Good News for Buyers and Planners: Use filtered favorites in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and New AX

In every manufacturing company there are two types of users who need to work with the output of MRP: the material planner, who is often also the buyer and the production planner/scheduler. The first type of user works with planned purchase orders, the second with planned production orders.

Very few companies have only one user in each of these roles. The business challenge is how to divide the MRP-output between the different people. Material planners, who are often also buyers, and the production planners or production schedulers.

In this article we will explain how your material planners and production planners can easily divide the work between them in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 or new AX (a.k.a. AX 7) by setting up permanent filters per buyer group

We all agree that MRP has two main outputs:

• Planned orders
• Actions

Most material planners and production planners start with planned orders, making sure orders are created (firmed) in time. Next they will be dealing with the actions.  In both cases, they want to only focus on their own planned orders and actions.

In this article we assume you have decided to use the buyer group for both the material planners (who are often also buyers) and the production planners, having set up one code per person (so not using the group feature).

The buyer group is a field on the Released Product or the Item and it is a field on the Vendor.

Without exception so far I have seen companies using the buyer group on the item. For material planners or buyers, we often see a split by commodity code, for production planners it is a number of machines (resources, ...