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[Scott Milner]

Good morning, AXUG!  I’m hoping to find some assistance diagnosing a problem where our AR specialist is seeing intermittent print failures during invoice processing.  

We are using AX 2012 R2 CU6.  The AX clients are installed locally on workstations.

During our invoicing process, we use print management to print a copy of the invoice to our shared network printer and to send a copy of the invoice to the customer via the local computer’s Outlook 2013.  Our AR person has issues every day with some of the invoices failing to both print and send (today 6 out of 64 invoices processed failed).

There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to which invoices fail.  The common thread seems to be that in every failure, both the print and email functions are not done for that particular invoice (we never seem to have an invoice that doesn’t print but does email, or vice-versa).  AX doesn’t inform the user that the print jobs fail–she only finds out when she goes to file the invoices with the sales orders and finds she is missing copies.  

I’ve searched the event logs on the client workstation, the print server, and the AOS, but no messages are being logged that point to the issue.  This morning I set up a new print server and updated printer object for her to print to, but the problem remained the same.

Can anyone offer a suggestion for further problem determination?

Thanks,

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Jim Czerniak]

Hi Scott,

Do you use a batch job for invoicing?

Regards,

Jim

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Jim Czerniak
Applications Developer
CMC Group
Bowling Green OH
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[Rudy Salcedo]

Scott, make sure the printer drivers are up to date on all the network printers that you’re using.  Outdated print drivers caused issues for us in the past.

If you’re able to determine the SO/Invoice/Customer that it failed on, make sure the email address is valid.

If you run invoicing as a batch job, does the infolog give you any info on the invoices that failed to print/email?

Even though the printing & email fail on those invoices, does the SO get invoiced and posted successfully?

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Rudy Salcedo
Senior Programmer/Analyst
LaForce, Inc
Green Bay WI
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[Scott Milner]

Hello Rudy,

Thanks for the suggestions!

I’ve installed an updated printer driver on a new print server that only she had access to, but the problem remained.  I think this eliminates the print server and printer object as being the cause of the issue, although in her print settings, we’re spooling the documents on her workstation rather than printing directly to the printer.  In the past, I’ve tried sending the print documents directly to the printer, but this caused significant delays in printing.  I may try it again, though.

We don’t do the invoicing as a batch job.

The SO does get invoiced and posted successfully, even though print management fails.

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Steve Padfield]

Are you posting and printing at the same time? If so, have you tried to post first and then use print management to print and send?

Have you tried changing print management to just print the invoices and not email to see if that helps?

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Steve Padfield
P.W. Gillibrand Co., Inc.
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[Scott Milner]

Hi Steve, 

We are printing and posting at the same time.  We will try separating out the steps today and I’ll report back with the results.

thanks!

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Scott Milner]

Hi Jim,

No, we run the invoicing process directly from the AR person’s client.  No batch processing for this task.

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Archive User]

Hi Scott,
I’m sure you did this, but I have to ask.  Did you clear usage data and delete .auc files for that user?  Have you tried your AR person running invoicing under another user or on another machine?  For weird, intermittent issues like that, I always find that ruling out those items helps, especially when there’s nothing showing up in a log anywhere.
Jessie

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Jessie Swartz
Senior Functional Consultant
Stoneridge Software Inc.
Minneapolis, MN
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[Scott Milner]

Hi Jessie,

I hadn’t thought usage data could cause so intermittent a failure like this, but I see your point.  

Our controller reported that she also had an invoice fail to print from her logon and workstation, so it may not be usage data after all, but I’ll give it a try in any case.

Thanks for responding!

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Stefan Dam]

[Swaibu Ssali]

Hi Stefan,

What helped  with the same problem
Regards

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swaibu ssali
URBIS SCHREDER
BASINGSTOKE
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[Rich Krol]

We run batch invoicing here, and in our batch log after the run, we are missing the info records that tell us the print status… either through printer or email when using print management for invoicing.

I posted  on the forum today, and Jessie pointed me to this article with your similar occurrence, so sorry about double posting (New to AXUG, and need to find a way to search here better than what I have been 😛 .)

https://www.axug.com/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=2b4478fa-4f97-47d4-8cb1-d24e47e2eb9b&CommunityKey=182d53cf-429b-4c75-a580-d5950846fd14&tab=digestviewer#bm2b4478fa-4f97-47d4-8cb1-d24e47e2eb9b

In one of the comments on trying in batch, I would think you’d have the same occurrence in batch, similar to what we see here.  

We had our devs step through code, look at mods created… normal troubleshooting for our staff, but can’t seem to find this.  Doesn’t occur for same customer, next batch of TEST invoices through our TEST system will produce results normally for same sales orders.

If we find a solution here, we will let you know for sure.

