All posts by : Mason Whitaker

But if you're happy with the soft allocation plan, then what you can do is you can run what's called your automated order release. Before you run automated order release, there's all sorts of different parameters that go into setting that up just like the soft allocation. We can set up this automated order release on our sales and receivable setup. So if we were to navigate over here, we can see that we've added in some features at the bottom where we can actually put in thresholds. So maybe we want price thresholds. Maybe we have quantity thresholds, order dates that need to be actually applied on the threshold. The release group method. So are we releasing per order line, per item number, per item plus color on our variant? And then what's that threshold percentage going to be as well? So we can take this down to the sales and receivable setup. We can do this on the customer card. We can do this on locations. We can do this on inventory setup, or we can even go as granular as doing this on particular orders. So I'll showcase just what it looks like on the customer card as well. I won't go through every one of those screens here today. But if we were to navigate over to our customers and we look at Trey Research here, we'll see that we can put threshold methods. Right? So whether it's price, whether it's quantity. So maybe we actually have a quantity threshold, or we have a release group method on an order line, the item number, the item and color, and then we can put those percentages on these associated with it as well. So, basically, what this does is it gives us the ability to say, for example, maybe Trey Research doesn't want us to send partial orders unless it's over fifty percent or whether it's over seventy five percent, or maybe they don't care. We can do partial shipments. Right? So it gives you that granularity to set these thresholds, and automated order release will take that into effect as well. Once you're ready, everything's set up properly. You have the ability to manually or have automated order release run on schedule. What we'll do is I'll click automated order release. I can select the demand sequence that we'd like to utilize. We can even set if we'd like to create Don WMS pick list, we can run it in simulation, and we can even put in days prior to shipment that we'd like it to look at. Right? So in this example, I've run it in simulation mode already, and now I want to see the specific results that have been created here. So I can search for my automated order release summary. I can click, and I can see the two times that has been run. I can see the days prior to ship date that we've associated with that. We can see the orders that were released, the actual lines on that order that released, and then the total quantity that's been released as well. But maybe we wanna get a little more granular with that, and we'd like to see the log. So now we can see every order that is looked at, and then we can see the log lines here as well. So if I expand this out, we can see that for this one here, the order header validation pass, the ship date pass, the line threshold validation equals none, the order release date pass threshold zero percent. And so in this example, no lines were released since they haven't been allocated out. But if we were to look here specifically at that sales order that we looked at earlier, now what we can see is in this particular scenario, the order header validation passed, the ship date validation passed, our line threshold validation was skipped because we had a method of none, the order date threshold, we had a zero percent. It looks like seventy six point nine two percent of that order is ready to release. We saw that one line that did not have the actual on hand to fully allocate, and then the simulation would have released those four lines. So if we just navigate back to that sales order here, what it's saying is based off of the parameters we have set up for soft allocation and for automated order release, those parameters, we would actually release these four lines, so the two or the three that are fully allocated and the one that's partially allocated. Since we do not have on hand here, we can't fulfill this order. And for that reason, we will not get through with this particular line here. So that is just one very simple scenario of running automated order release in tandem with our soft allocation engine. I think it's something that, you know, is extremely helpful, will be tremendous for a lot of our customers out there today.

