Enhancements to the Project Resource Scheduling Functionality in AX 2012 R2 Cumulative Update 7

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts • Tagged AX 2012, CU7, Project Management, PSA, R2, Resouce Scheduling • 1 Comment

Hello Everyone,

I hope all of you found my earlier post on “Enhancements to the project management functionality in CU7” useful. As mentioned in that post, today I will take some time to explain the new enhancements to the “Project Resource Scheduling” functionality in the latest release of AX 2012 R2, which is the CU7 release.

For a professional services firm, the workers of the organizations are the key assets and are also the key sources of revenue generation. When your organization grows in size and number of Projects you manage grows, you ill need effective tools to manage and schedule the workers on projects to ensure that the skilled and most available people are assigned to the project tasks, to ensure optimized cost management and realize better profits.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 provides you with such functionalities under the Project Management & Accounting Module. Let us take look how this functionality has evolved over the last few releases of AX.

Project Roles: The Project Managers can now create “Project Teams” for each project and include appropriate project roles to the team. The project roles/project role templates basically act as pre-defined roles, where you can specify the required competencies such as “Skills”, “Certifications” and ‘Education” for that role, which ultimately will help in the resource search operation for the project.
Create Project Teams: For today’s demonstration, I have created a sample Time and Material project for a Website development project. Let us now see how the project managers can create the project team by adding project roles. For this project, I will need one software architect, one Java developer and a QA engineer.
- Go to the project details screen and expand the Project team and scheduling fast tab.Specify the project start and end dates.
- Note that these days might not be always accurate, but the PM can specify the approximate start and end dates.
- Click Add roles button and select all the roles you will need in the project by creating new records. Note that you can specify how many workers you will need in each project role.
- Reserve workers immediately : If you mark this check box, then system will open the resource reservation form as soon as you click OK button.
- See the screenshot below where I have added all the three roles I need in the sample project.
Reserve the workers for the project: The next step is to find, identify and reserve the most suitable workers for this project.
- Click the “Reserve worker” button to open the Worker reservations main form.Note that the project manager has several options on this form such as editing the worker competency criteria, search workers by role, by name, department, legal entity.
- Also they can view the worker’s availability in the specified duration of the project by Days, Weeks and Months. Additionally they get to see the worker’s availability statuses such as ‘Available’, ‘Partial available’, ‘Booked’, ‘Overbooked’, ‘Non-working day’ and ‘Soft booked’ in different colors, with an indicator of what each color means. Screenshot below highlights each of these options.
- The worker search criteria (Competency) automatically populates from the roles selected, but the manager can always override them on this form.
- The ‘Display remaining capacity’ checkbox allows the project manager to see the available capacity of the worker in terms of Hours for each Day/Week/Month.
- The PM can either hard book or soft book the appropriate workers for the project by selecting the required options on the Hard book > and Soft book > buttons.
- In my example I have reserved the software architect, java developer and the QA engineer to their full capacity in the full duration of the project. Below screenshot shows the results after the reservation. The #hours the workers are reserved for the project is now update in the Hours reserved column. Also, notice the color code of availability for the workers now have changed on the Worker reservations form.
- Notice that the Hours assigned column still shows ZERO as the PM has not yet assigned these workers to the project tasks or activities (WBS).
Assign workers to the Individual tasks of the Project: The next step for the PM is to do the detailed assignment of the workers (Project team) to the individual tasks or activities of the project on the work breakdown structure form.
- Go to Plan tab of the project detail screen and click Work breakdown structure button.
- Select the workers for each of the tasks under the Worker column. The PM can select one or more worker for each of the tasks and assign them.
- Notice the Hours assigned column of the project details screen now. It automatically shows the #hours the worker is booked for the project by calculating it from the assignments done in the WBS screen.
New forms to show project resources and availability: Two new list pages are now available to help the project resource management function.
- Project resources – This new form under now allows the project managers to see the project resources quickly without having the need to navigate to the HRM module.
- This form also allows to view/edit several worker related data such as cost price, sales price, assigned projects, categories, competencies etc.
- The PMs can also initiate the hard/soft booking of the workers to projects by clicking Hard book or Soft book buttons.
- Resource availability: This list page shows one stop snapshot of the worker’s availability, everything at once :). This form also lets the PM to initiate the Hard/bookings for the resources.
Inquiries: At any time in the duration of the project, the PMs can see the detailed analysis of the resource assignments. Let us see it for one of the workers “Sandeep Chaudhury” whom we booked in the example above.
- Navigate to PMA > Inquiries > Resource Scheduling > Resource assignment analysis –by worker.

