Dynamics AX

Designed for mid-size and larger companies, Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Microsoft Axapta) is a multi-language, multi-currency enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Its core strengths are in manufacturing and e-business, and it includes strong functionality for the wholesale and services industries.

Microsoft Dynamics AX can be tailored to support the exact needs of a manufacturing business, while delivering a low total cost of ownership (TCO). The solution has broad functionality that supports build-to-order, engineer-to-order, and build-to-forecast supply chain models, across both discrete and batch-process manufacturing modes. The solution is particularly well-suited to manufacturers operating in a mixed-mode environment.

Microsoft Dynamics AX also helps drive global business opportunities because it supports high transaction rates and thousands of users across multiple sites, and supplies built-in languages, currencies, and legal requirements for more than 30 countries.

Because it integrates with widely-familiar Microsoft products--such as Microsoft SQL Server, BizTalk Server, Exchange, Office, and Windows--employees can work with the tools they are likely to be already familiar with, lowering training costs.

About Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft Dynamics" is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like and with familiar Microsoft software, automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship and supply chain processes in a way that helps you drive business success.

Accounts Payable

In the Accounts payable section, you track all purchases and outgoing expenditures to vendors.

You can set up vendor groups, vendors, posting profiles, various payment options, parameters concerning vendors and purchase orders, prices and discounts, charges, supplementary items, deliveries and destinations, promissory notes, and so on.

Depending on your setup, you can then perform many tasks that are related to vendors and purchases. For example, you can create and manage purchase orders and planned purchase orders, use various kinds of journals, and settle vendor invoices.

Features Include:

• Bridging accounts
• Flexible terms of payment and cash discounts
• Advanced payment schedules
• Pre-payment capability
• Promissory note handling
• Payment proposal feature with flexible payment method
• Invoice registering and approval process
• Export and import formats for electronic payments
• Multiple currency handling and exchange rate adjustment

Accounts Receivable

Financial Management - Accounts Receivable

Features Include:

• Credit control
• Flexible terms of payment and cash discounts
• Advanced payment schedules
• Pre-payment capability
• Draft handling (bill of exchange)
• Payment proposal feature with flexible payment method
• Free text invoicing (non-stock invoicing)
• Interest calculation functionality
• Flexible collection letter procedures
• Export and import formats for electronic payments
• Multiple currency handling and exchange rate adjustment

Analytics and Reporting

Microsoft Dynamics AX provides the power needed to quickly transform business data into knowledge and strategic action. Modules include:

Business Analytics- A straightforward way to create, view, and understand multidimensional reports. A centrally managed system makes it easier for everyone in your organization to get the answers they need.

Financial Management- Get fast, reliable, and comprehensive accounting, financial reporting, and analysis capabilities. Extend access to your business community, at the appropriate level, and improve the efficiency of your existing accounting processes.

Tools- Allows developers to tailor almost every aspect of the solution with simple and easy to use tools. The MorphX development environment integrates several different functions, such as designing, editing, compiling, and debugging, within one common environment.

Business Analysis

Microsoft Dynamics AX helps you effectively increase your business while maintaining control over your financial management processes. Modules include:

Financial Management- Get fast, reliable, and comprehensive accounting, financial reporting, and analysis capabilities. Extend access to your business community, at the appropriate level, and improve the efficiency of your existing accounting processes.

Business Analysis- A straightforward way to create, view, and understand multidimensional reports. A centrally managed system makes it easier for everyone in your organization to get the answers they need.

Project- Gain financial control of both short-term and long-term projects. This complete and easy-to-use module helps you manage project accounting across your company and gives you full financial overview and control.

E-Commerce

Microsoft Dynamics AX empowers you to pursue new opportunities for Web-based business-to-business collaboration. Modules include:

Commerce Gateway - Use Microsoft BizTalk Server to orchestrate business processes smoothly, both within and between organizations. Help meet the changing needs of any partner quickly, and form new partnerships easily.

Enterprise Portal - Make your workflow smoother by allowing employees, customers, vendors, and other business partners to interact directly with your ERP system. Offer access to relevant business information directly and conduct business transactions through personalized, role-based Web portals.

Enterprise Portal Roles - Make it easy for employees to transact with the system with little or no training. Employees around the globe can work comfortably with the applications and functionality they need to excel at their jobs, while customers and vendors can place orders, view item information, and make requests, all in their native language.

