In Search of Product Development Efficiency: Integrating Microsoft Dynamics AX and PLM

Engineering teams have enough headaches to deal with in developing winning designs for their company's products.  So once they've dotted all the "I's" and crossed all the "T's" on the design, they don't want to fight with laborious manual processes to push that design's bill of material (BOM) to ERP  and the manufacturing floor.

But pushing that data correctly in today's product development company requires the integration of two critical systems-the engineering team's product lifecycle management software (PLM) and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software like Microsoft Dynamics AX.

And that can present some challenges.

At Key Technology, a multi-national manufacturer of industrial equipment for the food processing industry, the interface between PLM and ERP had long been a point of inefficiency and potential errors.

"One of my engineering managers, who is heavily involved in the engineering-to-order side, estimates it probably takes him 45 minutes to an hour to put the BOM into the engineering change order (ECO)" for release to manufacturing, says Sherry Moran, Key's Sr. Business Systems Analyst.  Key runs both Microsoft Dynamics AX and SolidWorks Enterprise PDM (EPDM), and IT knew that an integration between the systems would make the company's operations more efficient.

Moran explained some of the reasons behind the desired integration and some of the challenges.

Key has two product lines.  One is mostly configured to order with some custom elements to it, then we have a purely engineered-to-order side of the house - a job shop. "In that job shop environment, during the quotation process with our customer, we will figure out what they need in basic dimensions, and basic features and options that they want," Moran says.

Key had been using an older, homegrown estimating system. And based ...