Manufacturing

image Houston Neal from Manufacturing Software Advice recently wrote a nice and a very detailed article on the Differences Between Microsoft Dynamics products. It’s an interesting article and gives a good overview of where different Microsoft Dynamics products stand, and overall I recommend you to read it, even though personally I don’t agree with everything in there.

I like good argument, but I don’t like disagreeing just for the sake of it, and this was one of those articles that I would prefer disagreeing in private. But Houston was so persistent in me expressing my opinion on his article here on my blog, that I just decided to speak up.

After all, everyone is entitled to my opinion ;)

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Parallel or serial?

by Vjekoslav Babic on November 20, 2009

Long time no see, eh? I know I’ve promised to write about a lot of stuff here, and I see this queue of you hardly waiting to read my next topic on process manufacturing, but I am just far too lazy to think it out thoroughly. So, an easier one, but still about manufacturing.

I spent this week delivering two courses about manufacturing in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Usually, these trainings are gatherings of partners who discuss geeky stuff over coffee breaks. This time, it was kind of different – there were two people from the customer front, and it was really amazing to listen to customer perspective when learning about standard NAV.

One of the points raised today, in the midst of closing of Manufacturing II course, was about parallel routings. Do we do them, or do we not. A tough one, indeed.

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Discreet and process manufacturing difference

by Vjekoslav Babic on June 28, 2009

When implementing NAV in manufacturing companies, I’ve sometimes heard complaints that the type of manufacturing supported in NAV doesn’t fit the customer needs.

And sometimes that’s completely true. NAV supports discreet manufacturing, and it handles it pretty well. But the things do get bumpy when you venture into process manufacturing world.

Sometimes customers or even consultants don’t really understand why this happens. It’s simple: there is a big difference between process and discreet manufacturing, and to successfully implement NAV in these two fundamentally different environments you need to understand and appreciate these differences.

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Mystery laptop

by Vjekoslav Babic on June 12, 2008

I had no clue how good my laptop was. Seriously. Today it kicked ass of an 8-processor server.

Tomorrow we have a go-live of a Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment, with manufacturing customized to support configure-to-order functionality. Refreshing manufacturing orders now calculates dynamic BOMs and routings, and it takes time.

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Architectures: Good, Bad and Ugly

by Vjekoslav Babic on June 11, 2008

Four months ago I attended a conference, where I had a chance to listen to Miha Kralj, an architect at Microsoft, talk about architectures. It was one of the best presentations I ever attended, and ever since I had this topic in queue, but never really had chance to write about it. Most of the stuff he talked about reminded me of some bad experiences about architectures on projects I’ve worked on. Most of stuff here is also not my original contribution to the universal pool of knowledge, and I reuse it with the permission of the author, so Miha, thanks! What I did, however, is that I applied general principles to specific Microsoft Dynamics NAV situations.

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Not-so-elementary costing: The Change

April 11, 2008

They say the only constant is change. I’d say that the only other constant is error. We humans tend to err. Give a repeatable task to a human, and they’ll mess it up every once in a while. Some call it the human factor. One of the many repeatable tasks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is setting [...]

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Output journal confusion

April 4, 2008

A few days ago, I’ve got a question from a customer, about an alleged bug in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. According to online help, when you are posting output in manufacturing module, the last line of the type Output in the journal will actually adjust the inventory level. However, what is not explained is how the [...]

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Scrap doesn't just happen

April 2, 2008

In reality, if you need 1,000 of whatever product, the manufacturing process is rarely going to yield exactly 1,000 of it, even if you feed into the first operation the exact quantities of raw materials system calculated as gross requirements. The process may produce 980 or 1,020, but is hardly ever going to be exactly 1,000. If you didn’t take [...]

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Scrap the crap

April 1, 2008

Scrap happens. So does sh*t. In my last blog post about scrap I gave a crappy explanation of how forward calculation of fixed scrap works. So instead of disgracing myself by leaving the incorrect explanation there, I’ve just corrected it, and posted this lame excuse here. Anyone who is interested in how it really works, please accept my [...]

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Cut the (s)crap

March 30, 2008

[I had to edit this post on April 01, 2008. And no, it's not April Fool's Prank]  Have you ever wondered how manufacturing scrap works? Or what it really is? It’s an interesting topic, and yet a very confusing one. It has caused so many headaches to the project team I worked on recently, because nobody [...]

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Manufacturing quickie

February 14, 2008

Today, I got an e-mail from a reader of this blog, who asked me to help them with an actual problem on a project. Their customer is a small manufacturing customer in textile vertical. Whenever they calculate consumption, quantities for certain items get rounded to full numbers. Since the items are usually textile, measured in meters, a [...]

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