Unfortunately any producing company has already been confronted with production standstills. There can be many reasons for these precarious situations, but an incorrect Bill Of Materials / recipe has often been considered as a Gordian knot. As every standstill in the production process can lead to incomplete or delayed deliveries there's no need to emphasize that circumstances such as these have a profound impact on the bottom line.

As a result, you and many of your competitors attempt to make sure that no make-to-order sales orders are pushed into the production flow before a BOM (or recipe) has been activated.

Recipe control in Microsoft Dynamics AX

Thanks to the MILAS AX add-ons on Microsoft Dynamics AX users can easily control the BOM / recipe:

• When confirming the order, MILAS AX checks if there is an approved and active BOM / recipe on the right date for the correct warehouse.
• Via a workflow the different responsible departments can subsequently take the proper steps to continue the production and sales order.

The recipe control process

Let’s take an example to illustrate this MILAS AX feature:

• Your sales responsible creates a new sales order. When confirming the order, he/she gets an error (or a warning; it’s up to you) when there is no active recipe. This order is blocked now and cannot be processed further. For instance, the sales order cannot be sent (automatically) to your production system;
• Triggered by the blocked order, the nutritionist can be informed of a missing BOM / recipe via an automatic email (i.e. workflow-functionality). In MILAS AX, he / she can obtain an overview of all blocked orders with one simple click;
• With the proper information at hand, this responsible staff member can take the actions needed. He / she can build a new BOM / recipe or alter an existing one; often this is done by recipe-formulation software such as BESTMIX. Afterwards, through an interface, this new recipe is sent to MILAS AX;
• To support the nutritional decision, an unambiguous overview of all historical recipes can be consulted straightforwardly;
• Informed via the same workflow, the sales responsible person can, subsequently, confirm the order to continue the sales order and production process. As stated before, the confirmation can trigger an export to your production system.

Conclusion

Since production standstills slow down your cash flow, companies check more and more if production orders have an active BOM / recipe before they go into production. To support this “proactive recipe check”, MILAS AX provides a structured, flexible, and user-friendly tool, which helps your organisation to secure timely and complete deliveries.