Financials

Microsoft Dynamics AX raises the bar for delivering powerful ERP capabilities and supporting perational efficiency in many key functional areas. Microsoft Dynamics AX includes new capabilities such as supplier relationship management, case management, and the Audit Workbench, as well as important enhancements in the following domains: finance, sales and marketing, procurement, project accounting, human capital management, supply chain management, inventory management, and compliance and internal controls

• Quickly create unlimited, form-based financial dimensions that can be shared across legal entities for a complete business view, audit trail transparency, and detailed analyses.
• Transform budget information into precise, workflow-driven management tools with multiple, variable, and hierarchical budgetary controls that allow you to define how you want to manage expenditures and achieve greater control of the procurement process.
• Set up, view, and manage encumbrances, including purchase order commitments, in the general ledger, and manage workflow items with respect to year-end processing and encumbrances.
• Streamline the cash-to-collections process to save time, engage efficiently with customers, and improve cash flow.
• Simplify and help ensure accurate processing of requisitions, orders, invoices, and other key transactions by defining accounting distributions and viewing subledger journal entries before journalizing source documents.
• Improve accounts payable operational efficiency with new capabilities to match invoices, allocate charges, process and track purchase order prepayments, add lines to invoices, and more.
• Define and control the information you capture more precisely to achieve better insight into your business.
• Increase productivity and accuracy as you leverage architectural advances to share key financial data among legal entities.
• Sharply reduce time and effort for year-end closing with enhancements that include purchase order rollover and budget carry-forward options.

Fixed Assets

Financial Management - Fixed Assets

Features Include:

• Manages the full life cycle from acquisition, depreciation to disposition
• Maintains asset status information
• Improves control over fixed assets to drive accuracy and timeliness in your accounting results
• Supports five depreciation methods (straight line, declining balance, factor, manual percentage and consumption)
• Forecasts using fixed assets budgets

General Ledger

Financial Management - General Ledger

Use General ledger to define and manage the legal entity's financial records. The general ledger is a register of debit and credit entries. These entries are classified using the accounts that are listed in a chart of accounts.

You can allocate, or distribute, monetary amounts to one or more accounts or account and dimension combinations based on allocation rules. There are two types of allocations: fixed and variable. You can also settle transactions between ledger accounts and revalue currency amounts. At the end of a fiscal year, you must generate closing transactions and prepare your accounts for the next fiscal year.

You can use the consolidation functionality to combine the financial results for several subsidiary legal entities into results for a single, consolidated organization. The subsidiaries can be in the same Microsoft Dynamics AX database or in separate databases.

You can use the tools for forecasting cash flow and currency requirements to estimate your legal entity's future cash needs. You can then calculate, view, and print forecasts of the cash flow. You can also calculate and display currency requirements.

Features Include:

• Flexible setup of accounting periods
• Fast and reliable year-end procedure
• Multiple budgets
• Multiple journals
• Journal approval procedures
• Recurring journals
• Validation prior to posting
• Allocation based on percentages for accounts, and Dimensions
• Extensive tax module for different types of tax calculation and reporting

Human Resource Management

With Microsoft Dynamics AX, you can fulfill the potential of your workforce while minimizing administrative costs and complexity. Modules include:

Human Resource Management I- With your employee information stored in a structured, easily retrievable manner, you can concentrate on managing rather than simply documenting human resource issues.

Human Resource Management II- Learn from the experiences of previous recruitment campaigns and pinpoint the most effective media and methods for sharper, more effective communications. Recruit more efficiently and monitor the performance and well-being of your organization.

Human Resource Management III- Develop resources to meet your strategic goals. Identify skill gaps to determine required employee development, initiate, and follow up on development plans, and provide a uniform framework for people managers to reach employee development goals.

Balanced Scorecard- Keep your business on the right track by turning strategic goals into tangible targets based on Key Performance Indicators. Quickly monitor progress towards your goals and react to performance trends.

Business Process Management- Develop and manage business processes by identifying and monitoring actions that support your business strategy. Get detailed information on responsibilities, time, priorities, and status.

Questionnaire- Design online surveys, such as customer or employee satisfaction, in a matter of minutes, without any technical experience. Business managers, human resources personnel and administrative personnel can quickly design and implement basic questionnaires.

Inventory Control

Part of the fully integrated system, inventory control is set up to meet the needs of your business. Here are a list of features available in the inventory control module which can be customized to meet your company's specific needs.

