I love finding obscure, hidden settings and checkboxes in AX that end up unlocking solutions to business problems. Auto Reports as Finished in Microsoft Dynamics AX definitely fits that category.
You’ll find the Auto Report as Finished setting on the Engineer fast tab on a Released Product:
You’d use this setting when you have an item that you do NOT stock in inventory, but rather stock the individual components that make up the finished good item. When the setting is enabled, shipping the product from a sales order will result in consumption of the components on the Bill of Materials, but all customer-facing documentation lists only the finished good item.
When Would Auto Report as Finished be Useful?
There are a couple scenarios where this may come into play:
1. Light assembly/Kits
If you sell products that require non-value added activities (such as kitting or light assembly), you may not want to go through the overhead that comes with utilizing Production Control functionality in Dynamics AX. (ie- Create and process a production order).
*This is not a full-featured ‘Kit’ capability. It works well in very simple kit scenarios.
2. External production control
In a recent phased implementation, replacement of their fulfillment/production system was pegged for phase 2. Since production activities and material consumption was happening on a separate system, we wanted to scale back user interaction to just the Sales Order processing.
How Does Auto Report as Finished Work?
1. You’ve got an item with ARAF marked and an active Bill of Materials:
2. You have zero available on-hand inventory for the ARAF item (you don’t stock it)
3. Put the ARAF item on a sales order
4. Post the packing slip. You’ll see that the ARAF item is listed, and not the components.
5. Behind the scenes, you’ll see inventory transactions that add inventory for the ARAF item, and consume that inventory:
6. You’ll also see consumption of inventory for the component items from the ARAF Bill of Materials:
Other thoughts on Auto Report as Finished
1. Issue in AX 2012 R2 – There was an issue that threw the error:
“1.00 cannot be picked because only 0.00 is/are available from the inventory.”
This happens if the ARAF item does not allow negative inventory. We were able to get a fix for this, KB 2860146. The error is not logical, because the whole point of the feature is that we never keep stock of the ARAF item. So, we shouldn’t have to allow negative inventory.
2. This feature uses the RAF/BOM Journal posting logic and ledger accounts, so you’ll need to configure that. You’ll see the normal packing slip postings against the ARAF item, and also a production issue and receipt against the components. You’ll likely want those to wash (no production impact).
This post about auto-report as finished BOMs is very helpful, it identifies a need our company has and we have determined to utilize this functionality. Thank you for walking us through the information. One problem we are having with it is the ATP date. Since there is no stock on the BOM item itself, Dynamics gives us the future lead time or time fence date even though the components are in stock. Any thoughts on how to make this such that it calcs based on the components ATP? I’m guessing modification, but wanted to check in with the expert. thanks so much
Janine Breton
America’s Gardening Resource
Hi Cody Marshall,
The auto report as finished does not work in D 365 for Finance and Operations. I guess, the fix for the bug KB 2860146, should have been part of the D 365 now.
How can I fix this in D 365 O?
Regards,
Udhay
Hello Udhayanand,
After talking with Cody, and Michael (a functional consultant) – we ran through the blog with no issues. As such, we would need more information to help you further. We would suggest that you open a ticket with Microsoft.
Thanks,
Brandon
Hello Janine,
I’ve just taken over the blog and I noticed this post from a while back. I spoke with the author about this, and based on what you are asking it sounds like it’s more of a customization need and if that’s the case I’d advise that you talk to your partner about it. If that isn’t an option then we do offer support contracts that can be utilized in a variety of ways.
Regards,
Taylor
Does this functionality work with Stock transfer?
Hello Jayank,
At the moment it doesn’t work. Based on testing it’s either that the logic doesn’t trigger, or that the validity check fires before the Auto Report as Finished logic gets a chance and it produces a failure. To me this seems like a bug since I would expect this to work. I would advise reporting this to Microsoft so they can be made aware of this issue and potentially provide a fix.
Regards,
Taylor
We are interested in using this functionality for “kits”, i.e., we sell item A, which is composed of item B & C.
If we use ARAF, how will the warehouse personnel know to pick items B & C to fulfill the sales order?
djz
Hello,
We are using that checkbox in one of our customer. But if you use it, master planning doesn’t create any requirement for subitems in that BOM. Do you have any idea about it?
Thanks for your help in advance.
Latif Dindoruk