Well ! That was a pretty long write up !!! But it deserved it 🙂 In my next post, I will explain all the new enhancements in the Project Timesheets functionality in the CU7 release.

I hope you all will find this post useful. keep reading !!

Regards,

Sandeep

Missing Timesheets Report – Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

Posted on December 26, 2013 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts • Tagged AX 2012 ERP, CU7, Project Time Management, PSA, R2, Timesheets • 7 Comments

Hello Everyone,

First of all, I would like to wish you all very happy and prosperous holidays and hope you all are enjoying with your families and relatives.

And, So do I ! I took a long vacation from blog writing and work and had wonderful time with family and I am back again here.

In today’s post, we will discuss a very small report/functionality of Microsoft Dynamics AX, which is the “Missing Timesheets Report”” under the Project Management and Accounting Module.

Timesheets are critical for any service industry to be able to invoice their customers effectively on time, as they are the source for the invoices. Making sure that all the employees submit their timesheets on time is very important for the service industries in terms of project management, accountability, invoicing customer and getting paid.

AX 2012 provides a a report called “Missing Timesheets” which tells which employees have not submitted their timesheets for a given period, so that you can communicate with them to make sure the timesheets are in.

Let us take a look at how this is configured in AX and how does it look like.

To begin with, I will need to ensure that all my configurations and setup for worker and timesheets are correct.
Navigate to Workers > Project Management Tab and make sure there is a timesheet period attached to the worker.

3. The next step is to make sure that the “Worker timesheet periods are updated along with billable and efficiency hours data.

4. Go to PMA > Setup > Timesheet > Periods, Select “EmplWeek” and Click Update worker periods.

5. Now, the worker “Alan Brewer” has not submitted his timesheets for the week 12/23 to 12/29. Let us generate the Missing Timesheets report and see how it looks like.

6. Go to PMA > Reports > Timesheets > Missing Timesheets. Let me explain the options on this report.

Period Code: Select the timesheet period code for which you want to generate the missing timesheets.

Start date: Select the start date of the Week/Bi-Week(Depending on what is your timesheet period).

All Employees: Mark this check box if you want the report to list all the employee who have already registered their hours.

Send e-mail: This check box misleads by its name. It does not really send email to the employees for whom the timesheets are missing in the given period. For me, this is limitation and you could write custom code (Will not be complex) to send emails. When you mark this check box, the “E-mail sent” column will show “YES” if the an email id is setup for the worker in the worker master and will show “NO”, if there is not email ID.

7. Finally, let us see how the final report looks like.

See that, Alan Brewer is listed in the report, as he has not submitted his timesheet for the week 12/23-12/29. Also, there is no email ID specified for Alan, so the “Email Sent” column shows “No”.

When you write the custom code to send emails, you could also set this report to run automatically at end of every timesheet period, so that the report can be automatically sent to the accounts receivable team for their action for follow ups and also an automatic email can be sent to the employees directly asking to submit timesheets.

NOTE: Please see the conversation below between myself and KK, where he says the CU 7 now has the functionality of sending emails. This means that you will no more require to write custom code for this. Thank you KK for providing this information.

Thats it for today’s post. Till next time !!!

Integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX with Microsoft Office Word

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts • Tagged AX 2012, MS Office integration, MS word integration, Proposals, PSA, Quotations, R2 • 2 Comments

Microsoft Office , especially the excel, word and PowerPoint are the most popular office productivity applications which everyone knows and works with today.

Imagine what if a Simple, scalable yet powerful ERP system integrates seamlessly with such popular applications to exchange data so that users can spend more time on their favorite office applications and then easily push or pull data to or from the ERP without requiring any development effort.

As most of us know, with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, these all come Out-of-the-box.

There has been a lot of great posts and discussions about the Office excel add-in functionality which is heavily used by most of the implementation teams up to some extent.

