Author: admin

DATE: 26-JUN-2025

Why doesn’t this item appear in MRP? Who hasn’t asked this question?  Why is this other stuff showing up in MRP when I don’t think it should?  Another great question!

Scroll down for a cool new tool for managing MRP, but first the background.

A client contacted us to help investigate why they had a huge number of Item-Site records in IV00102 that they swear nobody created.  The problem records were all Work Centers where they wouldn’t normally store inventory so they wouldn’t assign items to those sites (as you know, Manufacturing requires that Work Centers also be Sites).

The first thought was somebody mass assigned a Site to Items.  We deleted over 20,000 “bad” Item-Site records from the table, but a short time later they had several thousand of the bad records again.  It was apparent that something was automatically creating them, and the only thing that seemed a possible culprit was MRP.

We repeated the “bad” record deletion in a test company and ran MRP and watched it adding records to IV00102.  At this point we noticed that all of the bad records were in the MRP Exclusion List as “Inactive”.

The MRP Exclusion List “Type” options are confusing.  Here is what each option actually does:

• VIEW ONLY: The Item is included in MRP Calculations but does not show in the MRP windows
• VIEW AND CALCULATE: This one corresponds to NOT marking the Calculate MRP checkbox, in other words the Item is excluded entirely from MRP (it is not calculated and it does not show in the MRP windows)
• INACTIVE: It sounds like the Item/Site/Item-Site would be ‘inactive’ for MRP but what it does is include the item in MRP calculations and only show it if there is activity

The root of the Item-Sites problem is that you can add Item-Site pairs to the exclusion list as INACTIVE where the Item-Site assignment does not exist.  When MRP runs it creates records for those items in IV00102.  In addition, you see all sorts of results in MRP for these items that appear to be excluded because they are INACTIVE.

There’s more…

The Exclusion List window is not just “exclusions”.  As described above the Type field also results in different things happening when an item is INCLUDED in the calculations.  As you can see in the screen shot above, the Exclusions List allows TRIPLICATE records.  This happens because the key on the MRP Exclusions table (MP030000) is Item, Site, Exclusion Type.  This creates a situation where different parts of MRP will handle the Item differently depending on what it is looking up in the Exclusions Table.

We created a better way to manage MRP Exclusions.

The new MRP Exclusion Utility in MFG PowerPack gives you one place to manage all the settings that affect whether or not an Item is included in MRP.  From this window you can change the Calc MRP flag and/or change the MRP Exclusion setting.

Given the issues described above with the Exclusion List “Type” options we strongly encourage you to only use Calc MRP checkbox because this will enforce the Exclusion List table containing ONLY items/sites/item-sites that are EXCLUDED.

MRP Exclusion Utility breaks out Work Centers separately from regular Sites.  Usually, inventory is not stored in Work Centers, so this view provides an easy way to mass update all Work Center-Sites to “unmark” the Calc MRP checkbox.  Note the small downward arrow above the CALC MRP column header–this will rolldown the adjacent checkbox to all displayed records.

MRP Exclusion Utility flags errors–records where the Calc MRP flag is not compatible with the MRP Exclusion setting.

The Rebuild Exclusions button clears the MRP Exclusion table and repopulates it based on Calc MRP settings in:

• Site Resource Planning
• Item Engineering
• Item Resource Planning

Note: Rebuild Exclusions leverages an existing Manufacturing utility under Tools >> Utilities >> Manufacturing >> MRP Exclusion Build.  Unfortunately, the MFG utility does not clear the table first, so if there are any ‘bad’ records in there such as the triplicates described above, it will not clear them.  Our MRP Exclusion Utility clears the table first so you are starting with clean data.

MRP Exclusion Utility is available now if you have the Suite License.  Just download an install the latest build.

25-JUN-2025

We have an interesting addition to PowerATP this week!  It addresses a frequent user request that, until now, we have not had a good answer for.  The user interface for PowerATP is already rather full, so finding space to display more information has been a challenge, and it seems that everybody would like something else on the window–standard cost, actual cost, item class, user defined #3, you name it.  You now have the ability to add an unlimited number of additional fields from any source.

The PowerATP window has a new “pop-out” extra fields scrolling window!

Back in 2000 Microsoft acquired four separate ERP software companies: Navision, Axapta, Great Plains and Solomon.  There was a lot of messaging from Microsoft about how Project Green was going to combine all of them into one super ERP software package.

In this timeframe there was also a stripped-down version Great Plains called Small Business Accounting, and Microsoft also tried to create a Peachtree-like competitor from scratch built into the MS Office Suite called Office Accounting (it was around from about 2005-2009).

It seems like Microsoft thought ERP software was like a spreadsheet so that it would be an easy thing to acquire these different products and just make everybody start using the merged Project Green.  Somewhere along the line they perhaps realized that different ERP packages are not interchangeable, so instead of actually merging them into one application they merged the names and thus they became Dynamics.

More recently we have another rebranding that covers two of the four separate ERP products: D365.  The term D365 is often used as if it is a thing, but as you can see from the graphic above, it is a name only that wraps around two separate ERP packages: Navision/Dynamics NAV/BC and Axapta/Dynamics AX/F&O (F&O is Finance & Operations).