So what we've noticed is for a lot of our customers on the allocation side, they wanna prioritize specific demand, specific supply, and they wanna make sure that they're allocating that inventory out correctly to different customers to different transactions. So we've introduced the concept of soft allocation. On soft allocation, we have several different parameters that need to be set up before we can actually run that. So I'm gonna run you through some of those here today. We're gonna be looking at demand sequences, our supply sequences, period templates, and then finally, our soft allocation plan. So let's start with our demand sequence. I'll navigate over to our demand sequence screen. And then from here, we can see that I've already set up a sequence on how I would like to prioritize my sales, my demand on the allocation side. So right off the bat, number one, I have my ecommerce orders. Ecommerce orders are gonna be our highest margin. As these order orders come in, we're going to have already captured the sale as well. So we always want to allocate inventory to ecommerce orders over any type of transaction. Next, we have selected wholesale. So any type of wholesale would be next. We have our demand forecast. So if we have a forecast associated that we've created in the system, we've put a group of customers who are our top customers. We've even put EDI orders, and then we've put one specific customer for Trey Research and then for Adamantum Corporation. So you can set these up however you'd like. They can be for sales orders, blanket sales orders, transfer orders, service orders, demand forecasts, and then we can filter on different types of orders, different types of customers, different forecast, however you would like to set that up. We can have multiple demand sequences as well. But in this instance, this is the one that we're utilizing. So we're going from ecommerce to wholesale to demand, top customers, EDI orders, and then Trade Research and Adamantum Corporation. So as these transactions come in, this is our prioritization. We then have the concept of supply sequences. So as these orders come in, we're going to allocate inventory to our ecommerce, to our wholesale. But how are we actually allocating that inventory? Where are those allocations coming from? Right? So in this instance, what I said is we always wanna allocate from on hand inventory first. If we don't have on hand inventory, then we wanna allocate from purchase orders, so inbound purchase orders. And then if we don't have inbound purchase orders, we wanna allocate from inbound transfer orders. So maybe you have multiple locations that inventory is coming from into multiple different locations. Right? So in this instance, we could have purchase orders coming in from vendors, transfer orders from different locations, but we're always gonna allocate from on hand inventory first, then our purchase orders, and then our transfer orders. So that's our demand sequence. That's our supply sequence. Now let's go ahead and take a look here at our allocation period templates. So I'll search for period templates. And from here, this is where we can see the concept of a period template. We can configure these period templates to be in days, weeks, months, quarters, years. We can put our starting date formula. So in this instance, we want it to look starting back in the last three months. We can define the size of these soft allocation periods. And then what this does is when we run soft allocation, this is gonna pry it's gonna show what we're prioritizing demand and supply. So the lowest priority transaction for the current period is higher when the highest priority transaction or is higher than the highest priority transaction for the next period. So once we put this all together on the allocation plan, it will make more sense, but you'll see some of those common configuration examples that we have. So weekly, monthly, daily, quarterly. We can even do a test period generation. So how I have this set up per month, looking at the last three months, the bucket one will start on nine ten twenty twenty five going all the way to one ten twenty twenty six. Great. So once you have your sequences set up, you have your period templates set up, then what we do is we move into our soft allocation plans. And just like any of these period templates or these demand or supply sequences, we can have multiple plans. In this instance, we're utilizing one plan. And from here, this is where I start putting everything together. So I can select the period template that we're utilizing, the demand sequence, the supply sequence. We can even utilize planning worksheets to be brought into these allocation plans. So if you're utilizing MRP or utilizing the planning worksheet, you'd like that to be considered in this, you can do that as well. We have our preliminary pass, our item filters, our variant dimensions. So we've added in all sorts of parameters around this. You can make this really as complicated or as simple as you'd like. So if you have questions around this, you know, please feel free just to reach out, we'd be more than happy to answer these questions. So let's go ahead and navigate over to a sales order that I've already run soft allocation for. So I'm gonna navigate over to my sales order that is our ninety seven. And from here, I can actually see that I ran allocation earlier today for the purpose of this demonstration. I can see the items. I can see the variance, and I can see which of these lines have been allocated. So we can see that these first two lines have been fully allocated for their quantities of forty and twenty. We can see that this, for example, has not been allocated. So for whatever reason, we have not allocated over those fifteen. I'll showcase how we can see that here in just a second. We've allocated the full thirty five here. And then in this instance, we've allocated over ten of our twenty. You always have the ability to look and see, you know, why that is just by looking over here on the right. Right? So we can see allocated quantity unallocated, the percentages. Was this allocated from on hand? Was it allocated from purchase orders, from production orders? So, for example, here, we could see this one was allocated from a purchase order. This one was fully allocated from our on hand. But we also have the ability to go into what's called our soft allocation inquiry to see additional information on top of that. So if I navigate back to the home screen, I search for my soft allocation inquiry. We can see when soft allocation was run, which lines are here, the supply type. So in this instance, we can see that these were fully allocated from on hand. This one was from a purchase order, and this was partially allocated from the current on hand inventory. So we only have ten on hand, but we needed twenty. At this point in time, these are just soft reservations. We have not reserved the inventory to these particular orders. We've run this to see what this would look like. So this is something that can be extremely helpful. You know, maybe you really run run it at the end of the day, the end of the month, whatever that may be. In this instance here, we've run just to see based off our current on hand, purchase orders, based off our current inbound transfer orders, out of these orders, which ones could we allocate inventory to, and where would that be coming from?