In today’s post, I wanted to uncover and discuss the integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 with Microsoft Office Word and demonstrate how these two applications share and exchange data effortlessly making the life of the end users a lot simpler and better.

Let us take an example where the sales manager of an organization has challenges in preparing different quotation/business proposal formats for different customers and still maintaining all the data inside the ERP system.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Office, they can prepare as many number of proposal templates in MS word in any format they want for different customers/prospect, and then just upload them in the organization’s shared document library in the enterprise portal. AX 2012 can then sync those automatically within it to generate project proposals with data on to the templates without needing multiple development efforts. Let us now take look at the steps involved in accomplishing this in AX 2012.

Prepare the required project proposal templates and do the necessary data mapping within AX:

Open a Microsoft Word document and click on the Dynamics AX tab.
Connect to the Dynamics AX AOS server in the similar by which you connect the excel add in function.
Now, once you have your document source types configured in AX, you would see the table and data fields in the Add fields pane. In this case, I have already done the necessary configuration.

Upload all your template documents on the shared document library of the enterprise:

After you have prepared all your required proposal templates, you can upload them in the shared document library in the portal.
This document can be shared, reviewed and managed as in normal SharePoint functionality.
Once these are finalized and ready, AX has in-built functionality to sync with these.

Complete necessary setup in AX to automatically synchronize the documents into AX document types:

AX 2012 now automatically synchronizes with the share point portal and gets the document templates to create new document types in AX.

Generate project proposals from proposal templates:

In Dynamics AX, you can create and store proposal templates for various customers or price groups.
Once you generate your new proposal either newly, or by copying from a template, the proposal is all set to be generated in the MS word formats which were created and designed outside AX, without needing any specific connection methodology. Thanks to the seamless integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and MS Office.

Generate proposal templates in your desired format with just click of a button:

When you click on the Attachments button and create a new document, you will notice that the document template which we created and synced in AX appears automatically on the document handling options.

Click New > Project Quotation Sample menu button. This will automatically attach the word document for the project proposal on to the proposal record and then generates and launches the document which the data automatically filled in from Dynamics AX which is ready for review and sending to Customers or prospects.

Powerful, Simple and Agile ! Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Absence/Leave Management in Human Resources Management–Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts • Tagged Absence recording, AX 2012, HRM, Human Resources Management, Leave request Management, R2 • 5 Comments

I have been contacted by many of the readers requesting a post regarding the absence management functionality of AX 2012. In today’s post I will cover the key features and benefits of the absence management functionality along with the setups and processes involved in it.

Workers are the key assets for every professionals services firms and gaining control over the workers capacity cost and workers availability is always a key to success. Moreover managing employee leaves/absences is always a key aspect of Human resources operations for every organization. Organizations always looks for a flexible and effective leave management system, when they choose an ERP to implement.

The Human Resources Management module of AX 2012 provides a very effective absence management functionality which is simple to setup and use and also enables organizations to have their employees to use enterprise portal to submit and approve leave/absence requests.

Key features and Benefits:

Below few points represents the key features and benefits of Absence management functionality of AX 2012.

Simple to configure and easy to use.
Easily group absences and associate absence codes with them.
Register past absences.
Request for future absences.
Setup validation rules for absence types such as, employee’s cannot avail more than 3 casual leaves consecutively.
Option for absence administrators to register absence for multiple workers acting like a delegate.
Option for workers to request absences and approvers to approve them in the Enterprise portal, when away from office/work.

Configuration and Absence management Process:

This section of the post will explain the necessary setup required to enable absence recording in AX 2012.

Absence Groups: The first step is to create Absence Groups. The absence groups are used to group various absence types such Holidays, Sickness, Jury duty etc. Absence groups are mandatory information for setting up absence codes.

Navigate to HRM > Setup > Absence > Absence Groups.
Create new record and enter absence group id and a description.
Additionally enable Registration to enable absence recording in Time and Attendance process.

2. Absence Codes: The absences codes represents the reasons for the employee absences. These are are the codes against which employees will register absences. Additionally several validation rules can be setup on the absence codes as per requirements. Example of absence codes are Sick, Injury, Jury, Vacation, Leave etc.

Navigate to HRM > Setup > Absence > Absence Codes.
Create new absence codes such as Jury, Sick, Illness etc.
You can also setup validation rules which will enable validation such as an employee can take only 3 days Funeral leave in a series etc..

