Raw material over picking for production orders in D365

Finally, we have this much-needed addition to D365FO, but a recap of the journey so far is a must before we deep dive into the functionality.

For so many years consultants had a hard time explaining to customers that they cannot over raw materials against work orders. This led to so many issues as there was no workaround to circumvent this issue.

This was obvious to me that this was a hard sell and a very big GAP in D365 from my experience implementing D365 FO manufacturing projects where we had to explain the GAP in D365 to the customers.

Some of the industry reasons which made this GAP a very hard sell.

• Bill of materials is not correct, and, in that case, you want to have the option to pick additional.
• Inconsistency of handling units of stocked raw materials. Not all business has standard packing units. (Not all vendors share the same pallet size of the same item) This leads to the failure of rounding and unit conversions.
• Companies that move the leftover raw materials back to the fresh full pallets need the ability to over-pick.
• Manufacturing is dynamic and needs flexibility in picking raw materials to account for waste, rejects, setup runs, QA tests, and traceability samples.
• Not all manufacturing industries FG need the same number of raw materials for the same amount of FG produced over different work orders.

Now to the good part of what this new feature brings to D365.

Microsoft Prerequisites

• You must be running Supply Chain Management version 10.0.37 or later.
• The feature that's named Over-pick materials for production orders and batch orders must be turned on in feature management.
• All products that you'll use this feature for must be enabled for warehouse management processes (WMS).

This new feature lets warehouse workers pick more than the estimated BOM quantity which gets transferred to warehouse work for picking. Now workers can click over pick on the mobile menu and pick more than what BOM estimated giving the much-needed flexibility to the business.

Let's look at a sample work order processing which we will use the feature and perform over picking.

I am taking a coffee maker as an example where the BOM looks like below.

Now let's enable all setups for the coffee maker to allow over-picking for the coffee maker's raw materials.

1. Enable BOM items to allow for over-picking - I will enable the over-picking for the first BOM item which is OXO-01 by updating the new field on the Warehouse Fast Tab, setting the Material over-picking (%) field to the over-picking threshold that you want to allow. I updated 100 to denote 100 % over picking allowed.

2. Over-picking threshold on the BOM line - Once the item is added to a BOM the default over-picking threshold from the item master is copied to the BOM line. In cases where we want to have a different value for the BOM, we can override the value on the BOM line. In our case for the BOM item OXO-01, I will keep the same value and will not change it for the BOM.

3 - Enable over-picking for warehouse workers - Warehouse managers can select the workers who are allowed to over-pick raw materials for the threshold specified on the item master and on the BOM lines.

This is very critical as warehouse managers can carefully allow this privilege to some senior workers only.

I below enabled my worker login with this privilege.

4 - Enable over-picking for raw material picking mobile menu - Select the mobile menu and check the check mark "Allow over pick."

Now time to over-pick

1 - I created a work order for the FG item as below

2 - Now estimate the work order and we can see that we need 10 pcs of BOM item OXO-01

3 - Now we release the work order, and the system is created work to pick 10 Pcs of BOM item OXO-01 (See below)

4 - Let's start raw material picking on mobile devices by navigating to the raw material picking work list and by selecting the work (See below)

On the scan a license plate mobile step below we can see the option to over-pick

I click the over-pick button and mobile device takes me to the next mobile device step which is to enter the new quantity to pick. (See below)

I enter 11 Pcs and click the ok tick mark which takes me to the next mobile step (See below)

Now we can see that mobile device has updated the new over-picked quantity which is 11.

Now if check the BOM transactions at this stage while we have just over-picked a raw material and work is still in process, we can see that the system has updated the remaining quantity as the over-picked quantity. (See below)

If we look at the BOM item transactions, we can see that system has also updated the transaction to 11 (See below)

Now we move to the next step on the mobile device, and it takes us to the put screen and the put quantity is the over-picked quantity which is 11. (See below)

We drop the items on the put screen which competes the raw material picking work.

So, we can see that we could override the system estimated picking quantity and manually specify our picking quantity.

You can also track the raw material over-picking % on the BOM transactions and update them if needed.

So, this was a quick look at how this new feature works can solve age old problem of raw material over picking.

Cheers ;)