So now from here, we're going to get into our transactions, and I'm gonna start with our sales orders. So what I will do here is I am just gonna navigate over to the sales order screen like you would in Business Central. And here, I can see a list of all of the sales orders that I currently have in the system. We can see there's a lot of b two c orders in here for Gonzalo, for myself. We have some b two b orders in here for Trey Research, you know, just like you would see in general out of the box business central. One thing that we've noticed is that if you do not have integrations into ecommerce portals where automatics or orders are automatically flowing in or you have EDI, whatever that may be, we found that it can be tedious entering orders in. So what we've done is we've introduced some automated capabilities around order entry on the purchase side and on the sales side. We're gonna look at that on the sales order side here. What we've done is we've introduced one, the export Excel template. Here, we have the ability to have the system actually create a template for us to fill out and then upload back into the system. So a lot of the times, you know, this is something we see for, like, line orders or these can be for catalogs. So we can select our document type. Is it a sales order or a blanket sales order? We can select specific items, so if it's for one item, or we can even select collections. Right? So these can be our catalogs of different types of items and then the locations that these are for. What this will do is it will create an Excel template that we can then export, we can then fill out, and then import back into the system utilizing our sales order upload feature here. So this is something that's very popular, something that helps automate the process of actually creating these different sales orders. One of my favorite features, though, that we've introduced is the transaction matrix. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a sales order here. I'm gonna put in our tray research customer. Just like it does in out of the box Business Central, it is gonna pull in all the default information associated with that particular customer. You will notice here that we've added in some fields around season, season delivery group, request a date, cancel dates. We have our automated release feature here. I'll be getting that here in just a second. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add in our Volt zero two hundred product master. So just like it always would in Business Central, it's gonna pull on the item, the description. We have a default location associated with this particular customer, which is why that was brought in. From here, I could go ahead and I could start selecting variants. Right? Maybe I have ten variants I need to add to this order with specific quantities. That can be fairly time consuming. So what we've done is we've added the select variant quantities feature. And now what this has done is it's built out an actual matrix for me showing our different colors and then our different sizes as well. From here, all I have to do is put in the quantities that I'd like to purchase. So we want ten of the large and black. We want fifteen of the medium and gray. We want twenty of the small and red. We want fifteen gray large, extra large, and then we want twenty of the extra small in black. Once I'm done, I click okay, and we'll see here now that those variants have been added for that particular item. We have our colors, we have our sizes, and we have our quantities created just like that. Right? So it saves you a ton of time rather than having to go line by line, select your variant, put in the quantities, put in the locations. All of that can just be done and automated utilizing our transaction matrix here.

