For many years I have had the opportunity to work on Dynamics 365 topics involving Kitting, Value Added Services(VAS) and Bill-of-Materials(BOM). Today I would like to write about the released product parameter “Auto-report as finished” in a retail scenario, and you can read more about report as finished at the Microsoft docs. To explain the business scenario, let’s take hot-dogs. A hot-dog is normally assembled as the customer wants, but in this scenario, we have a standardized hot-dog with 4 ingrediencies.

As a retailer, I would like to sell the finished product, but keep track of the raw materials. To do this you need to create a BOM, and when the hot-dog is sold, Dynamics 365 will automatically report a hot-dog as finished, and draw the ingrediencies from the store warehouse. It is possible to use a production order, but for retailers this is overkill. Something much easier is needed. Instead of exact BOM’s, then average BOM’s can also be used, since knowing exactly how much onion or mustard the customer will apply is not an exact science.

Dynamics 365 have a nice feature for this; Auto-report as finished.

What this parameter does, is then when the product is physically deduced (or Sold) a BOM journal will be created and posted. This will create issue-transaction (sold) from your inventory.

Here I have created a BOM for my hot-dog:

When creating a sales order and posting a packing slip you will see that a Bom journal is automatically created and posted.

The posted BOM Journal looks like this, and here we see that a hot-dog is added to the warehouse, while the ingrediencies are subtracted from the warehouse.

For retailers, this means that we can sell goods in the POS, and when the statement posting process is creating and posting sales orders, the auto-report as finished functionality will be posted. So, no need of any production order, or manually posting Report as Finished journals. So, Dynamics 365 have an alternative to retail kit’s, if a more standardized BOM’s are used. The BOM can then also be used for cost calculations on food and retail produced items. Comparing the counting and the actual transactions will also help to know how accurate the BOM are for describing the cost picture of the products. Master planning will also catch this, and you can get replenishment to work on ingrediencies.

BUT!!! There are some issues.
As a workaround and to make this work you will have to specify default warehouse per site per item in the default order settings.(I know this is an impossible task if you have 500 products and 500 stores, as this would mean you have to create 250.000 default order settings). I have a support request going with Microsoft to change this, so that this is not needed, and that the warehouse can be inherited from the parent transaction. So, if you get error like this, then you have done nothing wrong, and hopefully it will be fixed on future releases.

STOPP HERE, unless you like X++

Here is something for the “technical” guys; The code that automatically triggers this auto-report as finished is actually the class InventUpd_Physical.updatePhysicalIssue(). For those of us, that have worked quite some time with Dynamics, we understand that this class is very central, because all physical inventory transactions are posted through this class. The behavior of auto-posting BOM’s will therefore influence all places where a physical transaction is posted.

Microsoft have created a method on the movement classes named ” canBeAutoRepAsFinished()”, that let’s them refuse this behavior on certain transaction types.

If you don’t want to wait until Microsoft fixes the feature where the warehouse dimension is inherited from parent BOM, then you do have an option to extend the class BOMReportFinish.initInventDimFromBOMRoute(), and here set the InventLocationId from the parent. Her is at least my suggestion to fix the issue in the standard code(without extension):

Here is the code for validating that warehouse storage dimension is used on the BOM-line, and sending this back to the report as finished class.

Take care and I’ve got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the mothership just goes in circles.