EAN128 do support application identifiers For more information on the EAN128 see my post on Hidden Barcode Secrets in AX 2012.