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Rich Krol
IT Business Analyst
Applied Medical Technologies, Inc.
Brecksville OH
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[Stefan Dam]

Click the link to another thread on this forum

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Stefan Dam
mi
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[Archive User]

Stefan, the link you posted isn’t working – it just reroutes back to the same thread.  Can you please try again?  I’m sure Rich and Scott would appreciate it!

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Jessie Swartz
Senior Functional Consultant
Stoneridge Software Inc.
Minneapolis, MN
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[Scott Milner]

Updates from yesterday and today…

Yesterday, we tried separating out the invoicing steps.  First we posted the invoices, then went back and ran the print management (print and email) step.  This resulted in 3 of 61 invoices failing to print/send, which is slightly better.  However, for reasons that may be unrelated, our EDI invoices failed to be transmitted to the EDI share.

Today, I cleared the AR specialist’s usage data (I’ll document the process I used here, just in case I missed something)… File – Tools – Options – Usage Data – General Tab – Reset all user-specific selections, then open User folder on local workstation – AppData – Local and delete all AUC and KTI files in that directory.  

She ran the invoicing process in our original manner (post and print in one step), and 10 of 67 invoices failed to print.

I’m continuing to research.

Stefan, if you could please repost the link that you mentioned in your post, I’d really appreciate it!

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Krupa Shah]

Firstly, is there any customizations in the process that you are performing? If yes, you need to ensure that proper steps are taken to fire errors from the code.

Second, when you use the user’s outlook to send emails, it asks for user’s permission to send the email. If it cannot connect to Outlook in time & get the user’s permission for it, it will fail due to timeout & might not throw any errors.

One thing you can try, is to send the invoices in email through batch job. It will run on server side & will not require outlook to send the emails. Benefit of this is that everything will be saved in the log & will be easily traceable. Also, it doesn’t require user’s permission to send email, so issue of timeout doesn’t occur as often.

We have seen issue with Outlook where it hangs with too many requests at same time. Sometime even with single request when there is too much data associated with it. This causes the timeout when working with external applications connecting to outlook.

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Krupa Shah
AX Techno-Functional Project Lead
Apps N Stuff
079-48002735
Ahmedabad India
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[Stefan Dam]

https://www.axug.com/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MID=13992&GroupId=205&tab=digestviewer&UserKey=958058d6-b6be-4cc5-9d8e-f6db02bc5f28&sKey=C8443607E88D4867AD5F

 

Does the user print the invoices in batch?  Is so, you can look at the batch job in batch history and see if there are any errors.  It is possible that invoices are being split into multi-threaded tasks in the batch job (this is the default behavior in AX) and that could be causing the issue.  

There is a setting in Accounts receivable > Setup > Account receivable parameters, go to the Updates tab, and under the “Batch” group change the “Number of documents in batch task” from 5 to something like 99 (depending on how many invoices the user typically processes). This should single thread the printing and hopefully eliminate the missing invoices. 

the most important text from the thread I linked to.

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Stefan Dam
mi
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[Scott Milner]

Hello Krupa and Stefan,

We don’t have any customizations (other than some changes to the actual invoice format) in our invoicing or print management processes.

I believe I was told that we had tried batch processing for invoicing a few years ago but elected not to continue with it.  I’ll work on getting more information, but the process for the past few years has been to not use the batch process.

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Scott Milner]

Update:

We haven’t solved the issue, but we did find that moving the AR specialist to a different computer (a newer machine) let her successfully print 90 of 90 invoices that were processed today.

This is both promising and frustrating!

The old computer was not logging any pertinent warnings or errors in the event viewer (application, system, etc.).  However, it was an older machine.  The computer she used today is has a core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM, and is about 2 years old (an HP ProDesk 400).  Perhaps it was performance-related somehow?

The new computer also has a ‘fresh’ Windows user profile, AX client profile (although we did clear her usage data), and minimal other software installed.  But again, if these were causing issues, I’d have thought I would have seen some trace in the event viewer.

If anyone has any thoughts on the development, I’d be happy to hear them!

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Steve Padfield]

Scott,
Do all your users have the client installed on their local machine? Do you have a terminal server setup for AX use?

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Steve Padfield
IT Manager
P.W. Gillibrand Co., Inc.
Simi Valley CA
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[Scott Milner]

Hi Steve,

We are currently running with local clients on all workstations.

Scott

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Scott Milner
Applications Administrator
J&D Manufacturing
Eau Claire WI
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[Steve Padfield]

Got it, I was going to say if you had a beefy terminal server to try running the invoicing there to see if you get the same results as the newer PC.

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Steve Padfield
IT Manager
P.W. Gillibrand Co., Inc.
Simi Valley CA
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