How Microsoft Dynamics AX Can Track Shelf Life Dates and Optimize Inventory of Food and Beverage Products

For food and beverage manufacturers using or considering Microsoft Dynamics AX, it's vital to understand the software's capabilities for tracking shelf life dates. Effective use of shelf life dates can have a dramatic benefit in optimizing inventory, manufacturing and customer service. This article focuses on the significance of shelf life dates and explains the solution approaches within Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Many of these manufacturers track the shelf life information for specific lots of their purchased and manufactured materials. The shelf life dates include an expiration date and a best-before date, and either date can be used to support several critical business needs.

For example, master scheduling logic should ignore a batch's inventory availability after its expiration date. Sales order reservations should also reflect first-expired-first-out logic, as well as the customer's requirements for remaining shelf life. These shelf life considerations typically apply to manufacturers and distributors of food and beverage products, but they can also apply to other types of products such as certain chemical or life science products.

It should be noted that Dynamics AX employs the term "batch" rather than "lot" -- such as the terms batch number rather than lot number - because the term lot id applies to an internally-assigned identifier for inventory transactions. Hence, the batch terminology will be employed throughout the remainder of this article, while acknowledging that the lot terminology may be more familiar to many readers.

To understand how Dynamics AX can support shelf life dates, we first need to look at its functionality for batch tracking. Then we can examine more specific details concerning shelf life information and how this information can be used. I also examine a case study about a food products manufacturer and the ...