Our Wind Turbine manufacturer company manufactures state of the art Wind Turbines and in our facilities are being produced the nacelles and the wind tower blades. For those coproducts and all the other necessary items and services needed to construct a wind turbine we make use of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain for their acquisition. See how the procurement and sourcing module in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain helps us to realize those tasks.
Basically what we need are a gearbox, a electric generator, a rotor hub and a framework for each nacelle. For each blade what we need are pvc-foam sheets, resin and fiberglass. The tower segments will be produced by a supplier and direct delivered to the project site, some other purchases of type services will be also required during the project phase of each Wind Tower.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain has a very complete procurement and sourcing module which cover all our needs, not all the companies use all the available steps in the procurement and probably they do not need it. Here also will be not delivered an exhaustive description of the module but only it is intended to show how the basic functionality it is used. Basic picture shows some of the steps and documents that we find around a purchase order.
Our Purchase order can be created in different ways like:
1. Manual entry
2. Planned order from the MRP
3. Request for quotations
4. Sales orders (Direct delivery)
5. Production orders
6. Project and more
Some of the documents that we will be generating along the way will be request for quotation requests, request for quotation replies, purchase order confirmations, product receipts and invoices.
In our examples here for simplification we simply create the purchase orders manually.
First we take a look how it looks like the Accounts payable menu where we find information related to vendors and some configuration. Every menu in Microsoft Dynamics 365 is naturally divided in forms for daily operations, queries, reports and configuration. You can easily add whatever element in the menu as favourite so you can easily access your more frequent menu element quicker.
And following we take a look at the Procurement and sourcing module were we have access to all the procurement processes.
In order to create a purchase order we can do that from the vendor menu, the procurement menu but also from one of the Workspaces that come by default like the purchase order preparation. Those Workspaces allow a quick view and action on basic functionality that a specific role in the company is expected to realize.
So let's create a purchase order. First I will buy some fiberglass that I need for the blades from my favourite supplier for this type of material, Pexcel Composites from the UK. As you can see the purchase creation form automatically put as delivery address the location of EWR facilities (Hambacher Forst 1, Rostock) but also the default site and warehouse (01, raw materials) where the fiber glass should be delivered. A good configuration helps the user to introduce as less information as possible and it is very easy to customize the system in the case you need to default some values that are not defaulted in the way you wish.
Once we create the purchase order we have to create the purchase order lines, so here we add our fiberglass, the desired quantity and we check that the automatically filled information like site, warehouse and price from price agreements is correct. Also we can check quick the last orders done to the supplier just in case we introduce duplicate orders and the totals. So far so good.
Once the products arrive you can print a receipt list if you want and post the product receipt to book the items in your warehouse as available in the locations you need to. After this, or even before if you setup that in your system, you can post the invoice. Here you check that the invoice match with the product receipt, the totals and the taxes (in this case no taxes as is a delivery from the UK to Germany) and post the invoice.
Now you can take a look at the on hand form to check that you already have more quantity of fiberglass in your warehouse, you can also easily see all the transactions for an specified item. For example here you see the 100 m2 of fiberglass that were acquired in this example and the total cost of the transaction. Also here you can see that some quantities were deducted before as they were consumed in production orders.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 as plenty of functionality that help the key users to improve their performance, new functionality is periodically included with the monthly updates and, if you wish, you can easily customize the system with customizations that automatize even more your operations. Here I want to show the Copy from functionality that lets you create purchase order lines for a purchase order copying the lines from a former order. The option is available in the menu of purchase orders as you can see here:
If the Copy from other documents form you simply select from which type of document you want to copy the lines from (purchase order, confirmation, receipt, invoice, ...), them you select the document and the lines you want to copy. Here we select a former purchase order from Regional Castings GmbH.
After we click in OK the lines are copied to our purchase order which is ready to be worked by the key user so they save time adding the lines.
If now we go to the Purchase order preparation Workspace we will see the new order but now the one we have already invoiced. This workspace can be used by the users at the purchase department in order to check new orders. Other workspaces are available by default for different roles into the company and new ones could be created with customizations.
In the next post we will dedicate some time to further functionality in the purchase module like the arrival overview form, the invoice register and invoice approval and the payment of invoices.