3. Absence Setup: It is required sometimes to have multiple absence administrators, multiple absence period frequencies, multiple working times(Hours, Days) for different groups of workers. The absence setup allows to accomplish this. The Person in charge is the Absence administrator who will review and approve/reject/cancel the absences.

Navigate to HRM > Setup > Absence > Absence Setup.
Create new records and setup Person In charge, Period unit( Month, Week, Month-Fixed and No Period), and Working time.
Absence setups are attached to workers to enable them for absence registrations.

4. Absence Setup for Worker: The Absence related parameters needs to be setup in the Worker details form as shown in screen below.

We are now done with all the setups necessary for absence registrations. Let us not take quick look at how employees can register absences. In AX, employees can register absences both in rich client and Enterprise portal.

Recording Absences In AX Rich Client:

Before employees can register absences in a given absence period, the absence journals must be created by the absence administrators for that period. Absence journals can also be setup to be created in batch.
Navigate to HRM > Periodic > Absences > Create absence Journals to create the absence journals for workers.

To register absences, go to Home > Absences > Register Absences.
Create new records and enter dates and absence code for each day.
You can also create a absence series such as Vacation for 5 days/10 days etc..
The Notes section will contain the notes from the absence registrar and absence approver if any.

After creating the absences, Click Transfer to transfer the absences for approval. This will transfer the absence details to the approver for review and approval.
The Approver can go to Home > Absences > Approve Absence Requests.
Approver can click Approve/Reject button to approve or reject the absences.

Using the absence management function, employees can also can request for future absences, and one absence admin can register absences for multiple workers as a delegate. I will not explain those all here in this post.

Recording Absences In AX 2012 Enterprise Portal:

Below is a quick video which I have prepared for the employee absence management in the enterprise portal of AX 2012.

That is it for this post. Please contact me in case you have any queries with regards to absences management in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

Regards

Sandeep

Project Invoice Proposal Approvals in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts • Tagged AX 2012, Invoice proposal approval, Invoice proposals, Project Invoicing, Project Management and Accounting, PSA, R2, Workflows • 4 Comments

Hello Everyone,

Here is a quick post on an update on the approval process of project invoice proposals in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 release.

In the AX 2012 feature pack release(Until Cumulative Update 4), the project invoice proposals were always forced or required to go through the workflow for approval.

I came across many situations where customers did not want their invoice proposals to go through the workflow approval process as it is not required as per their business policies and rather have them posted directly. But in AX 2012 feature pack release, there was no way to have the invoice proposals not go through workflow approval.

Microsoft has introduced a design change in AX 2012 R2 release, by which we can now have project invoice proposals not routed through the review and approval process in workflow.

If you unmark the “Enable processing invoice proposals in workflow checkbox”, then you can directly post the invoice proposals without having it to go through the workflow process.

Pretty good and much needed change !!

Regards

Sandeep

Managerial Hierarchy based workflow configuration for Timesheets does not work as expected when Timesheet is submitted by a Delegate in AX 2012

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts • Tagged AX 2012, AX 2012 R2, Delegate, Managerial Hierarchy, Project Time Management, PSA, R2, Timesheets, Troubleshoot • 5 Comments

Friends,

Hope everyone is doing well.

Just wanted to share a quick information about an issue which you may face while implementing Timesheets approval of workers based on a Managerial Hierarchy.

When you setup the Timesheet review workflow as “Hierarchy” based and setup appropriate reporting positions for the workers, you will notice that the timesheet when submitted “by a Delegate” for an employee, will get routed/assigned to the reporting manager of the delegate(who submits the timesheet), instead of getting assigned to the reporting manager of the actual employee.

This is a known issue in AX 2012 feature pack(until the CU4 release) and you will need to make a code correction by taking help of your developers.

However in the R2 release of AX 2012, this issue is taken care by the introduction of a small “Design change” in the workflow configuration. In the R2 release, you will be able to select “Worker” as the “Start from” location for the workflow. This will ensure that the timesheets even though submitted by a delegate, will get routed/assigned to the reporting manager of the timesheet worker/employee, but not to the reporting manager of the delegate. See screen below.