Exploring Updates to Process Industry Capabilities within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

Editor's Note: The following article is drawn from Scott's new book covering process industry capabilities within Dynamics AX 2012, and represents an extension of his previous column about "what's different in AX 2012".

Many AX solution architects may not be familiar with the process industry capabilities within Microsoft Dynamics AX, especially the newest updates in AX 2012.   Two of the basic questions facing AX solution architects are "What's different about the process industry capabilities?" and "How can I learn it as quickly as possible?"  I have tried to answer these questions across the past year of prior research for my new book about Dynamics AX 2012. 

One of my goals was to help knowledgeable AX professionals quantify, plan, and streamline their incremental learning about the process industry capabilities of AX 2012 by building on what they already know.  In particular, I wanted to provide a rough measure of the nature and magnitude of supply chain management functionality for process manufacturing and distribution firms, as well as a detailed list of these changes so you can selectively review the extended explanations. 

This article focuses on the specific feature areas where you will most benefit from incremental learning if you are not yet familiar with the process industry capabilities of Dynamics AX.  However, for readers already familiar with these capabilities in AX 2009, the capabilities are largely the same in AX 2012.  The slight changes reflect much tighter integration and build on the AX 2012 functionality for enterprise- versus company-level information for an item.  As one example, you designate a catch weight item as part of the enterprise-level information, and the related policies (such as a ...