• Item Master configuration with Attributes and SKUs
• Item Dimensions including Lot Number, Batch, Serial Number and Location control
• Bill of Materials (BOMs) & Formulas
• Bar-Coding Support in Microsoft Dynamics AX
• Catch Weight
• Min Max and Requirements Management
• UNSPSC and other commodity classifications
• Inventory Costing including LIFO, FIFO, Standard
• Costing, Weighted Average Costing and FEFO
• Bin, Location, Aisle and Pallet Management
• Directed Pick and Directed Put-away
• Yard Management & Cross-docking

Manufacturing

Microsoft Dynamics AX offers powerful, cost-effective resource planning and management tools that empower your management and staff to collaborate better with trading partners, manage the entire financial life cycle of the manufacturing business process, and build a sustainable advantage in your industry. Modules include:

Master Planning - Streamline your entire production process. The data provided by the Microsoft Dynamics AX Trade, Logistics, Projects, Work Centers, and Production Series helps you minimize inventory-carrying costs and optimize product flow from suppliers, through production, to your customers.

Product Builder - Streamline the process of ordering, planning and producing customized products. Enable your employees, as well as your customers, to configure complex products via a Microsoft Windows client, or over the Web.

Production - Increase production efficiency with real-time insight into your manufacturing processes. Handle material flow, plan and execute routes, manage operations and rough capacity planning and jobs, and make detailed schedules including the use of Gantt charts.

Shop Floor Control - Manage your personnel, material, and data processing more effectively. Collect and analyze production-related information such as work hours and production activities for improved cost control.

• Utilize the flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to run process and discrete manufacturing models in a single solution. The mixedmode capability also allows implementation of lean manufacturing practices in the way best suited for your company.
• Take advantage of a new operations resource model to efficiently use resources at multiple locations. Schedule resources (vendors, people, machines, tools, or locations) to jobs and operations based on their capabilities (ability to perform a specific production-related activity). A scheduling engine will handle resource selection.
• Model and execute lean manufacturing on production flows to reduce delivery lead times, trim excess inventory between work centers, treat contractor labor as a service (not a BOM component), and support continuous improvement by using kanban boards, event kanbans, and kanban rules to view, plan, and run kanban jobs.
• Use the new constraint-based Product Configurator to efficiently create, maintain, and reuse product models, components, and attributes.

Point of Sale

Retail has evolved into a multichannel experience for today's informed shoppers--whether it's in-store, digital, social, or mobile. Faced with educated, digitally empowered consumers, retailers must operate faster and smarter across their organizations to achieve deeper customer loyalty and maintain a competitive edge.

To stay ahead, retail businesses need to improve agility and drive customer centricity as a core value. Microsoft Dynamics AX offers specialty retailers a single unified solution with point-of-sale (POS), store management, supply chain, merchandising, and financial capabilities to drive business productivity and customer service. You can also scale quickly to expand into other retail channels or across multiple global sites, or add new stores--all while staying in front of demand with self-service business intelligence and reporting tools.

Project Management and Project Accounting

• View a summary as the project budget is created, compare against funding, and make corrections before submission.
• Create and manage projects in Enterprise Portal to enable remote access.
• Make time sheet entries more efficiently with enhanced time entry capabilities and user experiences from a web browser or the client application.
• Allocate and post revenue based on internal sales prices for workers, categories, and dimensions, enabling profitability monitoring by allocation area.
• Improve management of complex portfolios of projects and next-level optimization of resource schedules through enhanced interoperability with Microsoft Project Server 2010.

Requisitions and Purchase Orders

• Manage direct and indirect procurement of goods and services using procurement and sourcing in Microsoft Dynamics AX.
• Empower workers to order day-to-day goods and services from searchable online catalogs. Help vendors operate more efficiently by enabling them to perform a variety of tasks online, such as updating profile data, requesting additional users, requesting that the scope of their offering be expanded, uploading catalog content, submitting invoices, reviewing payments, and more.
• Import, create, edit, stage, publish, and search catalogs of items for internal consumption on an internal shopping site. Or punch out directly to your vendor catalog.
• Create a virtual workplace where category managers can manage overall spending by category. *Utilize requisition aggregation, work queue management, category management, and other procurement functionality through a procurement-based Role Center.
• Establish a centralized procurement desk capability across your organization to support procurement policies and processes.
• Easily set up and maintain one or more different purchasing policies and apply them to different sets of requisitioners across the organization.