So now I am going to navigate over to the items card, and this is where we will start looking at some of those enhanced features that we have built specifically for our SKUs. So I have a very generic demo item that I will be utilizing today. This is gonna be our Volt zero one hundred item, and it's a T shirt. Right off the bat, you're gonna see some new fast tabs and some new fields that we've added in here. You'll notice item status. This is something I will talk about more as we get to our variants. But within Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, out of the box, you have the ability to block items from all transactions. You can block them from production orders, from sales orders, from purchase orders. What we've done is we've taken that a step deeper, more granular, and actually added the ability to say, instead of just creating purchase orders, we wanna stop from receiving on purchase orders, or we wanna stop shipping on sales orders. So we could still create sales orders. We just couldn't ship out the item. Right? So we have the ability to put that on the product master, or we can flow those over to specific variants, which I'll showcase here in just a minute. We've added fields around style numbers, item type, main item number, item phase codes, and then additionally samples. So if you're utilizing samples, we can set these items as samples as well. Another great feature and one of my favorite that we have created is our item variant dimensions template. So if you're familiar with base out of the box Business Central, you know that there's just the concept of variants. We don't actually have the concept of dimensions. We don't have the ability to apply dimensions to different variants. Well, what we have done is we've introduced that actual terminology, those capabilities. And in this example here, I have two product dimensions, one for color, one for size. You know, we can utilize two dimensions, one dimension, three dimension, four dimensions, whether that's style, configuration. Generally speaking, in the apparel space, color and size are gonna be the most common that we see utilized. From here, for this specific T shirt, I can go in to my template dimension values, and I can see a list of colors that I could select that this shirt comes in. So if I filter here, I can already see that this specific shirt comes in yellow, red, navy, and black. Maybe we've decided that, you know what? We'd actually like to go ahead and we'd like to introduce this item in different colors. So we'll go with tan, and maybe we want to add in a granite as well. Additionally, we have sizes that we can utilize. So from here, I have my template dimensions for sizes. We can see that this shirt currently comes from in sizes from extra small to extra large. Maybe, you know what, we've decided that we'd actually like to add this in extra extra large as well. One call I always like to make here is I am manually selecting sizes. I'm manually selecting colors. We do have color groups. We have size ranges, size groups that can be associated with particular different item categories. Right? So maybe we always know that our tops come in extra small to extra large. You know, instead of me manually having to select this, we can associate that size range with that item category, and it can select those for us. But what I'm gonna do now is instead of manually going and creating every combination of these dimensions, I'm gonna click our suggest item variants. What this will do is it's gonna show me that there's already twenty variants that exist. But now that I've selected the tan size, I've also selected the granite or I'm sorry. I've selected the tan color, and I've select selected the granite color, and we've added the extra extra large size, there's now thirty six combinations. It will show me the variants that already exist, and then it's gonna show the new ones. Right? So it's actually recommending an extra extra large in our black, in our yellow, in our red, and in our navy. And then it's recommending the tan in the extra small to extra extra large, and the granite in extra small to extra extra large. From here, I could pick, select any of these I'd like. In this instance, I'm gonna say I'd like to select all of these that have not been created yet and go ahead and create these item variants for me. It will let me know that the selected item variants have now been successfully created. And if I go back and I look at my item variants, we should see all sorts of different variants that have been created now. Perfect. So we can see our black, all of the sizes that are associated with that. So if I wanna go ahead and just filter by description, we can see now that our black does come in extra small up to extra extra large. We have our granites. We've added additional sizes for navy, red, yellow, and now we have our tan variants that have been created on top of that.

This is gonna be our transforming apparel operations with Microsoft ERP from design to delivery webinar. So with that, we'll start with some quick introductions. I'll get over Evolve Technologies overview, and then from there, I'm going to go into our apparel IP overview, and then we'll actually demonstrate it and open it up to questions. And this is something that I could spend hours demonstrating. What we've done today is we've really selected just a couple of the main features that we think would resonate well for the webinar. But that being said, we have all sorts of different features out there as well. So throughout the demonstration, please feel free to reach out in the chat with any questions you may have. You can email me, call me, text me directly. Like I mentioned, we won't be able to get to everything today. So if there's features that you have questions about or other things you'd like to see, just reach out. What we will be looking at today really specifically is some of our inventory seasonality and dimensionality SKU management. So we've seen opportunities within the system to really enhance some of the processes that Business Central has out there around SKU management, right? So we've added in the concept of dimensionality. We have seasonality, all sorts of features around that. We've added an easier order entry. So we have the ability to utilize Excel spreadsheets as well as our transaction matrix that I'll be showcasing. Finally, we'll wrap up by looking at our soft allocation engine and our automated order release management. Something that we have seen time and time again in the apparel space is really frustration around allocating inventory to specific customers, specific channels, things like that. So we've built out this tool that helps us utilize demand sequences, supply sequences, period templates to really prioritize demand, prioritize supply for specific channels. And then we have the automated order release where it takes these soft allocations, these soft reservations, and actually allocates them into the orders. So I will walk through those features. We'll send out this PowerPoint afterwards. But those are just a quick sneak peek of some of those features I'm going to showcase.