New D365 Warehouse Management Features
January 25, 2023
By: Chris Robbins
With the newest release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management out of preview and rolling out to the general public, I want to talk about a few features we are excited about in 10.0.31 around the warehouse management module. While there are a number of great new features in this release there are two or three in general that are, in my opinion, a game change for anyone using Dynamics 365 warehouse management inside of Supply Chain Management. Below we talk about a couple of these features why I think they are a big deal!
Guided warehouse implementation
Anyone who has setup the warehouse management module inside of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations knows how time consuming and tedious this process can be. There are a number of critical steps and configurations to handle before you can ever start testing. Often when I work with customers training how to setup and configure warehouse management is one of the longest processes in the implementation. There are work templates, wave templates, location directives, and so much more.
Now there is a setup checklist users can enable inside of Feature management that gives you guide to follow as you setup Warehouse management. For many of us, we’ve created our own spreadsheet over the years to make sure we get everything and have all our bases covered, but it is fantastic to have this built directly into Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations now. For anyone setting up D365 Warehouse management for the first time this is a true game changer! When I generated the default Warehouse implementation checklist a full 134 checklist items were created! This is certainly a hefty number of tasks to remember.
As many of you will know, not every company needs every feature inside of the WMS. If you are a big company rolling out many warehouses or will slowly roll out warehouses over time, you have the option to make a template that you can reuse for each setup and make sure you included everything you needed.
In addition to the checklist Microsoft has created wizards that can help walk you through each step of the process. In the past, I have seen customers struggle with, not just what needs configured but how it should be configured. These new wizards exists for several flows within Dynamics 365 including the warehouse management parameters and overall warehouse configuration.
There are two new wizards within the Dynamics 365 Warehouse management module, Warehouse initiation wizard and Warehouse management initiation wizard. The Warehouse management initiation wizard enables a user to setup the following data all through a guided experience:
- Location formats
- Location types
- Location profiles
- Inventory status
- Default work user
- Generation of load posting methods
- Generation of wave process methods
- Warehouse management parameters
The warehouse management initiation wizard helps to setup general warehouse setup around locations, loads, wave, and work. The Warehouse initiation wizard helps with some the deeper flows and the actual warehouse data itself. The Warehouse initiation wizard will guide you through setup of the following:
- Locations
- Directive codes
- Work classes
- Work templates
- Location directives
- Wave templates
Location directive enhancements
When I’m working with customer’s to setup warehouse management, location directives are often one of the toughest concepts to fully grasp and configure. To date, location directives have made heavy use of the query tool to help drive location picking strategy. If you are not someone with heavy experience in the warehouse management module of Dynamics 365, this can feel a bit cumbersome and overwhelming.
With the release of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations 10.0.31, Microsoft added some great new features to location directives that should make it much easier for customers to self-service and get up to speed faster. These new features are:
- Acceptance tests to verify configuratin
- Location directive scopes (must be enabled through Feature management)
- Preview query button in the Edit query window
- Related query information window
As I mentioned, the other major addition to location directives I think users will love is the Acceptance tests framework. This new framework allows users to setup certain scenarios across different flows like outbound, inbound, cycle counting, production, and more to see what location directives will get hit with a given set of criteria. In my below example I setup a test run for a Sales order work order type using item A0001 (HDMI Cable). Looking deeper at the example, you’ll see I’ve specified what site, warehouse, status, quantity, and location profile I’m looking to pick from. By setting this criteria, the system was then able to run through my location directives and found a match!
With the release of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations 10.0.31, Microsoft added some great new features to location directives that should make it much easier for customers to self-service and get up to speed faster. These new features are:
- Acceptance tests to verify configuratin
- Location directive scopes (must be enabled through Feature management)
- Preview query button in the Edit query window
- Related query information window
These are just a few of the exciting new features available inside Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply’s warehouse management module in the latest release, 10.0.31. There are several other new features, even within warehouse management that I think are beneficial to end customers. In another post we will go over more of them and how I think they will be useful. Curious to learn more or see a demo on the features we talked about today in this post? Feel free to get in touch with us!
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