In today’s blog, we’ll describe some updates and enhancements that can be found in the Dynamics 365 April 2019 release. More specifically, these enhancements apply to Finance and Operation and are in several modules for Distribution and Trade.

Inventory performance optimizations

For starters, all inventory operations and on-hand lookups have been changed to increase system performance. We all know that some of those functions can be performed from several forms within several modules within Finance and Operations, and in the past, this was a bit of a slow process due to the response times. This enhancement has optimized the system performance and will allow for a better experience for the end user.

UOM conversion for product variants

Next is an enhancement to the Unit of Measure (UOM) conversions at the product variant level. With this release, those unit conversions have been extended and can now be included in the warehouse management module. If the use of these are desired in the Warehouse Management module, parameters to enable this functionality were added to the Product Information Management parameters on the general tab shown, as shown:

Along with the above UOM, there are also new parameters to enable UOM conversions at the variant level for a specific product master, if desired. This setting will be found on the general tab under the Product Variants group as shown here:

Catch weight product processing with warehouse management

The next thing we will find in the April release are enhancements to include catch weight product processing with Warehouse Management. Catch weight products use two units of measure, one for inventory, such as ounces or pounds, and a catch weight unit, such as box, each, or pallet. This will allow the user to perform the inbound at the catch weight level (e.g., pallet), but yet capture the outbound sales during picking or packing at the box catch weight quantity.

Simplified view - template

Simplified view templates are also introduced with the April release. This will allow the users to create, manage, and publish personalized views of the pages to enhance the experience and make work more efficient. There will be a set of preconfigured view templates on select documents and entities. The templates will allow for relevant information for a specific user role or a given task. The document types and entities that will have view templates available are:

• Documents
  • Sales orders
  • Purchase orders
  • Purchase requisitions
  • (Select) journals
• Entities
  • Customer
  • Vendors
  • Products

An example of the templates: two separate views of the sales order detail page will be available. One for the customer service rep and one for the accounts receivable clerk; the template view is designed to reflect different needs for order detail that are relevant to each role.

Master Planning stability and recovery improvements

Master planning enhancements will make it more resilient to failure and enhances the recover from exception without stopping the process. If planning does stop, it will now restart where it left off rather than a total restart of the plan. Cleanup jobs will be introduced to clean up and remove unnecessary (obsolete) data. Planning service will enable a company to maintain a dynamic plan in a manner that is closer to real-time than it was in the past. This will be a big plus for those companies that are running 24/7 and will eliminate waiting for the master plan to regenerate. A planning hub will also be introduced, which will allow connection with multiple ERP systems or other data sources, such as the internet of things that may incorporate forecasting data, for example. Based on the enhancements mentioned, this will all contribute to the overall performance improvement in master planning process.

The above-mentioned enhancements in the Finance and Operations area of this release are all quite welcomed. Be sure to keep checking our blog for more!

Happy Dynamics 365’ing!