What’s new in CU12 for WMS and TMS

Cumulative update 12 for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is now available for download on Lifecycle Services, PartnerSource and Customersource. In this blog post, we will give you an overview of the feature improvements for warehouse and transportation management. If you want more details about the release of CU12, see the Dynamics AX In-Market Engineering blog. The build number for Cumulative Update 12 is 6.3.5000.138 and the knowledge base article is KB3199741.

In short, the following enhancements are now available:

  • Work creation policies have been added to control whether work should be created for finished goods putaway and raw material picking.
  • A warehouse worker can now cancel work using a mobile device.
  • You can now reverse ship confirmations of loads, cancel packing slip updates for sales orders, and cancel product receipts for purchase orders.
  • The Movement work creation menu item now has the option to show inventory status.
  • It is now possible to merge license plates that are tied to work in staging area.
  • Warehouse workers can now manually move inventory using a mobile device even if there’s work created for that inventory.
  • It is now possible to change unit of measure during quantity confirmation when picking batch items.
  • Improvements to the On-hand form with a new column showing available physical inventory on exact dimensions.
  • There is now support to create invoice journals for transfer orders when freight is reconciled in transportation management.
  • It is now possible to create a work exception with LP receiving for transfer orders.
  • Performance improvements to location directive search.

The following table provides a list of feature enhancements made to WMS and TMS.

List of feature enhancements Description of enhancements
Work creation policies have been added to control if work should be created for finished goods putaway and raw material picking.

A new work policy has been introduced to prevent the creation of work for raw material picking and putaway of finished goods or co-product and by-product for a set of products at specific locations. This is particularly useful in production processes with assembly lines where the output from certain work cells should be delivered to the next stage in the assembly lines without being put away in the warehouse.

 

For more information, see the Microsoft Dynamics AX Manufacturing R&D blog.

A warehouse worker can now cancel work using a mobile device.

Warehouse work can now be canceled using a mobile device. A new mobile device menu item has been added to cancel work. The setup also supports cancelling work that has associated replenishment work. This functionality is controlled on the menu item itself.

 

This is particularly useful if a mistake has been made when packing a container with the associated work that needs to be sent back to the pack station. With this functionality, you can remove the existing work and move the inventory related to the work to any location, including back to the pack station.

Enable reverse of ship confirmation of all loads, cancel packing slip update for sales orders and product receipt for purchase orders from the load planning workbench. You can now reverse loads once shipment is confirmed. You can change the loads up till the actual shipment. Furthermore, you can cancel packing slip update for sales orders and product receipt for purchase orders, so you can reverse the loads even when these updates have been completed.
The Movement work creation menu item now has the option to show inventory status.

A new parameter for displaying inventory status has been added to the Movement work creation method.

 

When you process an inventory movement, quality departments might not want warehouse personnel to adjust the inventory status. In this case, the Display inventory status check box must be added to the Movement work creation menu item.

 

You can now use a new option on the Movement menu item to restrict the user’s ability to change the inventory status.

It is now possible to merge license plates that are tied to both work and staging area.

You can now consolidate the content of different LPs into one LP.

The work that is associated with the LPs will be merged. One work

item will remain (the first LP that has work), and the other work items from the consolidated LPs will be completed. The consolidated work items must have the same load and shipment address. The same preconditions that are used for consolidation shipments apply. The LPs must be at the same location. You can start the consolidation by scanning either an LP that has content or an empty LP.

 

For more information, see the following blog post: Tutorial: License plate consolidation.

Warehouse workers can now manually move inventory using a mobile device even if there’s work created for that inventory.

 

Warehouse workers can now move inventory using a mobile device, even if work has been created against part or all of the quantity that must be moved. This change adds flexibility to the operation by letting you move pallets that are filling up on the inbound dock to an inbound buffer location. Putaway work can then be started from that inbound buffer location. Similarly, you can clear a location at a pick face where some of the inventory is reserved against sales picking work. This work updates the location where inventory should be taken from as soon as the ad-hoc manual movement is registered.

 

For more information, see the following blog post: Tutorial: Movement of inventory with associated work.

It is now possible to change unit of measure during quantity confirmation when picking batch-tracked items. When using quantity confirmation during picking of items that are batch tracked, it is now possible to change unit of measure. This used to be a problem if unit conversions were a fraction, which resulted in that you might need to enter a large decimal during the pre-defined unit conversion. Being able to change unit of measure lets you enter whole numbers in the right unit of measure.
Improvements to the On-hand form with a new column showing available physical inventory on exact dimensions.

A new column is added to show the available physical

inventory on the exact dimensions that are shown.

 

If some dimensions in the reservation hierarchy seem to be missing, a warning icon appears as a notification that the value in the new field cannot be calculated.

There is now support to create invoice journals for transfer orders when freight is reconciled in transportation management.

When creating a freight bill invoice for transfer orders, after you have matched the freight bill with the freight bill invoice, a vendor invoice journal is now created.

 

Charges are apportioned to the transfer order to help matching the freight bill with the invoice, but charges are not posted with the transfer order.

It is now possible to create a work exception with LP receiving for transfer orders. Work exceptions that are recorded during transfer order LP receiving is now saved properly in the work exceptions log.
Performance improvements to location directive search. You can now avoid executing the same query twice to find locations during location directive search by using the query run for following iterations.