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[Lauren Yoshizuka]

AX 2012 R3, upgrading CU8 to CU12 later in the year.

• We are exploring some light manufacturing best practices for building serialized BOM items. We will be receiving various child parts from suppliers, and at least one of the child parts will have a serial number that needs to be tied to the parent item. Does anyone know how to accomplish this/what the production order flow looks like? Will this cause issues?
• We may utilize barcode scanning of child parts to ensure quality control of the BOMs & to report as finished for moving the parent item into inventory. As stated above, the parent item would have a serial number, so we’re also looking into transaction log as the parent moves through the production order.
• We also want to understand how MRP needs to be changed, so we improve child part replenishment. 

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Lauren Yoshizuka
Business Analyst (IT)
Forney Industries, Inc.
Fort Collins CO
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[Kevin McLean]

?One of the implications of connecting a child serial number to a parent serial number is that your production orders for the parent need to be for a quantity of 1.  AX will track the consumption of serial numbered items, so that you can see which production order consumed the serial number, and allow you to track all of the serialized items produced by that production order.  However, it has no way to specify that this particular serial number was consumed by this particular parent serial number.  A production order quantity of 1 makes that unambiguous.  I’ve had clients get around this issue by using the component item serial number as the parent serial number. 

Using a pre-printed label with a bar-coded serial number will facilitate your production reporting.

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Kevin McLean
Strategic Solutions NW, LLC
Beaverton OR
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[Andrew Ford]

Lauren,
Based on my prior experience:
1  You don’t want to make a purchased item serialized unless the quantities are very small or you are creating serial numbers.  Accountants go nuts when you tell them it will be six weeks before you can register all 4,000 serial numbers and they can invoice/pay after that (and it can take that long to unpack, register, and repack large quantities of PCBs).   You can use an intermediate part number for serialization and issue multiple production orders that simply add the serial number from the purchased part.

2  Native AX does make it possible to track child serial number usage, but it’s neither quick nor convenient, especially if you ever have a child serial number returned and re-used (no trouble found or repair/update).  In a previous position, I used the report as finished to populate a custom table for tracking child serial numbers that had parent serial, child serial, parent item, child item, production number, sales order number, sales line InventTransID (Lot ID) and RMA number on one line.  A simple form with a grid search made it possible to to detailed searches quickly and find the full history of a child serial number.

3 Most importantly, if your production team does not have a history of extremely precise inventory control, they will learn that these items must have precise inventory control.   You will very likely have issues with swap-outs of child serial numbers when there are production issues (the first child serial number is scanned, but when they swap out the part for whatever issue, they’ll forget to correct the consumption leaving 1 serial number physically in inventory but not in AX and another serial number in AX but not in physical inventory). 

????

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Andrew Ford
Lead AX Developer
Nivel Parts & Manufacturing Co., LLC
Jacksonville FL
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[Florian Endres]

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for those insights. 

We (my current company) are facing similar topics right now.
We are mainly doing assemblies of electronic components with expensive sensors that we want to track by serial number (in case of warranty or a recall).
We do have experience with what this means for production, as we are currently doing this in another system.
We do have (relatively) small numbers of units – and we are aware that inventory control has to be done very diligently.

We are a little unsure how to handle certain operations when tracking SN’s in production:
-during our standard quality checks, we realize that one sensor is faulty and needs to be replaced – but this might happen just 2 or 3 assembly steps later (after the inital consumption of this SN). How do you make sure the serial numbers are exchanged and documented correctly?
-after delivery to the customer, the device comes back for a repair – we need to change a sensor – how is this done correctly?
(-somehow related to the above point: how are you handling service/repair processes in the system?)

Are there any other pitfalls that we need to consider when deciding to go for serial number tracking in production?
Any accounting-relevant topics that need to be considered?

Best,
Florian

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Florian Endres
NavVis GmbH
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[Jonathan Anderson]

Lauren,
For serialized parts, the production flow is not much different than using non-serialized parts, except you have to tell AX which serial number(s) you utilized in production of the finished good.  You can do this either through using a mobile device to register the serial numbers against the pick list, or manually within AX on the picking list journal or production BOM.  

If you didn’t want to have to tell AX which serial you’re using, another option would be to utilize auto-reservations which would employ a FIFO reservation principle and then instruct the production operators which serial number to utilize in production.  This option can be difficult and cause inventory issues if your production operators are not disciplined to always pick the serial number the system instructs.

There should be no major changes to MRP as long as in the tracking dimension group for the serialized parts, you have selected that the serial number is a physical inventory dimension.

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Thanks,
Jonathan Anderson
Managing Consultant
BKD Technologies
Denver CO
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