Sales and Marketing

Microsoft Dynamics AX gathers all your customer information in one place and keeps it structured and readily available. This provides you with the necessary insight to identify your customer's needs and make optimal sales and marketing decisions. Modules include:

Marketing Automation - Make campaign planning, execution, and analysis easier by placing all relevant marketing information at your fingertips. Campaigns can be based on back office and front office information and are easily organized, executed, tracked, and analyzed.

Sales Force Automation - Provide your sales and marketing personnel with the tools they need to track any type of activity targeted at customers, prospects, suppliers, or other business contacts. Not only can you log information for general sales support and for automated marketing purposes, but you can also give all your employees access to updated information in Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Sales Management - Help sales and marketing managers work more efficiently with their teams. Use it to manage and monitor individuals, teams, and the entire organization, and to display sales data graphically.

Telemarketing - Execute and manage telephone sales and marketing functions from one place. Use Telemarketing for a variety of activities, including sales-lead generation, customer surveys, direct marketing campaigns, and customer support.

Sales Orders

• Customer Management
• Credit Limits and Customer Profile Management
• Sales Order Management with notes for customer service
• Order Fulfillment
• Customer Rebate Management
• Sales Commissions Setup and automated calculation
• Multiple deliveries per order

Service Management

Plan, track, and analyze service operations to maximize ef?ciency, gain a complete overview of costs and revenue, and improve pro?tability for service operations.

• Meet demanding customer needs. Ideal for companies that support customized, changing service requirements, Service Management streamlines the process of creating and maintaining a wide range of service agreements.
• Manage financials more effectively. Tight integration with Project Accounting for Microsoft Dynamics AX enables managers to track exact costs for service orders, monitor and manage invoicing, and handle multiple revenue models based on resource consumption or periodic payments with.
• Drive efficiency to keep costs down. Optimize resource usage with automated planning for service orders; save time and reduce errors with integrated processes that reduce data re-entry and update information automatically across your business system.
• Transform service operations into business profitability. From identifying recurring product issues to understanding problem resolution ratios, running customer feedback reports, and building detailed profit and loss analyses, Service Management enables you to transform service information into profitable insight.

Designed for simplicity and ease of use, Service Management for Microsoft Dynamics AX can support a wide range of service operations. Your service people can easily create agreements tailored to customer requirements and access service orders, contract details, and repair histories to quickly respond to customer queries. Flexible capabilities and full integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX enable companies to plan service orders proactively, manage costs effectively, track current service resource consumption, and analyze past use from both service and ?nancial perspectives

Supply Chain Management

Microsoft Dynamics AX offers powerful, cost-effective resource planning and management tools that empower your management and staff to collaborate better with trading partners, manage the entire financial life cycle of the manufacturing business process, and build a sustainable advantage in your industry. Modules include:

Logistics - Streamline cooperation among purchasing, production, customer demand, inventory, and other key areas of your business, including warehouse management, finance, trade, and production.

Master Planning - Streamline your entire production process. Use data provided by the Microsoft Dynamics AX Trade, Logistics, Projects, Work Centers, and Production Series to help you minimize inventory-carrying costs and optimize product flow from suppliers, through production, to your customers.

Product Builder - Streamline the process of ordering, planning and producing customized products. Enable your employees, as well as your customers, to configure complex products via a Microsoft Windows client, or over the Web.

Production - Increase production efficiency with real-time insight into your manufacturing processes. Handle material flow, plan and execute routes, manage operations and rough capacity planning and jobs, and make detailed schedules including the use of Gantt charts.

Trade - Automate sales and purchasing and streamline intercompany operations. Improve relationships with your customers and suppliers using trade agreements, manage intercompany orders within one system, and achieve better cost control with greater visibility into cost prices and accurate inventory valuation.

Warehouse Management - Work more efficiently by managing your warehouse according to your individual needs. Optimize your warehouse layout to increase efficiency and streamline your warehouse processes to reduce costs.

Commerce Gateway - Use Microsoft BizTalk Server to orchestrate business processes smoothly, both within and between organizations. Help meet the changing needs of any partner quickly, and form new partnerships easily.

Enterprise Portal - Make your workflow smoother by allowing employees, customers, vendors, and other business partners to interact directly with your ERP system. Offer access to relevant business information directly and conduct business transactions through personalized, role-based Web portals.

Enterprise Portal Roles - Make it easy for employees to transact with the system with little or no training. Employees around the globe can work comfortably with the applications and functionality they need to excel at their jobs, while customers and vendors can place orders, view item information, and make requests, all in their native language.