Changing the Unit of Measure on an Item - It Can Be Done!

"Help! I selected the wrong unit of measure on my item!" It's more common than you know, and if you're new to AX or if you are just working quickly while setting up an item and you set up the wrong unit of measure (UOM), do not despair! You do not have to start over from scratch. There is a trick to quickly and easily get your item UOM back on track.

Changing the Unit on an Item in AX

When you first set up an item, the default UOM is usually set to ea. Let's say you wanted to set your item up as UOM lb, but hit enter before you changed the UOM. It happens, right?

Using Favorites in AX

If you spend most of your day in AX, one thing that you may have noticed is that it is really difficult to stay in just one module to do your job. If you can do this, lucky you! But for the rest of us, there seems to be a lot of navigating through multiple modules. A scheduler might spend some time in the Master planning, Production control, Inventory management, and Organization administration modules. An accountant may touch modules such as General ledger, Cash and bank management, Accounts payable, and Accounts receivable within their work day just to name a few.

If you have specific areas within AX that you access on a regular basis to do your job and you find that going back and forth between modules is tedious and tiresome, then setting up Favorites in AX is something that can make your work day go by more smoothly and efficiently.

Where are Favorites Located in AX?

How to See an Item's Purchase History

When planning and forecasting for the next year, it is helpful to know the past purchase history on an item. It isn't extremely obvious how to find this in AX if you aren't tracking this with a Purchase agreement, but there are a few different ways to see this information that can help when setting up a purchasing plan for the next year.

Period Statistics

When you navigate to an item in the Released products form, Product information management > Common > Released products, you can find your item and navigate to the Purchase tab in the ribbon. 

Make End of Year Trade Agreement Updates Quick and Easy

The end of the year is rapidly approaching. This means there are a lot of tedious updates that need to be done in AX in order to do business in the upcoming year. One thing that typically needs to be updated are the trade agreements that companies keep with their customers and vendors.

Sometimes companies will approach this by creating all new journal lines, but this is not necessary! There is a way to copy your old trade agreements and modify them before posting as new.

Where are Trade Agreements in AX?

Trade agreements can be found in both the Sales and marketing and Procurement and sourcing modules. They can be found under Journals > Price/discount agreement journals. Yes, they are called Price/discount agreement journals in AX, but for simplicity's sake, I will refer to them as trade agreements in this post.

In order to copy a trade agreement, you will want to create a new trade agreement.

Converting Prospects to Customers

The Sales and marketing module in AX offers some pretty cool benefits to a sales team. While it is not as robust as CRM, there are still plenty of really beneficial features that can be utilized to a sales team's advantage in AX.

One such feature is the ability to add sales prospects into the system without allocating a customer number to the prospect. This is helpful in the event that the prospect never comes through as a customer.

Also, another useful feature of using the prospect list would be to have current prospect records in the system if a sales person leaves the company, goes on a medical leave, takes vacation, or is out of the office for whatever reason. Another sales rep can look into that sales rep's prospect list and make contact if necessary to complete the transformation from prospect to customer. 

Item Model Group vs Item Group

When setting up a new item or released product in AX, you are presented with a lot of different options. Two of the options are Item model group and Item group.

Item model group and Item group on the Released product form.

Upon first glance, one might be inclined to think that these are probably pretty similar, but they would be mistaken. It's OK, I did it too! I am going to break down these two reference groups that are on all items in AX so you can understand what makes them so different and what purpose they serve on the item.

Using Dimensions Display to Gain Insight into Inventory

AX is extremely robust in its ability to allow for single user configuration and personalization, and one of my favorite tools for this is Dimensions display.

Dimensions Display is found in many different places in AX related to inventory. Based on how you set up your products, there are many ways to use Dimensions Display to really drill down into your inventory. Dimensions Display can be found by looking for the words Dimensions Display along with an icon for a "flux capacitor" in AX. If you don't know what a flux capacitor is, you are really missing out. But for the sake of this blog post, I am going to show you what it looks like:

See Doc, it really DOES look like the flux capacitor! Now, if only we had a DeLorean...