Dynamics 365 SCM Production Order Scheduling: The Impact of Asset Management Work Orders

This article was co-authored by Venkata Ramana Korrapaty, principal consultant at Wipro.

One of the common requirements of a production scheduler is to have accurate information about the resources (machines, workers, materials, etc.) available to do precise scheduling of production orders that will meet the delivery dates.

In a production context, the machines used for production activities are referred to as assets. These are purchased or manufactured during production and have a residual value. An asset can be sold once it is no longer needed in production.

In this article we will go through the impact of asset management work orders on the production order scheduling in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. We will explore the system configuration options, the process for raising and completing maintenance requests, and the processing of production orders.

The Basics

To deploy asset management work orders, we first need to understand the areas of Dynamics 365 SCM that are involved in working through the relevant business scenarios. 

The Dynamics 365 SCM asset management module provides various metrics about maintenance downtime, condition assessment, work order details, and more. The maintenance data helps the shop floor manager to decide if the asset or machine must be replaced or scrapped.

Maintenance teams can use D365 SCM to manage asset information, track maintenance schedules for the assets, and process corrective and planned work orders to avoid breakdowns. The system also helps link a resource (machine, worker, etc.) to an asset.

The production control module allows the production team to raise a maintenance request through the production floor execution interface.

The work order management workspace is intended for users who work with and manage work orders on a daily basis. The standard tiles shown in this workspace include:

• Scheduled - work orders scheduled for today
• Delayed - work orders for which scheduled start date and time is in the past and not yet completed
• Unscheduled - active, but not yet scheduled work orders
• Work orders with faults - active work orders containing fault registrations
• Work orders with production stop - active work orders containing production stop registrations
• Completion (KPI) - shows percentage of work orders completed of the work orders scheduled for today.

Business Scenario

An item, “Finished Product”, has a route with an operation. This operation gets executed on a resource “MACH1” (Resource type= Machine).

The production supervisor identified an oil leakage from the oil seals of the machine MACH1. For the identified problem, a maintenance request was raised to the maintenance team.