There are a few important implications of the D365 wrapper around BC and F&O:

• The D365 wrapper covers two separate ERP packages
• They are not interchangeable with each other or with any of the other Dynamics ERP packages, or with any of the other ERP packages in the world.
• A marketing answer of “YES! D365 can do that” needs to be carefully examined to determine if the YES pertains to BC or F&O.
• BC is not an “upgrade” or “next version” for GP.  This is not true now any more than it was 25 years ago.  Moving to BC or F&O is implementing a new ERP package from scratch.

With all of this in mind let’s address a few common misconceptions.

D365 is the next version of GP. No.  D365 is two completely separate online ERP packages (see above) that are in no way related to each other or to Dynamics GP.

GP migration to D365 is simple.  Probably not.  It might be easy if you are a very simple, financials only Dynamics GP deployment, with no 3rd party products, no report modifications and no window modifications.  Even with all of those restrictions, you are still implementing a completely new, completely unrelated piece of software so there will not be a direct migration for everything.

Dynamics GP turns off soon.  Absolutely not.  We recently did a custom project for somebody still using GP 2010.  If you own your GP license, it does not “turn off” because “support” ends.  There is no rush to do anything.  If you feel there is a strong business case for implementing new ERP software you can take your time to make a careful decision.  Do you know what can shut off at any time?  Software that you pay for on a monthly basis.

D365 is my logical migration path. Maybe?  Since BC and F&O are in no way related to Dynamics GP or each other, you might as well consider all of your ERP options.  Why not also look at SAP, Oracle, Infor, Netsuite, Acumatica or others?

Dynamics GP is slow. No.  This is a resource issue.  GP can be as quick and snappy as anything else.  If it is slow look at resources (hardware).  Also make sure there isn’t a 3rd party product that is killing performance.

D365 can do everything GP does.  If you already asked questions to confirm that “D365” can do what you need, make sure you know if the “yes” refers to BC or F&O.  Honestly, F&O is amazing and if you can afford it, go for it, but know this will be a very big implementation.

Dynamics GP is not “online”.  Dynamics GP can easily be moved to Microsoft Azure.  If you are not familiar with what Azure is, just think “server that lives at Microsoft”.  What is cool about Azure is you can add more RAM and CPUs at any time.  Better performance is just a few clicks away, then a couple minutes later GP is even faster!

Microsoft support for GP is ending.  Yup.  How much support do you get from Microsoft?  If you need support, who do you actually turn to?  What you need is a good Dynamics GP partner who is committed to helping you.  WilloWare is still developing for, and supporting our products on, every version of Dynamics GP from 2010 and up.

Lastly, a question that you can probably answer by this point:

Will my (3rd party product/Excel report/Web-store integration/etc) work with D365?  No, because D365 does not exist.  How about with BC or F&O?  Probably not, but the details are important:

• Is it “part of” GP?  Examples are: Modified windows, reports, 3rd party products, customizations.  NO.
• Is it external to GP and integrates data into GP.  MAYBE.  It depends on whether an integration into BC or F&O has already been created.
• Custom Reports (SSRS, Excel, other).  NO.  These depend on the specific database tables of the ERP system.

The Dynamics GP Landed Cost module could be used for recording tariffs on purchased material, but there are several downsides to this approach.

The Landed Cost module adds some cumbersome overhead to PO Entry, Receiving and Invoicing, but the primary issue is whether or not it can do what it is supposed to do–value inventory at the total cost you paid you receive it.

• If your inventory is Standard Cost the tariff goes to PPV
• If you have already used the inventory by the time you get invoiced the tariff goes to PPV
• In the ‘ideal’ situation the inventory is revalued to include tariff.  But if you might sometimes have already used the inventory you have a situation where sometimes it carries the cost of tariff and sometimes it does not

There are a number of downstream issues caused by wildly fluctuating inventory value (shown in the image above) which all center around your ability to operate business as you normally do without losing visibility into your profitability.

An alternate approach is to keep tariff costs out of your inventory and still ensure you are recovering the expense related to tariffs.

In POP you can either use a non-inventory item (i.e. Item Type of Services/Flat Fee/Misc Charge) or the PO Invoice Miscellaneous field.  An Item can have the IV Account set to an Accrued Tariff Expense account, as can the Miscellaneous field (Posting Account Setup >> Purchasing).  This will ensure the tariff expenses are always tracked at the GL and do not affect inventory value.

The WilloWare Tariff Module takes care of calculating tariff and adding it into Sales Transactions where it can add tariff on a per-sales-line basis or a total amount in the Miscellaneous field.  The non-inventory item’s Sales GL Account can be an Applied Tariff Revenue account, as can the Miscellaneous field on the Sales Transaction (Posting Account Setup >> Sales).

This process tracks tariff revenue and expense at the GL to give you good visibility.  Since the Tariff Module is adding tariff in real time you can react as quickly as tariffs change by either increasing or decreasing (or removing) the tariff as needed.

Learn more about the Tariff Module.