Microsoft Dynamics AX Customers with Lean Manufacturing Needs Welcome Enhancements of AX 2012

Each day manufacturing companies have to address the challenges of economic pressures and globalization, not to mention environmental regulations.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, Microsoft has provided capabilities that, it believes, manufacturers need to deal with those challenges, according to a Dynamics AX customer presenting at a recent online meeting of the AX User Group.

Based on the five principles of lean manufacturing, Dynamics AX 2012 enables manufacturers to view and apply different manufacturing processes, including MRP (material requirements planning) in their ERP system, the presenter told the assembled group.

Those lean manufacturing principles are:

• Specify what creates value from the customer's perspective
• Identify all the steps along the process chain
• Make those processes flow
• Make only what is pulled by the customer
• Strive for perfection by continually removing wastes

"In the solution, Microsoft has taken these principles pretty much to heart and they have a lot of flow solutions in the product," the presenter said.

"It was released in AX 2009 as an add-on and now in 2012 it's fully integrated with a lot of the lean functions in place so you can run MRP and lean together," he said.

Lean manufacturing for Dynamics AX 2009 introduced two different concepts to support pull and flow: pull to order (PTO) kanbans and lean order schedules (LOS). Dynamics AX 2012, on the other hand, introduces a new architecture to enable a new way of modeling lean manufacturing based on production flows consisting of process and transfer activities. Lean manufacturing for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 brings these two approaches together in a single architecture while production flows help keep material flow and costs consistent.